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Presented by Ross Szabo, Founding Wellness Director at Geffen Academy (UCLA) and author
Many people either don’t understand mental health or refuse to address it, which can lead to significant problems down the line, undiagnosed psychiatric conditions, poor quality of life, and poor functioning. People’s reasons for avoiding addressing their mental health or getting professional care may differ.
Still, one thing that can help everyone, no matter who they are, is challenging misconceptions about mental health, going beyond simple awareness, improving mental health literacy, and empowering people to make positive changes in their lives.
There are many misconceptions about mental health. The term “mental health” doesn’t necessarily denote a diagnosis or problem. That phrase is “mental health disorder.” Mental health refers to our social, emotional, and psychological well-being and how we address challenges in our lives. (1)
Much like physical health, mental health should be preventative instead of reactive, although many people don’t treat it that way. Instead, they wait until something is seriously wrong and then try to address it. It’s like saying that you don’t need to eat a nutritious, well-balanced diet until you get diabetes or high blood pressure. But mental health is about tending to your well-being and checking in with yourself; it’s about knowing what coping mechanisms to use and when.
One damaging and stigmatizing misconception about mental health is the separation of mental illnesses and states into a spectrum of diagnoses. Many people without a mental health disorder don’t think they need to care about their mental health or go to therapy.
Meanwhile, they may view anxiety and depression as “mild” mental disorders, although they can be severe and debilitating. And then conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder are often classified as “severe.” This spectrum is unhelpful because it classifies people as either needing help or not needing help, plus it doesn’t acknowledge the variability of functioning and well-being within these disorders.
Below is a helpful reframe for contextualizing and discussing mental health:
Many mental health campaigns focus on mental health awareness, which is a great first step toward helping people. Still, they often stop there, not providing people with the tools they need to care for their mental health, manage stressors, recognize and cope with triggers, communicate with their loved ones, and seek help.
The one unintended effect of spreading mental health awareness is that these campaigns often advise people to talk to a counselor or mental health professional without also providing them with the everyday strategies they can employ in their daily lives to help achieve balance and better quality of life.
A physical health campaign focused on preventing heart disease doesn’t simply spread awareness—it teaches useable strategies people can integrate into their lives to help prevent this condition. Mental health campaigns should do the same for psychological well-being.
There are many reasons people don’t seek help for their mental health. These barriers to care may include: (2), (3)
There are systemic barriers, too, such as: (2), (3)
But when talking about people who can obtain and pay for quality treatment, they may avoid it because they aren’t comfortable talking about mental health. One of the easiest ways to help people feel more comfortable is to compare mental and physical health.
People often don’t have the vocabulary for their mental health. They might simply refer to it as good or bad, but with physical health, people can identify the body part that hurts or feels weak and seek help. We need to do the same for mental health and equip people with the language they need to get them the help they need.
The first step to breaking down mental health language is differentiating between feelings, experiences, life-changing events, mental health disorders, and developmental disorders.
For example, everyday challenges may include:
Environmental influences and challenges may include verbal abuse, bullying, or sexual abuse. Meanwhile, a significant life event is something like the death of a loved one, a major illness, or a divorce.
These challenges, environmental factors, and events can influence a person’s mental health, but they don’t necessarily signal one.
Examples of mental health disorders include:
And developmental disorders include:
Whenever we hear the word “stress,” we most likely immediately categorize it as bad. And research tells us that people who categorize all stress as bad are more likely to have mental health disorders, die younger, and have a poorer quality of life.
All stress doesn’t have to be bad. For example, good stress can help us: (4)
On the other hand, bad stress doesn’t help us achieve our goals or get tasks done. Bad stress leads to problems such as: (5)
People often mistake nervousness for an anxiety disorder, but they differ in many ways.
Nervousness:
Anxiety disorder:
As with nervousness and anxiety, people may confuse feeling depressed and full-blown clinical depression, which is a psychiatric condition.
Feeling depressed:
Clinical depression:
A lot of our adult patterns start in adolescence. Being an adult is often just undoing our patterns from adolescence or reliving the patterns we established during adolescence, depending on our level of self-awareness and commitment to change. (6)
One study found that people’s first experiences with loss, change, and rejection happen during the second largest period of brain growth: between the ages of 12 and 25. The changes that occur during this time matter a lot. We develop coping skills during this time as well as our internal voice and our identities, and they can last forever. (6)
We can’t control whether we have mental health disorders or experience trauma, but we can control how we cope with stressors, triggers, and challenges in our lives.
We develop coping mechanisms from a very young age—often, these skills are maladaptive or unhealthy, such as disordered eating, substance abuse, or excessive exercise. The longer and more frequently you use a coping mechanism, the deeper the brain pathways get and the more automatic your behavior becomes, which means it becomes harder to change this behavior. (7)
However, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to change. Our brains constantly create new neural pathways in response to what we do. If we want to change our coping mechanisms, we can do so by following these steps:
For these steps to work, we must create and cultivate an environment that helps us change, which may include a strong support system, patience with ourselves, self-compassion and forgiveness, and professional help.