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Mental health doesn't affect me. does it?

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anthony

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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.
 
If I had not googled “ptsd support groups online” when I did nearly 3 years ago as a result of my own mental health collapse I know for certain I would not be alive now.

My personal breakdown on My 8th 2013 saw me spiral downhill for a very long time. In that time I have projected unwillingly my own problems onto so many others in my life, least of all my own wife and children.

As a direct result of my mental health injuries I have been ostracized by them all, I have not been permitted to speak with , let alone see my children since August 22 2013 now.

Simply to re-iterate @anthony and the title of this article. Mental health directly and indirectly affects and changes the lives of *Everyone* involved, from the direct to indirect families involved, the friends of the affected parties all the way down to the medical professionals paid to care for the Mental Health patient.

Mental health issues go as far as to affect people not even in personal contact with the patient/victim/sufferer of mental health. Mental health quite literally affects every single person lived/living/yet to be born and will continue to affect everyone the world over for eternity.

A foetus is affected by it’s parents even whilst in the womb, the unborn child hears the shouting and screaming of its parents from a very early gestational period in it’s pre-birth form. That is manifested in what is known in Anti-Natal teaching as “Pre-Birth Trauma transference”. PTSD can be instilled in a child long before it is born. (I am a fully qualified Anti-Natal Educator, as sanctioned by the RCM *Royal College of Midwives* here in the United Kingdom.

As a result of my breakdown and mental collapse I am not at this time permitted to practice Anti-Natal or Post-Natal care until I am deemed sufficiently recovered. However as one of only 5 men qualified in the UK I feel that I do speak with some authority on the subject.

Bottom line is, as @anthony quite rightly states at the opening of his latest article

**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.**

Mr Laurie
 
Thank you Mr. Laurie and anthony. Going back to the subject of the range of mental health and physical health which goes up and down over the course of a day…I would like to share a story about a gentleman at work who answers the question “how are you” or “how is it going” with a response like, “I’d rate today as an 8/10. It’s a pretty good day today.” Me on the other hand, I am so accustomed to being in physical pain, that I tend to mentally rate my day on the inverse pain scale where 8/10 would be pretty bad. Usually, I respond to those questions with “good” for a typical day, “great” for a top notch day, or “ok” for a bad day. And I always try to smile kindly even when I do not feel well because when people smile back, it cheers me up. It can be hard to salvage a bad day sometimes, but it helps to use a scale rather than a binary, black or white indication. At least, for me, anyway.
 
I want to thank you for sharing your pain scale rating of the day vs. the gentleman from your work. It was very eye opening. I never thought about the terms I was using to judge my day or moment in my day: physical issues do rate differently than emotional ones! I am currently in my mental health semester and I know this information has changed the way I will ask questions of future clients and of myself! (future Occupational Therapy Assistant here:)
 
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