anthony
Founder
You're adopting an extremely naïve view if you believe mental health doesn't affect you or that it cannot affect you. As with physical health, mental health is a continuum that shifts between negative and positive.
At any given point within a day you will feel good or poor, mentally. If you assessed your mental health from 0 to 10, you would plot a shifting dynamic throughout your day, week or month.
If you're not a morning person, and you awake grumpy, then your morning mental health score may be low. As you feel better, your mental health score will increase. Within any day, you could feel anxious (lower score), depressed (low score), excited (high score), looking forward to something (higher score), elated due to a job well done (high score) and so forth.
If you think this is incorrect, let's compare it to physical health. During the day you will feel physically better and worse. You may awake with cramps, pains, headache, so forth. All low scores. You could exercise and feel great afterwards (high score). You may pull a muscle lifting something heavy (low score) or be sore from sitting all day (low score).
Make sense now? The above demonstrates a direct and realistic comparison between physical and mental daily health. You can't always be mentally healthy, just like you can't always be physically healthy.
Mental health is often confused with mental illness, setting aside the stigma often surrounding use of either term. Did you know that near every person on the planet will suffer some form of mental illness during their life? It's actually rare to not suffer some form of mental illness before death, whether you know it or not, sought treatment or not.
Anxiety and depression are the primary two mental illnesses suffered at some point by near every person in the world.
The primary difference between suffering mental illness and being diagnosed with a mental health disorder is that the majority will not seek treatment as they overcome the problem themselves within a short time frame (days or weeks). If treatment were sought, chances are a label would be applied for the duration of suffering.
The majority have adequate social support surrounding them to enable full recovery, with or without professional intervention.
Then we have everyone else. One should not misconstrue, nor forget, that nearly every person on the planet will suffer mental illness throughout their life.
Those diagnosed with mental health disorders are most often those affected in such a severe manner that their capacity to continue handling life's stressors has hit its ceiling capacity. They've endured so much stress or trauma within their life, their brain is basically overwhelmed.
It doesn't matter who you are, your demographics, race, religion or otherwise, near every person is affected by mental illness during their lifetime. One could argue that the severity scale changes for those with a disorder, but the scale remains the same because the scale is always relative to each person's individual experience. When you have suffered war, torture, rape, childhood abuse and so forth, your definition of 8, 9 or 10 will be different compared to someone who has not suffered those things.
Your ability to function may change in times of poor mental health; however, there are plenty of high-functioning people within society who have mental illness. Want proof? Google celebrities and famous people who have committed suicide. Everything looked normal to the outside world, even those around them, yet they committed suicide nonetheless.
Mental illness is everywhere, and we all manage our mental health daily. Lets reduce the stigma around these words by understanding their meanings.
At any given point within a day you will feel good or poor, mentally. If you assessed your mental health from 0 to 10, you would plot a shifting dynamic throughout your day, week or month.
If you're not a morning person, and you awake grumpy, then your morning mental health score may be low. As you feel better, your mental health score will increase. Within any day, you could feel anxious (lower score), depressed (low score), excited (high score), looking forward to something (higher score), elated due to a job well done (high score) and so forth.
If you think this is incorrect, let's compare it to physical health. During the day you will feel physically better and worse. You may awake with cramps, pains, headache, so forth. All low scores. You could exercise and feel great afterwards (high score). You may pull a muscle lifting something heavy (low score) or be sore from sitting all day (low score).
Make sense now? The above demonstrates a direct and realistic comparison between physical and mental daily health. You can't always be mentally healthy, just like you can't always be physically healthy.
Mental health is often confused with mental illness, setting aside the stigma often surrounding use of either term. Did you know that near every person on the planet will suffer some form of mental illness during their life? It's actually rare to not suffer some form of mental illness before death, whether you know it or not, sought treatment or not.
Anxiety and depression are the primary two mental illnesses suffered at some point by near every person in the world.
The primary difference between suffering mental illness and being diagnosed with a mental health disorder is that the majority will not seek treatment as they overcome the problem themselves within a short time frame (days or weeks). If treatment were sought, chances are a label would be applied for the duration of suffering.
The majority have adequate social support surrounding them to enable full recovery, with or without professional intervention.
Then we have everyone else. One should not misconstrue, nor forget, that nearly every person on the planet will suffer mental illness throughout their life.
Those diagnosed with mental health disorders are most often those affected in such a severe manner that their capacity to continue handling life's stressors has hit its ceiling capacity. They've endured so much stress or trauma within their life, their brain is basically overwhelmed.
It doesn't matter who you are, your demographics, race, religion or otherwise, near every person is affected by mental illness during their lifetime. One could argue that the severity scale changes for those with a disorder, but the scale remains the same because the scale is always relative to each person's individual experience. When you have suffered war, torture, rape, childhood abuse and so forth, your definition of 8, 9 or 10 will be different compared to someone who has not suffered those things.
Your ability to function may change in times of poor mental health; however, there are plenty of high-functioning people within society who have mental illness. Want proof? Google celebrities and famous people who have committed suicide. Everything looked normal to the outside world, even those around them, yet they committed suicide nonetheless.
Mental illness is everywhere, and we all manage our mental health daily. Lets reduce the stigma around these words by understanding their meanings.