This is a somewhat heavy topic that is becoming more and more relevant and important to talk about. This is a long post. The first thing I'd like to say is that any mental health problems, minor or major can affect anyone, any age, any background. I think that's something that people often forget, and it's important to keep repeating. As many people will already know, there's a big increase in the amount of people experiencing mental health problems. Sometimes it's our heros and people we thought would be here forever that suffer, and sometimes we have no idea. Other times, we know, but don't know what to do or how to help. I want to talk a little about my own experiences and also provide some resources and anecdotes about things that have and haven't helped me. Mind, a UK based mental health charity have a lot of useful and accessible information in plain language, so I would recommend starting there. www.mind.org.uk I want to start by adding some trigger warnings and I guess they give an idea about what I've been through and struggle with, so TW depression, anxiety, ptsd, self-harm, suicide, abuse. These are issues that affect me in everyday life. I won't go into too much detail here, but I speak from experience. It is only my own anecdotal experience so it may not apply to everyone, but hopefully it helps to illustrate the point I'm trying to make. It's difficult to try to make the exact point I want to without going into a lot of detail of my own experiences and so I want to avoid doing that too much because this post isn't supposed to be about me, it's supposed to help and give somewhat of an education about how to help. Many of us want to help, but often we don't know how to or we think we are, but we seem to be making things worse. . Unfortunately as much as intentions might be good behind saying things to someone with for example depression such as "But you're so talented", "You're successful, how can you feel like you're not good enough", "You enjoy this and are good at it", it actually can feel to the depressed person that you're ignoring their feelings. And some of this I believe is because there's a misunderstanding about what depression actually is and what happens to a person and how their thoughts develop. Maybe people believe that depression is just feeling sad and that all you need to do is "pick yourself back up and keep fighting", but it's not that simple. We all have the feeling of being sad, but depression isn't just sadness. It can be feeling numb, angry, you can even appear to be absolutely fine and not have any issues because you might not tell anyone how you are really feeling. That can be for a multitude of reasons. I know for me, I feel like a failure if I don't feel happy or and not seen to be functioning, it can be a kind of self-defence mechanism because any and all mental health issues are viewed as being extremely bad and it's this stigma that makes us not want to talk about it. As I said, I can only speak for myself, but that's another thing a lot of people misunderstand, having any kind of mental health issues messes with your thinking. We won't be thinking rationally, so trying to rationalise by saying "but you've achieve this and that" actually doesn't help because the mental health issue is a feeling and an altered thought process. Being in specific situations that are out of your control can be another factor in creating and keeping mental health issues going. I'm in that position. I can't actually get out of the situation I'm in, and so no amount of positive thinking will help me or how I view the world. No amount of telling me that I am good at this or that gets me out of the situation I'm in. I imagine there any many people in the same kind of situation, and so telling someone to stay positive can actually end up not helping. Or, the dreaded "it could be worse, people have it worse than you" comment that people seem to often make. That can actually make it feel like your feelings and struggles are being ignored or invalidated. And so having said that I feel like I should repeat that mental health doesn't discriminate. It doesn't matter what you have, what you can do, your background or anything else, it can still affect you, and that makes you no less valid than anyone else. I used depression as an example here to talk a little about what things are said to people sometimes. Lots of the things I have said here can be applied to the way that people talk to you with other types of mental health issues too. If anxiety is an issue sometimes "just doing the thing" is actually detrimental. Especially in a case where something has happened to make someone feel anxious about a particular thing. For me, going out alone is terrifying and I avoid it because bad things have happened when I've been alone. Telling someone it's unlikely to happen again seems helpful, but it's actually not because the person with anxiety has evidence that it did happen to them. My good friend Kashi wrote a blog about how anxiety affects her and I think it's talked about really well, so that can be found here https://kashiaka.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/anxiety/ I'm not going to go into great detail about the way the brain works, because 1) I'm not a professional and 2) it's very complicated and I'm not sure I could word it very well. But a thing that I learned that has stuck with me is that the brain has trouble with hanging onto positive things because it's wired for survival. That was something that was said to me in a therapy session recently, and it really stuck with me. So maybe think on that the next time you tell someone to "just think about positive things". Maybe talk to someone about positive things and help them remember instead of getting frustrated at them for not being able to remember them in a moment of crisis. That will help more than just saying "think positively" I promise. I've experienced it. As said above, many of these things can apply to someone with other mental health problems. If someone has PTSD, putting them into the situation that is the trigger is never good, I don't know a great deal about PTSD because I was only recently told I had it, I actually have complex PTSD which means I've experienced multiple traumas over a long period of time. So that's something I'm still learning about and the mind website mentioned above helped me with that. But again telling someone to "just think positively" doesn't actually help. Another thing I want to add is that "flashbacks" are nothing like what you see in movies. You don't see a vivid image of something happening again. The only time I've been close to that is when I've been having one about my open heart surgery, but even then it's not a vivid thing. The feelings are extremely intense, and I think about some of the things that happened, but it's not like a movie playing in my brain. Part of the cPTSD is unfortunately sexual abuse. It was by someone I knew, that I was in a relationship with at the time and I didn't know it was abuse until a while later because lets just say that education about consent was not great, and I didn't exactly have very good role models growing up. My parents didn't really talk to me about anything to do with having an intimate relationship with someone. Sex education is another thing, but I do think it needs to be improved a whole lot to stop things like this happening. I'm still uncomfortable talking about it because it makes me feel like I will never be clean and it's horrible. It created massive trust issues for me too and so I actively have avoided relationships. The last one I was in I was emotionally abused and it just was not helpful on top of having been sexually abused previously. I don't want to go into that too much. But telling someone that things like that have happened to "you survived, you got out" might seem helpful, but the damage is still done, it's still thought about. Intrusive thoughts are a huge part of that. And that's another thing, an intrusive thought is one that causes distress that you can't get rid of, it's not randomly thinking "ooh rainbow unicorns" while you're busy doing something else. This brings me to the final two things I mentioned in the trigger warnings. Self-harm and suicide. One thing I'd like to clear up is that just because someone self-harms, it doesn't mean they want to die and vice versa, just because someone is contemplating suicide doesn't mean they are harming themselves. That can be a difficult thing for people to get their head around. Self-harm, more often than not, is a coping mechanism. An unhealthy one, but that's what it is. It can be done for a variety of reasons and one thing I've learned that a lot of people don't understand, is that self-harm isn't as simple as having the thought to harm yourself, it can be like an urge and for me, I feel better afterwards. Which is why I keep doing it if I feel a certain way. I am working on trying to develop healthier coping mechanisms, but I feel that needed to be said. Just telling someone "don't do it" or "I don't want you to harm yourself" can be unhelpful because it misses the nuances of why someone may be harming themselves. The stigma around people doing it for attention also doesn't help. In reality, most people that self-harm will do it in a place where it can be easily hidden, and self-harm sometimes isn't as obvious. I used to cut my hair short as an act of self-harm. Suicidal thoughts are I think the most difficult thing for people to try to understand, as telling someone they have things to live for can be unhelpful because it can feel like someone is invalidating how you feel. The other thing is this discourse that suicide is selfish. I personally hate this particular discourse because as someone who has felt suicidal on several occasions, it hasn't been because I'm being selfish. To me when I've felt like that, I've felt like the biggest burden on my friends and so my thinking was that if I was gone they'd not have to deal with me. Another thing is if you do call someone selfish for feeling like that, I can almost guarantee that they will not feel any different about how they are feeling. It will cause feelings of guilt and that makes things worse and the person will conclude that them being gone would be better. I said that from experience. Telling people what they have to live for, or telling people they're talented etc will not help. It seems like a helpful thing to say, but as I said, mental health issues don't discriminate. Another thing I will say is that if someone comes to you and says that they feel suicidal, please talk to them. Respond to them. Answer them. Don't leave them waiting for a long time for a response because that can and will be interpreted by them as you not caring when they're in that state of mind. Another thing to note on suicide is that it's often not wanting to die, it's often the feeling of not wanting to feel what you're feeling anymore and not wanting the life you have. It's not necessarily wanting to die, but just wanting things to be over, for some people they do interpret that as death, but please try to understand someone going through that. If you tell someone you are there for them, be there for them, show them, talk to them, make sure that your words have the actions behind them. If you know someone with a mental health issue or are suffering with any yourself please know you're not alone. I hope that this has somehow helped even a little. For people that know someone and want to help, please try to understand what the person is going through instead of saying empty statements to them, For people that are suffering with mental health issues currently, I see you, you are valid and the way you feel is real. Lastly I'm going to link again to mind www.mind.org.uk and to their social media that can sometimes be helpful if you need to anonymously talk to someone www.elefriends.org.uk There's also Samaritans www.samaritans.org they have an email that I've used before, but be aware they can take up to 12 hours to reply. Thank you for reading this post, and I hope that it helps as least someone out there.
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AuthorLulu Moon is an artist and creative person that is from the North East of England, UK. Archives
September 2020
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