Mental Health Awareness: the reality.

I've wanted to write for a while on something I feel strongly about.What I want to talk about is the value of authenticity in our awareness and indeed our experience of mental health issues.

Statistics say 1 in 4 of us suffers from mental health conditions, but of course a huge number of individuals don’t go forward for professional help and thus are left out of the statistics. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that EVERYBODY struggles at some point, mentally and emotionally, because we are all thinking and feeling human beings in a fragile and imperfect world. Who of us can say we've not been physically ill before? Since our brain controls our entire nervous system, indeed everything we do, it makes sense that we should be prone, as human beings, to suffer at least the occasional mental blip.

I believe we are at large moving in the right direction in terms of abolishing the stigma surrounding mental health. But I think, like anything in life, there are some associated dangers. What I am specifically alluding to is that it is too easy to become so familiar and comfortable with our mental health conditions that we allow them to become our whole identity. To ‘become’ our illnesses is to escape the ability to live a life that is not entirely centred on them. It is to take away our capacity for freedom.

I see the term ‘pro-recovery’ used so frequently on social media and it is so positive to see people breaking free from things that have left them in chains in the past and supporting others to do the same. But how often is it just a case of using the right lingo and staying in that perhaps comfortable but unhealthy place of being a Mental Health Sufferer by title, and how often are we genuinely, authentically on that path to living a life where our mental health is as healthy as it can be.

Without this authentic awareness, we are not stigma fighting at all. I've heard so many inaccurate assumptions of mental health conditions recently from people whose main exposure to illnesses like depression, anxiety and eating disorders is through the new wave of ‘support communities’ on Instagram or Twitter. It is so easy to get caught up in the addictive hype of these websites that encourage us to focus on how many ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ you can get. Frankly, posts with intense anguish, poetic wording and a bit of moody lighting are far more popular than those celebrating a positive step in recovery or presenting a frank depiction of how incredibly tough living with mental illness can be.

So yes awareness is incredibly important but without the right intentions, this can be harmful and also counter-productive. My hope is that as organisations such as ‘Mind’ continue to fight for Mental Health Awareness and more people start to be open about their own struggles, we would feel more able and confident to present our sufferings in an authentic light, knowing we are not alone in what we are going through. Even if that authenticity doesn't get you a thousand likes on social media, it’s guaranteed to be a hell of a lot more helpful for both yourself and anyone else reading it!