Today, is World Mental Health Day.
It has been organised to try to stimulate discussion on what seems to be one of the most stigmatised areas of modern medicine: mental illness.
Most people would rather own up to having a serious sexual disease than admit they suffer from the most common form of mental disorder - depression.
It is a disease that brings a feeling of isolation to the sufferer but then feeds off the darkness of that same isolation. It is so easy to sink into the dark fog of loneliness, but to put it all into perspective, one person in four is likely to suffer from some sort of mental illness in their lifetime - governments have been elected with a smaller percentage than that!
More importantly, the percentage amongst children is growing, so it is even more essential we remove the taboo surrounding mental illness as soon as possible.
Almost as worrying, according to recent surveys, only about 25 percent of employers say they would give work to someone they knew had a mental illness. In most cases that just does not make sense and combined with the negative reporting in the press of people who suffer with extreme mental problems, it seems the quicker we all educate ourselves and tame our fears, the quicker the stigma attached to the disease will die.
I am going to start by admitting to the world that I have suffered from depression and received medication to control the imbalance in the chemicals that make up my thought processes. I feared people knowing about it - even though I have not been in such a bad way ever since I sought out medical advice. I was lucky, I had a superb and understanding GP who supported me throughout the whole slow healing process but I know some people are not so lucky.
Nowadays, when the 'black cloud' starts to descend, I go for a long walk and take action to reduce the stressful parts of my life that I know fuel the fire of my problem. I find it therapeutic to write about the things I used to think about; that is one of the reasons I maintain this blog.
I know it is manageable but I still fear that one day it might not be.
It is for all these reasons, I applaud and support any attempt to make such an illness socially acceptable, for sufferers need to be able to discuss and, thereby, share the burden that is mental illness.
So, please show your support for World Mental Health Day, for if you don't ... you really are mad!!
1 comment:
It is a fact that each and everyone of us will get depressed at some point in our journey in life,
some are only lucky enough to have the odd off day when things go wrong for them and have all the support and courage from their friends or family to help pick them up again,
while many others with no one by their side wake to an empty life for days, weeks, months, years or even right till the end of their journey that they see themself as a worthless soul that serves no purpose to the world and no matter how hard they try and change their life or the situation to make it be a happier or manageable one, they often can't.
Depression is a feeling!
Just as happiness is a feeling,
just as love is a feeling.
Depression is a feeling that starts of as feeling that something is wrong, missing and gets you feeling down and then leads to total sense of unhappyness.
Unless you have good support and total understanding from loved ones that care or able to help find or give a solution to change things to make you start feeling happy again it can only spiral out of control and become worse.
Think of the other feelings for a moment!
If you feel happy you have no reason to be depressed!
If you feel loved and you love you feel happy so do not have a reason to feel depressed.
A situation makes you depressed, if the situation cannot be changed to be a better one and you have made every effort to deal with what is causing the problem that gets you down so much, there is no point in prolonging the agony, you have to walk away from it to enable that weight off of you that is dragging you down.
Some people cope better with a situation than others,
Depression should not be something to be ashamed of it is part of life!
I would like to add here,
it's a FACT that each and everyone of us are responsible for how we make another person feel!
Finance, loss of a loved one and relationship problems
"are the main top causes" for bouts of Depression!
I, aswell as the person who posted this blog raise my hand and admit that I too, get low and depressed, I am not physically violent but I get into such a state I sob my heart out, I get angry because I try very hard to improve the problem and when I cannot see a way forward or change it, eventually I expload badly and become verbally abusive, that is pure anger and frustration, my way of letting it be known how it makes me feel because no one is listening to how something is making me feel, as I said it is a feeling, a bad feeling I am feeling, that I want to change to make me better but I can't, it's impossible to do so, but I am used to living a life of loneliness and what is dished on my plate,
I always try and make a situation better first and if I cannot and it just gets worse and worse
I admit defeat that it will not change, I then simply let it go, accept the rejection and walk away from it, the problem that got me depressed in the first place.
I am lucky, I feel that I am strong enough inside and can hold it together with no support and no one to hold my hand and without the need for medication,
I found the easier way for me to cope when I feel like that is to meditate through my problem,
I feel like a spiritual person and try hard to draw in some energy that flows with love and cast away the bad feelings.
Depression is a less harsher word than Mental Illness but the term for Mental Illness is when a person is actually capable of self harming or harming another person.
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