Mind your mental health, the road to ‘insanity’ is very short
Fighting a mental illness? These five young people want you to know that you are not alone.
What you need to know:
- Stress and depression have also hit millions of lowly peasants and slum dwellers.
- All it takes to maintain a healthy inner environment is to let stress out.
Whenever people hear of a mentally ill person, many get this mental picture of a man or a woman in tattered clothes, carrying dirty sacks and roaming aimlessly.
All these are stereotypical misconceptions. Mental disorders manifest in various forms — including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, personality disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia.
Patients include suited men and women holding executive posts in big offices but grappling with failing marriages, drug abuse and parenting. Stress and depression have also hit millions of lowly peasants and slum dwellers.
While cases of depression and suicides have become commonplace, the biggest worry for me is the fact that many don’t know how handle them. They do not know how to discover mental disorders, how to seek help, how to handle the conditions and how to help their family and friends.
Way before the discovery of psychology, mental disorders were viewed as demons and spirits from hell and victims, not patients, were subjected to death. They were branded witches, banished from the community, and in bizarre cases, a hole was drilled into one’s head to relieve them of evil spirits. The Greeks later started to suspect causes such as brain injury, heredity among others, leading to further research.
Today, those afflicted are called patients and there is increasing investment in facilities to treat people with mental conditions.
While this is encouraging, no country has enough mental hospitals. It is therefore important that we take personal initiatives, similar to taking an apple a day to keep the doctor away, to protect ourselves and our loved ones.
All it takes to maintain a healthy inner environment is to let stress out. Get someone to talk to. Let us create time and listen to others even if we do not have money to give them.
That is the one simple tactic that counsellors have, yet people think that it is a skill you acquire after four years in a university.
I mean, it’s a no-brainer.
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