I don’t want to talk about it...
Mental health. Most of us don’t want to talk about it. Especially if it’s our own mental health. There is a stigma surrounding all of us that there is weakness in struggling with the relationship we have with our minds. There is also a deeply felt sense in many of us that our sense of despair, hopelessness or unhappiness is not validated by our personal circumstances. As Johann Hari points out in his powerful work, “Lost Connections”, according to the measures of society, most of us shouldn’t be unhappy at all. Yet many of us are, quite deeply unhappy. And even if you are fortunate enough to be in fine mental state yourself at this point in your life, you cannot and should not assume this will always be the case. Life has many a curved ball waiting to be thrown, and it can hit anybody at any time.
Our mental state is a sacred place, shut off from others. In the wonderful, “Alone With Others” by Stephen Batchelor, he describes the phenomenon of our need for connection crossed with our inexplicable aloneness caused by the isolation of our inner self, our thoughts that remain private, or we hope to God they remain so! Most of us are uncomfortable sharing our inner demons, we fear that people of,” right mind” would surely judge us. Or use the information to their own advantage against us. Our closed inner mind can make us feel alone even when surrounded by others.
I held this idea close to me when I began my own journey into mental health therapy. I had never wanted to talk about my problems with others, but I desperately needed a solution to states of mind that were making me deeply miserable and impacting the lives of those who loved me. I held the misguided belief that because I didn’t know why I was so unhappy that no one else possibly could, so I struck out alone, seeking help from sources that never asked me a single question that I had to answer, they never needed me to speak a work. I learned from books and from online resources. I worked under the indirect tutelage of many great mentors who still don’t know my name. I learned there are many tools and processes that can transform your relationship with your mind without sharing anything on a psychiatrist’s couch. More importantly, I learned that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only one hurting.
When I finally started professional work in mental health, I marketed the fact that I could share tools which could make a meaningful difference to mental landscape without ever having to disclose any uncomfortable aspects of self. People started to contact me, almost always via direct messages in response to my social media posts. They really liked my work, they connected with it, could I perhaps help them?
People want to talk about it, but they are scared to. They are afraid of being judged, of being seen as weak, or perhaps even worse, simply been seen as ungrateful for what they have. This is a deep tragedy because it is never just us that are the victim of poor mental health, it is those we care about, our families, or friends, our children, our parents and ultimately society at large who lose the benefit of thriving and vibrant people who can more effectively help others in turn. When we are scared and angry or lost and hurting, we can’t grow effectively, we cannot nurture the relationships in our lives. We invariably cause harm.
In the excellent and challenging, “Trauma and Recover” by Judith Herman, she cites from the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry that the common denominator of psychological trauma is a feeling of “intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation.”. I would proposition that our society globally is being more and more subjected to this state of trauma with (but not limited to) the coverage of covid and environmental change. This ongoing sense of threat to which we are essentially, individually helpless can rob us of our faith in ourselves, in others, our governments, our communities, our religious institutions.
Whether you want to admit it or not, whether you want to talk about what is going on in your head or not, you and those you care about are being systematically mentally unraveled by the constant barrage of threat to which there is no apparent answer. You are being continuously stressed and left unchecked the response to this threat is inevitably fear or anger, neither of which are great long-term solutions for cooperation and growth, either individually or collectively.
So, you don’t have talk about what is going on in your head, but you should take seriously the need to develop tools and strategies and a sense of self that can improve your mental outlook. We need to take active steps with our mental condition in the same manner we need to take active steps with our physical conditioning. You don’t eat crap food and expect to be lean and healthy, so why should putting crap into your head every day deliver any good result?
We need to acknowledge and talk about mental health, we need to create safe and open forums to help support others. We need to remove the stigma and accept that all of us need help to keep from mentally treading water at best, or slowly drowning at worst. And neither state is one you want to be living in. We need our mental health to be strong, flexible and resilient, we want to be mentally striving. This is how we can grow personally and how we can be the best possible version of ourselves for our loved ones and our communities.
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