The Social Discourse On Mental Health

If you are looking after someone, make sure you can turn to other people for support for yourself. Supporting someone who has a mental illness or who is suicidal is really hard. But we can also all learn ways to help ourselves when we’re struggling. We should think about what we can do with our whole body to manage the way we feel. And one critical way of doing that is more vigarious exercise. Of course, this won’t work for everyone. But there are other ways the body can be harnessed to improve mental health. Popular among them is simply learning how to relax physically. Not the lie on the sofa with a glass of wine kind of relaxing but actually training the muscles to release tension and reduce physiological stress. A review paper published in 2008 looked at four types of relaxation training in the treatment of anxiety. The first was a simple technique called progressive muscle relaxation, in which you gradually tense and release different groups of muscles in your body. This technique was developed by medical doctor Edmund Jacobson in 1929 and is still used today.

Love Is All We Have Left

The second was autogenic training, a series of six steps which aims to achieve muscle relaxation through repetition of a series of phrases, such as my right arm is heavy. Applied relaxation, the third, is a broader program that encompasses progressive muscle relaxation and encourages individuals to relax their body during daily activities. The fourth was meditation, which includes mindfulness. Poor sleep, particularly when chronic, affects the ability to regulate mood and to concentrate. Sometimes the solution to this is straightforward. It includes recommendations not to drink caffeine or alcohol close to bedtime, not to work in bed, and to ensure the bedroom is dark, for example. Interestingly, while there is evidence that individual components such as drinking less alcohol improve sleep in the general population, the evidence supporting sleep hygiene practices as a collective set of guidelines is somewhat mixed. For those with more chronic or complex sleep problems, there are other, more intensive interventions. Sleep clinics can investigate and diagnose difficulties like sleep apnea and narcolepsy. I recently met a psychotherapist who worked at a university counseling service, and I asked her if there had been an increase in demand in services at her university in the decade or so that she’d worked there. She said she hadn’t especially seen an increase in volume or severity of problems, but she had noticed that students were now coming to her with a different expectation of what therapy could achieve. I wish I could! she said to me.

Race Against Time

I would add that all forms of psychological distress are the price we pay for being alive. Suffering is part of being human. This is a truth many of us, myself included, struggle to accept. Like everyone else, when I’m in pain, I want it to go away. And yet some pain simply cannot be controlled, and we must find ways to live alongside or through it. This is not a message that exists in the public conversation right now, and that’s a disservice to everyone. No matter how cautiously we try to live, we are all going to come up against unavoidable darkness in our lives. We all need to know that sometimes distress is normal and cannot be fixed. Of course, we must do what we can to look after ourselves while it’s happening. But let’s not add to our suffering by worrying that there is something wrong with us for feeling bad. The increased public perception that being well means only having positive feelings is taking over the social discourse on mental health. There are good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks.

One Day Like This

I sincerely hope this can be part of our new conversation about mental health. Just as some aspects of mental disorder must be endured, so too must other forms of psychological distress. These experiences can be ugly and exhausting, for the sufferer and those around them. In fact, the evidence suggests a certain level of stress is better than none at all. When future stressors arise, we are then more likely to believe they are manageable. One study found that, in a group of young adults experiencing stress at work, the ones who had already experienced work stress as teenagers seemed to cope better. In addition, these people were less negatively affected by recent life stress compared to the other two groups. But it seems that a little bit of stress may be a good thing. This has important implications for thinking about how best to raise children and teenagers to build up their resilience. Intuitively we may wish to protect them from any stress, but this isn’t necessarily beneficial. As Jonathan and Greg argue in The Coddling of the American Mind, overparenting does not help children in the long run. Of course, this doesn’t mean intentionally causing young people stress, but we also shouldn’t solve all their problems for them or panic if something challenging happens. Even the richest and most rewarding lives are peppered with heartbreak and hardships that must sometimes be managed and endured. I asked because at that moment, I really couldn’t fathom it. When I was first unwell, a family member who had experienced depression herself came to stay with me for a few days. I looked at her and I found it deeply difficult to comprehend that she had once felt like I did. But over time, I became my own evidence. Having been through several episodes of depression and experienced at least some relief in between, I started to build up my own bank of evidence that I could feel very bad, be entirely convinced that it’s permanent, and then come out of it. Now when I feel myself slipping again, I can hold on to this. Even though every fiber of my being is trying to tell me otherwise, I know the despair is temporary, because it was before.