3 Everyday Ways To Support Mental Health
With daily crying in the library around exam season, year-long counselling wait-lists, and public counsellors booked up weeks in advance, mental health is a topic that must be better addressed. The rise of mental illnesses, particularly among youth, is a relatively recent phenomenon. While part of it may simply be an increase of diagnoses, undeniable factors also include the rise of social media, over-stimulation, and the hyper-competitive and quantifying nature of our society.
Living with mental illness is a lonely, terrifying, and chilling experience. However, despite its prevalence today, there is still an extremely limited amount of general public awareness regarding these issues — so much that many are unaware how to support or talk to people who may have such illnesses, thereby making the problem worse.
From what I’ve observed, here are a few ways to begin changing the conversation around mental health:
Keep an open mind and accept other people’s realities. Mental illness often feels irrational, making it an extremely difficult experience to describe to someone who has never experienced it. Part of what makes it a problem is that it’s often impossible for the sick person to identify — let alone make sense of — what’s going on in their head. Explaining it to others is not easy to do without bursting into tears, and for a listener who has never felt the same kind of thing, very little will actually make sense. The best you can do as a support is to accept what they are feeling and recognize that whatever you may think about the situation, others may feel very differently. If someone makes it clear that they dislike something, are uncomfortable, are in a lot of pain, just acknowledge it.
Stop trivializing mental illness in our everyday language. Watch what you say. Phrases such as “I’m going to kill myself,” or “I’m going to shoot myself” used in casual conversation as exaggerations really trivialize the issue at hand, and don’t treat suicide with the weight it necessitates. Similarly, phrases like “I’m so ADD” in the place of “I’m easily distracted” also take away from what the disorder really means. Perhaps the most prominent example of this is with OCD. People say it every day: “I’m so OCD about my binders,” or “you totally have OCD; your room is so neat.” In reality, that’s not what the disorder means. By using “OCD” and “organized” interchangeably, people think that the two are identical. This false impression immensely undermines the severity of the disorder. Mental illnesses can have a huge negative impact on a person’s daily functioning and relationships, but by equating it to regular habits, people often don’t realize how serious and damaging these issues can be. This normalization can easily lead to thinking that mental illnesses are actually not that big of a deal.
Ask what you can do to help. Sometimes, it’s as simple as listening, offering a hug, or making a cup of tea. Do not think that you are expected to solve anything. There is no formula to make things instantly better, but just knowing that we are loved, appreciated, and not alone can mean a great deal.