Self care, romanticism and 'during' the illness - comments on Mental Health.

Recently, I talked quite extensively and very open about my mental health. That was possibly one of the hardest things I’ve endeavoured to do in my life and one which was received very warmly. A friend of mine reached out to me and said that I did not clearly address some issues. And that they felt I had not inculpated mental health issues. To be honest, I think that’s a fair point. I talked a lot about recovery because from where I’m sitting now, that’s easier to talk about. And I talked a lot of the lead up to what became a lot of my struggle but I never know how to talk about the struggle without it sound…wishy-washy.

You know what I mean.  “It’s all a journey”, “it gets better”. They’re all nice sounding phrases but I know people who take genuine offence at them. Because as nice as they’re sounding, if your endorphin levels have dropped and you can’t muster much energy to get up and do things, it’s bloody well hard to do anything else. I say I can never offer that much advice despite having been ‘there’ before. I don’t think of myself as qualified, I will simply try to see if I can see something similar in what I experienced and what a friend might being experiencing. But it’s really difficult sometimes to really know what to do because one feels that they should be better at it. But truth is, it’s not some float-y journey. It’s actually really hard.

I read a lot of things on the internet which bang on about ‘self-care tips’. And they usually say “get some chocolate, watch something nice”, etc. The messages themselves are nice enough but unfortunately, they tend to gloss over a lot of practical problems which arise with mental health. You tend to lose any patterns of hygiene you may have once have had and any desire to move your clothes out of the way on the floor. So maybe just grabbing some coco and sitting watching Orange is the New Black isn’t actually a way for you to progress. Sometimes it’s about doing the difficult thing – moving a couple of t-shirts so you don’t break your neck, clambering into the shower. That low point makes you lose any desire to function and it makes you lose any want to carry on. I think part of the illness is the inclusion of routine.

Even if it’s gentle things at first. You set a little task maybe, change your t-shirt today because you’ve been wearing the same pyjama top for 4 days consecutively. And here’s where, I think, the “mental health discussion” is actually finding problems. There’s one side which try to claim upon the beauty of people that has seemingly “Lost” throughout their ill period and the other side, which is harsh and cutthroat. We must understand that these are not the orthodox physical ill but instead, their mind is not necessarily responding to what seem normal human activities. And by simply bubble wrapping up people we are not actually helping. Whenever I break my leg, I’m told that the best way to recover is to get mobile as soon as possible.

That isn’t to say I should exist myself on crutches but make sure that I allow myself to get back to putting weight on it. Mental health cannot (nor should it) be treated exactly like physical health – for the quantifier of ‘mental’ makes it a much more subjective type of illness – but the analogy still holds some truth. You can’t make someone come out from the cave which they’ve built immediately but we shouldn’t be advocates of the cave to begin with. And it’s understood that people are struggling and are taking easier options but we need to have reality in this discussion. Without it, we will end up indulging emotional avoidance and people will be perpetually ill. Sometimes, my Mum would support me by making me get out of bed. That was hard, it was strenuous and I don’t always advise it (it worked for me but may not for you) but it was important that I had to begin a normalisation process.

Romanticism will not help nor will being overly harsh. Sensitivity is key to all these issues but I think sensitivity must go along with remembering what else is going on. Step by step.I think analogies and nice phrases are good at times but I guess one of the important factors of someone who has recovered is that it is particularly difficult to put yourself back in that place again. It's very difficult to remember what it was like because for a lot of it, you were very ill and you weren't entirely sure what was going on. You don't know if it was scary or bad but you perceive it to be as such now. And that is immensely important to discuss and to remember. 

I'm ending rather abruptly to allow space for discussion on this topic - I imagine it's one that can be discussed very lengthily by people more qualified to talk about this stuff than myself.