Mental Health is not a dirty word

Mental Health is not a dirty word.

by Darren Devlin
Rural Aid Counsellor and Community Representative, BA (Psych)

It is widely accepted that mental health carries with it some significant stigma. A lot of this can be accredited to the negative connotations associated to mental illness portrayed in the media, including movies, news, and social media. However, it is also becoming more common that people in the media spotlight are speaking out, such as Jim Carrey, an extremely successful, positive influence on society, at the top of his game, openly expressing his own mental health issues.

The truth of the matter is mental health is no different from physical health, and in fact both interact with each other and can influence where a person may sit with their health.

Physical health runs on a continuum from good health to poor health and chronic illness. Mental health also runs along the continuum from stable mental health through to poor mental health and chronic mental illness.

So what does this look like?

The physical health continuum

As you can see above, everyone sits somewhere along the physical health continuum, and can slide along the continuum at various times throughout their lifespan.

Your place on the physical health continuum can be affected by internal factors such as disease and illness, age, nutrition, and level of physical activity (which will be different for everyone).

It is also affected by external factors such as environmental factors (access to nutritious foods, clean drinking water, physical safety, biological and medical hazards).

The mental health continuum

As with physical health we all sit somewhere along the continuum, which can change depending on our individual circumstances. These circumstances can be internal such as how we are feeling physically (physical health) and our emotional state. As well as external factors (stressors) such as our environment, if we feel safe or under threat, if we have access to our immediate needs, if we experience grief and loss (we don’t only grieve the loss of a loved one, we can also grieve the loss of something special or our way of life, any significant change will come with some level of grief), or if we have social connection or feels isolated.

As you can see there is significant similarities and crossover between physical and mental health, and for the most part is a temporary status that can change due to various factors.

When our stressors go unmanaged our mental health can deteriorate down the continuum through reaction whereby, we are responding to our mental health deterioration and can and usually do bounce back. To an injured state whereby, our mental state can deteriorate and require intervention. Then down to ill which is when a diagnosable mental illness has developed.

An example may be:

We are working and maintaining our well-being both mental and physical, we are enjoying some down time and hanging out with friends and family. We have access to most of our immediate needs and there is no significant threat to our lives or livelihood. We are in the Healthy range.

However, one day we wake up and one area in our life has taken a hit, we have some bad weather and our feed crop for our livestock is destroyed. We become anxious about how we are going to feed our livestock through winter without the feed crop. Fortunately, we have a good relationship with our family, and they have some extra bales of silage that they can provide, we have also got some extra money from a good season the year before, allowing us to buy in some extra fodder. We get stressed but have avenues to address our area of stress, and therefore we bounce back from the stress and anxiety quickly. We are in the reacting range.

Same scenario as above, only we have no extra bales of silage and we just come through a drought, meaning there is no back up of money and our usual supports are also struggling. Our period of stress and anxiety is extended, impacting our mental state and physical health. We start to lose interest in our normal routine and motivation starts to take a dive. We rely on unhealthy external coping strategies (excessive drinking, bad habits, poor self-care, avoiding our usual support networks). Due to the loss of interest and poor motivation we find it difficult to get ourselves out of our current state. We can’t do it on our own and need the support of others. We are in the injured range.

We remain in the injured range for an extended period, such as through a major disaster or multiple disaster event. We feel stuck and can’t think or see a way out of our situation. We may not realise it at this stage, but we are in the ill range.

While in the healthy and reaction ranges, we have the capacity to cope and mange our situation, we address the areas of need and move on while maintaining our normal daily functioning and habits.

When we move into the injured range, things become more difficult and our ability to cope and manage our situation becomes more difficult. Our focus will usually become fixated on our issues and problems, we may become negative (there’s no hope, there’s no way out, I can’t manage this). It is at this point that we would benefit from support from others. We may tell ourselves that we don’t need the help, or that there is something wrong with us because we can’t manage this situation ourselves. However, when we are in the injured stage our brain isn’t functioning the same as it would in the healthy range. Our brain becomes flooded with stress hormones and our thinking becomes fixated, meaning that we usually can’t see the forest through the trees. Sometimes it takes someone not connected to the issue to help us see the way forward, and if we enlist the help of an external person, we can usually find a way out. This is where a counsellor may help, a counsellor is not an expert in your life or your situation, they may have some knowledge and experience and may offer options, however, often the counsellor is a sounding board and someone that we can download or debrief with and provide strategies to improve our mental and emotional states. As with our physical health, when we are injured, we seek out the right professional with the right qualification to help improve our health status.

If we don’t address the stressors in our life and stay fixated as in the injured range, this can lead to a further deterioration of our mental health leading us into mental illness and like a physical illness we will require treatment to amend our health status or in the case of a chronic condition like cardiovascular disease, cancer, schizophrenia, clinical depression, respiratory disease, bipolar disorder, we need the right medical and professional treatment to manage our lives to enable us to live as fulfilled a life as we can with the chronic illness.

As demonstrated above, mental health and physical health are the same, we don’t stigmatise someone with cancer so why should having depression be any different. In both cases with the right intervention at the right time, with the right support, we can still live a quality of life.

There are many people in our society that currently live with some form of mental illness or mental health concern, that are still raising a family and fulfilling a role in society, and at any time anyone of us may slide down the mental health continuum, but with the right support we can manage our situation often with only minor interruptions to the way we normally live.

Mental health is not a dirty word and seeking support to maintain your mental health is no more or less a reflection on you as a person as seeking help and support for a physical health issue.

If you or anyone you know is worried about their mental health, please reach out, the support is there.

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