3 Reasons Why We Should Talk About Mental Illnesses
Look around you. How many people take Mental Illness seriously? Or how many people “come out of the closet” with their conditions? Revealing a mental illness has become like revealing a sexual orientation, people call it a “phase”, say that “it’s all in your head” or make you feel ashamed of it. How many cases have you heard about friends and family of cancer or TB patient telling the guy to ignore the problem or asked him to stop talking about it?
People treat every disease special as long as the diseases aren’t messing up the brain. Everyone needs to realize that mental illnesses are the real disease. If you have an iron deficiency, you treat it with required medicines. You don’t wait for it to “get over” or start meditating hoping it will get cured.
If you will not do this thing to treat any disease in your body, then what does make you think it is applicable for a person with anxiety or depression every mental illness is caused either because of a deficiency or abundance of a chemical in the brain and it will get cured with proper medication and not meditation.
Mental Illness needs to be discussed and talk about to create an open society that won’t label every mentally sick person “retarded”.
3 reasons why we should talk about mental illnesses-
1. The Condition Gets Worse For The Patient If You Ignore The Illness
People are suffering from all kinds of mental illnesses- depression, PTSD, anxiety, bipolar syndrome, schizophrenia and what not. Some of them could have gotten better only if society didn’t ignore them.
“So you have pancreatic cancer? Look at Sharma Ji’s son. He’s got it worse than you, he has blood cancer. Stop whining like a little bitch!”
If this scenario was a reality, the number of people getting outraged would have been unimaginable.
But you replace the word cancer with anxiety or depression or any traumatic experience, no one is gonna bat an eye. In fact, it’s very common to dismiss someone’s mental illness and happens almost all the time.
This leaves the patient isolates, lonely and ashamed. They start feeling that their emotions are not valid and start bottling feelings up. And you know what Sigmund Freud said about repressing emotions-
“ Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
2. Substance Abuse Increases In a Silent Society
Now, because the patients feel invalidated and ashamed of their sickness, they close up and get embarrassed for asking for professional medical help. Most people either suffer or they start a self-diagnosis. Not every person is eligible to treat mental sickness like any other disease in the world. The patient either starts substance abuse like alcoholism, drug abuse, etc. or takes a wrong prescription. It may happen that the patient takes the right prescription but starts getting addicted and gets overdosed. Self-diagnosis in any form can be fatal and risk a person’s life.
3. Creates Awareness
When a person dies of mental sickness, people often remark things like “if only we knew what was going on his head” or “if only she reached out for help”. Chances are the patient did reach out but was ignored or the patient never had the guts to share his pain with anybody in the fear of getting judged. With increasing pressure, more and more people are getting mentally sick. It’s time to recognize these people and help them seek medical help if needed. To make it happen, people need to get aware so they would not force a person to suffer alone because of their lack of knowledge. The more people talk about it, the more people get aware and the more people come forward for a treatment. For a society to be functional, the citizens should not only be physically healthy but mentally and emotionally, too.