Mental Wellness Is A Huge Problem

According to the US National Alliance on Mental Illness, 1 in 5 people will suffer from a mental disorder / mental wellness issue.

Just stop for a second.

1 in 5.

This is (already) a huge issue.

Mental Wellness Affects Us All

Many of us are not mental health professionals. We don’t know what to look for or what to do if we think someone might be struggling.

Even though I’m not a mental health professional, I do believe that we all have a responsibility to be better informed. So I’m going to talk about five ideas that I believe are important as the dialogue continues on mental health. These ideas are important ones that set the foundation for mental wellness awareness and action:

• Remembering that You Can’t See Mental Wellness
• When Mental Health Issues Become Normal Behaviours
• Even if You Are the Person Suffering, You Can’t Always Tell
• Talking about Mental Health
• Listening is One Thing We Can All Do

Remember that You Can’t See Mental Wellness

When you look at someone, there is no way to judge their mental health.

What we can see are signs of physical health. Does the person look fit? Are they lean? muscular? overweight? underweight? Do they have a physical disability? Our eyes can provide us with a wealth of information that we use to make our own judgments, rightly or wrongly, of someone’s physical health.

When it comes to mental wellness, many times you can’t see it.

Have you seen those advertisements where they say this is the face of depression, and then they show a compiled image of people smiling and laughing?

If you haven’t, you can do a search, and by looking at the images, you’ll see that even close family members did not know that their loved ones were struggling with some kind of mental illness.

Even If You Are the Person Suffering, You Can’t Always Tell

The thing is for the person suffering from a mental illness, it is really hard to tell that you are having a problem because the problem is in your brain.

Your brain is the “supercomputer” that runs your body and your thought processes.

So if your supercomputer is not working properly, but it’s what’s in charge, then how are you supposed to figure out that you’re having a problem?

My Story

In my day job, I’m a consulting professional. The main thing I use to do this job is my brain. I don’t have a job where I work outside and rely on physical labour to earn my living. My job is to use my brain to help improve things for clients.

When I was suffering from trauma, I had no idea that I had been traumatized. I also didn’t know there was anything wrong with my mental health.

What actually pushed me to go and try to figure out what was going on?

Physical symptoms started to manifest in my body. For me, I had an adrenaline spike – the kind you’d get if you were about to step on stage and speak in front of 200 people – so my adrenaline would surge, and it would never go down.  It wasn’t temporary. I was amped up like something scary was about to happen ALL THE TIME. And when I mean all the time, I mean walking around my neighbourhood and holding hands with my husband in the sunshine – my adrenaline was totally amped up all the time.

I also experienced having tears streaming down my face for no apparent reason. The tears were not connected to what was actually happening around me. And I wasn’t really crying. I could keep talking. I would have to blow my nose, but that was because of the tears. And this would happen at home, at work, at hot yoga – really anywhere.

In my professional environment, you don’t see people crying at work on a regular basis. You might see it if something terrible has happened and people are struggling to cope with an event. But a clear signal that something is wrong, in my case, is when you see someone crying in my workplace, and even worse, when crying becomes their normal behaviour.

Read on.

When Mental Health Issues Become Normal Behaviours

Even if you’ve had the opportunity to interact with someone who is experiencing mental illness, you may not know that they were not well.

Here’s an example of how behaviors can become ‘normal’.

I once worked with someone who used to cry in meetings. People would say, “Oh, so-and-so, they cry in meetings all the time. It’s just how they are.”

But if you work in a professional environment like mine, and you think through the hundreds of meetings you’ve had at work, you’ll be able to recognize what is within the ‘normal’ spectrum in your workplace. In my work environment, people very rarely cry in meetings or in the office.

In fact, the behaviour being exhibited wasn’t ‘normal’ when compared to the rest of the workforce. The behaviour had become accepted as ‘normal’ for that individual.

When you realize this has happened – that an unusual behaviour has become normalized – that is a moment to stop and ask yourself if this could be a sign of a deeper underlying problem with an individual’s mental health.

Talking about Mental Health

In the past few years, celebrities have been using their fame as a platform to increase awareness about mental health or mental wellness.

• Prince William and Prince Harry have begun talking about the toll Lady Diana’s death had on them, and how it affected their mental well being. They launched a video about their campaign, Heads Together with #oktosay.
• Lady Gaga has been an outspoken advocate for marginalized groups, and has more recently become outspoken out about her personal mental health challenges as well as attempting to galvanize the global community to action. Her op-ed in The Guardian is powerful and moving.
• In Canada, where I live, Olympic athlete, Clara Hughes, has been the face of the Bell Canada “Let’s Talk” campaign which is founded on four pillars:
  1. Fighting the stigma
  2. Improving access to care
  3. Supporting world-class research, and
  4. Leading by example in workplace mental health.

While physical health has been a focus of education and training programs for a long time, the rise of mental health awareness has been more recent.

I admire these celebrities for choosing to use their fame and platform to increase awareness of mental health.  It’s so important that they are using their position of influence to raise awareness.  But it’s up to all of us to step into the fray and find ways to support each other and improve dialogue around mental health.

Listening Is One Thing We Can All Do

Lastly, one of the things that was the most helpful for me when I was experiencing my own mental wellness challenge was to talk about what was going on with trusted friends and family. Those conversations helped me to find more support and care.

So if you know someone who is struggling with mental wellness, one thing all of us can do is listen.

Because 1 in 5 people will need you to listen.

1 in 5 people may need your support.

And if we all turn towards those people struggling with mental health, maybe, just maybe, we can help others heal and we can improve those numbers.

Please share your thoughts and comments below. We love to hear from you.

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