May is Mental Health Awareness Month and I could not be more pleased that the government of The Bahamas and multiple local organizations have made concerted efforts to recognize it. The theme that seems to be presented for this year is “Mental Health is Health Too”, and I love it because it’s true. However, culturally this hasn’t been a truth we’ve upheld; and if we’re being honest, our society demonstrates a lot of the adverse effects of that collective decision. In this blog post, my goal is to help readers realize that just as we’ve learned that to be physically healthy we have to eat well, exercise, keep up with our hygiene, get enough sleep, and so on; we need to do the same and more to be mentally and emotionally healthy too.
Acknowledging your mental health does not mean you are mentally ill.
What I’ve come to realize about our culture is that traditionally, mental health has been treated almost like those are bad words. If we venture there, it’s uncharted territory and we need to seek shelter immediately. What we need to understand is that everyone has mental health, but not everyone has mental illness – just like everyone has physical health, but not everyone has sickle cell anemia. So with that logic, just because you don’t have sickle cell does that mean that you shouldn’t do your absolute best to be as healthy as possible – whatever healthy looks like for you? No. So why is it that many people neglect their mental health and hygiene because they don’t have a mental health condition? Something I share with my clients who struggle with embracing the necessity of taking care of their mental and emotional wellbeing is an analogy to drinking water. We’re supposed to drink about eight glasses a day, right? And what does being hydrated do for us? It helps our body function at its absolute best. If you experience thirst, that means you’ve already had less water than you should have, and you need to get hydrated ASAP. The link I’m making is that just like staying hydrated, regardless of if you’re thirsty or not, is just like staying on top of your mental hygiene, regardless of if you’re sad/stressed/anxious/etc. or not. It helps our body function at its absolute best. It is a non-negotiable to our overall health, and we’ve spent far too long negotiating its value. Attuning to your mental and emotional needs is something we should be doing on the daily – and multiple times on the daily at that.
Stigma is a major detriment to our health and we need to break it rather than perpetuate it.
I really hate the stigma surrounding mental health because it absolutely makes no sense. Culturally, we speak freely about cancer, diabetes, lupus and the like; but as soon as major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder are mentioned it’s almost as if the conversation is over before it even begins. There is nothing wrong with talking about mental illness in the same way we talk about physical illness. Nobody has ever been called weak for having cancer, cancer warriors are celebrated for their strength. So many people have been called weak for having depression, depression warriors are looked down on as if a flaw of theirs is the reason they have depression. Both cancer and depression are illnesses we can’t control, but because emotional and mental health are involved, depression isn’t held to the same standard of understanding and acceptance. And that’s really awful of us. At the end of the day, what we’re saying culturally is that mental health concerns need to be dealt with independently, privately, and with no support from the community at large. What we’re saying is that we’re reluctant to extend kindness and assistance to people who are struggling with mental health because it’s a struggle we may not fully accept as legitimate. What we’re saying is that medication to help one’s body function better is embraced but medication to help one’s brain (also part of the body) function better or to help regulate emotions is vilified. Make it make sense, guys. I have had the honor of working with Dr. David Allen and his program The Family: People Helping People which, pre-pandemic, regularly held group therapy sessions at multiple locations on this island. Programs like this help to break stigma because, as Dr. Allen once said, what is most personal is most universal. Since stigma hinders us from seeking connection, it’s easy to fall victim to thinking that everyone else is doing great and that only you have a problem. This could not be further from the truth. Everyone has experienced a mental health crisis at some point in their lives, and it’s harmful to pretend that we haven’t. This façade appeases stigma but does society a disservice. Silence on the subject chooses the side of stigma. There is so much more that we need to do to dismantle stigma, but it has to be a collective effort. It won’t work otherwise.
Having emotions is a healthy part of the human experience.
Men, I really feel for you here; because women having and showing emotions is undoubtedly more normalized than men having and showing emotions, and that’s totally not fair. In general, people get very uncomfortable with anyone having and expressing feelings – especially uncomfortable ones – and I have to wonder why. I look back at my youth and remember how my own emotional intelligence and willingness to voice my uncomfortable feelings had been vilified by my peers and adults alike. Having emotions is normal. Why do we treat them as if they’re not? If you think about it, it’s truly much more abnormal to try to pretend and mask something that’s innate to the human experience. It’s like never blinking until you’re home in private because you don’t want people to know that you blink! Imagine how dry and sore your eyes would be. Well, imagine how starved for attention your emotions are each time you pretend they’re not there? Emotions don’t go away just because you choose to ignore them. When you sweep things under the rug, the rug is still in your house. It makes far more sense and is far healthier to shake out the rug regularly rather than to let that dust keep accumulating. If acknowledging your emotions is difficult for you, I want to remind you that it’s not weak to feel. It doesn’t make you any less of a person to have big emotions. We also have to remember that emotions are neither good or bad – they are truly neutral. It’s the weight and significance that we’ve put on them that make us feel like emotions have some sort of moral value.
The mind/body connection is real and affects our health in serious ways.
If you ever questioned if mental health is health too, think about a time or instance that really rocked you emotionally. Maybe it was the death of a loved one, a traumatic experience, or a breakup. How were you feeling physically at that time? If anyone says they were in top form, y’all ain’t saved, because I guarantee that’s not true. We all joke about how getting cheated on causes belly breakdown, but it’s true – emotional stressors come hand in hand with physical ailments more often than not. Whether it’s not sleeping well, not having an appetite, increased blood pressure, fatigue, gastrointestinal symptoms, muscle tension, or the like, we really can’t ignore the connection. Taking care of ourselves during our times of emotional need is essential to combat the physical symptoms that tag along.
It’s clear we need a cultural reframe about what mental health really is and why we need to be so intentional about cultivating positive mental health and hygiene practices for ourselves. As the great Ms. Lauryn Hill preached to us in Doo Wop (That Thing), how you gon’ win if you ain’t right within? Even if you think you’re fine and don’t need to attune to your mental wellbeing, I guarantee that if you begin to engage in intentional mental health and hygiene practices, you’ll feel even better. You really have nothing to lose when it comes to taking better care of yourself!
Christina Johnson is a psychotherapist, certified life coach, and
mental health educator based in Nassau, The Bahamas.
