What has the mental health stigma done to our society?
We all come from different societies and cultures that carry different belief systems and values. However, throughout life we tend to carry the beliefs placed upon us by society.
There are some beliefs that derive from culture or religion, but there are some others which are prominent in every culture. One of those is the belief about mental health. Think about it for a minute. What is the opinion you had growing about mental health? How did you think of this topic? What were you told? How did other people talk about metal health in general?
Most of the time the views and opinions we have about mental health are the ones society and culture have placed upon us. How often can we say that we have looked into the matter to educate ourselves?
We heard phrases such as "a psychologist is for crazy people" or "don't talk to him, he's crazy". The emotion we felt was fear. Therefore, we grew up having the belief that a mental health problem is something dangerous and we need to protect ourselves.
At the same time, we tend to believe that we ourselves will be "crazy" if we ever experience a mental health challenge. This belief makes us obey the stigma that surrounds mental health and not ask for help when we need it. It prolongs suffering. But how many of us can say that growing up we challenged these beliefs? If we still have thoughts that actually go against mental well-being, it means that we haven't questioned these beliefs.
The thing that most of us don't realize is that mental health isn't something that is "invisible". It's something that's as real as physical health. In fact, mental health is so important that it can impact our physical health. But we never learned that, right? What we did learn, was that stress, depression or any condition, is something that's "in our head, we are over thinking, we made it up, it's not real, we should ignore it and it will go away... And the list goes on.
The thing is, that because mental health is simply a part of us as humans, we can't just ignore it. It's just like a physical problem. If you ignore a broken bone or an injury, it won't simply go away because you ignored it. And frankly, there's no difference. We have two states--a physical one and a mental one. Both need care and it's as simple as that.
Think of the tragedies that have taken place in our society and continue to take place. Addiction, suicide, speed driving/accidents, domestic violence, bullying, it just goes on. Can we say that these tragedies happened simply because of bad behavior? How many of these could have been avoided if mental health problems were viewed and treated properly?
At the end of the day, this hectic reality that we live in is the way it is, due to the fact that the stigma around mental health is stronger than our intention to speak about it. And the only thing stopping us is ourselves.
Zoe Shields,
BA in Social Theology,
BA in Psychology,
Training in mental health counseling,
MA student in mental health promotion and orthodox patristic studies.