Today is World Mental Health Day!
It is easy to dismiss treatment for mental health problems as a luxury. Even in my typically American middle-class community in Western New York, people have to make hard decisions about what gets attention. Will it be renovations to an aging house, tuition for college or psychotherapy?
There is a tendency to put our mental health struggles on the back burner with the hope that things will get better by themselves. When they don’t, even educated, so-called sophisticated people take it as a personal failure. That causes us even more pain, more isolation, deeper mental illness.
Take that scenario and make it global, across cultures, across socio-economic strata, across all levels of industrial development. The same issues that prevent my neighbor (or me for that matter) from getting mental health treatment may be what keeps a young man in Sri Lanka from seeking help.
Mental illness is not just a first world problem. The Secretary General of the United Nations wrote:
“Poverty, unemployment, conflict and war all adversely affect mental health. In addition, the chronic, disabling nature of mental disorders often places a debilitating financial burden on individuals and households. Furthermore, individuals with mental health problems – and their families – endure stigma, discrimination and victimization, depriving them of their political and civil rights and constraining their ability to participate in the public life of their societies.”
What can we do to change things? By being part of the solution:
1. Let’s look at our own lives. Prioritize your and your family’s mental health by educating yourself and seeking the advice of a good mental health professional.
2. Let’s pay attention to how we may carelessly support stigmatizing, discrimination and bullying of those with mental health struggles.
3. Let law makers know you advocate adoption and promotion of mental health policies, laws and services that support comprehensive education, employment, housing and social services for people with mental disorders.
“If someone has a broken arm, you feel sorry for them. But when (the problem) is psychiatric, people don’t know how to react because they can’t see anything.
But just because you can’t see someone’s pain, it doesn’t mean they don’t need your care and support.”
~Samoan woman with bipolar disorder, 29 years old, Auckland, New Zealand
