What is your journey with mental health?
October is Mental Health Awareness Month in Australia so I thought I’d share my journey with mental health to demonstrate the importance of the need for a perception shift in what mental health means. Like everything I talk to clients about its best to be raw and real to take full ownership of what is and how you can change it. So here is my very real account of how society influenced my attitude towards mental health and how developing my awareness changed everything.
To be honest my mental health journey started like I think it sadly starts with many people...'mental health is assistance for people that are mental'. Cue rolling eyes to indicate how ridiculous this is. I think I for one reason or another made a comparison between 'those people' and normal people. I could pretend like I didn't but the reality is this is what SOCIETY does to us. My parents NEVER taught me to treat people differently, quite the opposite, but the constant judgements from others, the media scrutiny of others made me think there were different health camps.
At 14 I lost my best friend in a car accident and I learnt about grief, depression & even suicidal ideation-.though I had no idea it was called that at the time. Fear riddled my mind but still I hadn't really understood that these very normal responses to sudden, unexpected loss at such a young age was HEALTHY, EXPECTED AND DID NOT MAKE ME 'MENTAL'. Though I'll admit the cycle of saying goodbye as if I'd die in a car accident the following day was something that if I didn't do I believed would seal my fate was pretty different. Fast forward to graduating as a Health & Physical Education teacher, with far greater awareness, learning about myself and others in & out of relationships and I still focussed on health as being more physical than holistic. I would teach drug and sex education and even created programs to help teens identify their values and how to live out of them but none of it unpacked mental health. As a writer my whole life (even since I was about 7) I wrote about my feelings often but I also felt a huge amount of anger if I didn't feel I couldn't express how I felt or if I had to be superhuman and 'get over it quickly.'
When I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD (something I no longer suffer from) in London in 2015 it was the first time I really came to learn what mental health truly is. Except for the first time in my life I really felt like 'those people'. You know 'the crazy ones' where you think 'why are they doing that? Why is that a big deal?' It was incredibly hard to process but also very freeing because it was the beginning of understanding what mental health really is and that it is about REMOVING JUDGEMENT OF YOURSELF & OTHERS AND BEING LOVING AND ACCEPTING.
Everyone has things that impact how they view mental health, there is no point blaming people for what we know because everyone operates out of their own level of knowledge. We can however share REAL experiences of what happens on our journey to understanding ourselves better. When I think about education now I am VERY passionate about the gaps it needs to fill but I don't focus on fighting what is, I focus on being a gap filler in a way that helps young people grow their self perception of mental health. I think anyone who has a greater sense of understanding of mental health can use their voice to do this work because the world still needs it.
I am not mental because I have struggled before, I am not to be categorised as someone less because I've experienced pain & the emotions one can expect to go with it. I AM HUMAN. I AM ME. I know the necessity to accept and love myself daily and I plan to share that with the world while helping others to do the same.
What is your journey with mental health?
