So, this is quite a personal post and topic I hold very dear to my heart, as I'm sure many others do: mental health. Though the stigma is slowly dissolving with the emergence of open conversation and awareness within society, this is still a topic which holds negative connotations for many. In this post I'm going to introduce the topic to my blog and hopefully share some relatable content for you all.
Looking back, I was always a happy kid. I never experienced any traumatic events or struggled much, and I was very lucky. I was social; had friends; played sports; did well in school with pretty minimal effort. Even throughout the HSC, which is one of the most important exams you take in your high school life, determining the success of university applications, I was fairly stress free and nonchalant. So how, I ask, did I get to this point? In bi-weekly therapy sessions, struggling with depression and an anxiety disorder, on medication for both.
The first memory I have of dealing with anxiety was right out of high school, working a horrible job. I had no clue what I was doing, the people were awful to me and I was terrified to ask for help. I would feel ill heading to work and consistently throughout the day. Until it came time to go home, and I would feel confused as to why I would suddenly feel totally ok again. In hindsight, I now understand that personally, my anxiety symptoms manifest physically, meaning I can feel super sick, to the point of throwing up. Eventually I hit the nail on the head and confided in my dad. I told him I had anxiety, to which he responded in the most boomer way possible: “It's just that god awful job you have, you'll feel less stressed when you leave”. That pretty set the tone for mental health and my parents. But on the plus side my dad was right, I quit the job and everything was fine and dandy.
Or so I thought…
I now know that I never really ‘fixed’ my anxiety. I immersed myself in university life, pretty much ignoring the symptoms and focusing on having fun. Well, that went great, as you can imagine. Two years later a doctor told me I need to get my ass into therapy and onto some anti-depressant’s stat! And I could run from the problem no longer.
In my life, I make an effort not to use terms such as “mental problems, issues and illness”. I think it makes people sound broken and crazy, so I will not be referring to mental states as such. These terms can be traced back in history as early as the middle ages where we see reports of people labelled “lunatics, possessed and mad”. It’s likely these people were actually suffering symptoms of mental states such as anxiety, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia etc. Unfortunately, back in those days, the uneducated solution to these issues were exorcisms, torture or death (bloody hell). As history progressed, asylums were introduced as a way of locking up the “crazy” and using them as guinea pigs for medical experiments. As we can see, the history of mental states is a dark one.
Today we have seen an increase in the conversation surrounding conditions like anxiety, depression, and chronic stress. However, in some cases, I feel like many people approach these conditions as though it's ‘trendy’ to be diagnosed: You flash your prescription drugs and have coffee with your therapist or perhaps even turn to alternate medicine such as crystal healing. All I can say to that is: if someone thinks that the days I struggle to get out of bed at all, or the times I’ve thrown up in the middle of a panic attack are glamorous and trendy, they are highly mistaken.
I think what is masked behind this new mental health ‘trend’ is just new-found coping mechanisms. By being more open and nonchalant about mental health, it creates a world where awareness and normalcy to be the new associations because fuck the stigma that we've had in the past.
I wonder if there's actually been an increase in mental health conditions or if people are merely more open than ever to discussing mental health issues, in turn helping to diminish the stigma surrounding it. As we can see throughout history, mental health conditions were always around and present, but society was not yet ready to look past their fear and try to understand the individuals suffering. Has humanity always suffered from these mental health conditions to the extent to which we do today? I suppose without data from the middle ages and throughout history we may never really know.
I will acknowledge that the role our modern way of life plays, and the pressures that we as society place on our careers, money, social media, has led to an increase in diagnoses. All we can do now is continue to destigmatize these discussions and realise that taking care of our mental health is just as important as our physical health, something I myself am still working on.
Read more about the history of mental health here:
Edited by Maddie Pollard <3