Welcome to the twentieth-first day of the National Health Blog Post Month Challenge hosted by WEGO Health. Every day during the month of November I will be writing a new blog post related to health and living with a chronic illness based on given prompts provided by WEGO Health.
Today’s post reads:
Mental Health Meld: Mental health issues can affect many other conditions. Write about mental health, emotions, and challenges as they relate to your condition. How does your mental health affect your overall well-being?
Let’s talk Mental Health…
Regarding yesterday’s post about the start of the dizziness in my life, entitled “I still remember..“; it also triggered an anxiety disorder. Due to the intense dizzy spells that I experienced as a young child and becoming worse as a teenager, it resulted in me worrying about everything; worried about the when the next time the dizziness will occur. And then when it occurred in places such as a supermarket, or in a particular shop, I would worry that it would happen again and so would avoid that places, in the hopes that I would avoid an attack of the dizziness. However, this obviously did not stop the dizziness from the occurring; but only resulted in my world from becoming smaller and smaller as I avoided more and more places. In addition, as a result the dizziness that I kept mentioning to the doctor was put down to the anxiety disorder that I was diagnosed with. This is the problem with being diagnosed with a mental illness; it is widely acknowledged that mental health patients face difficulty in getting diagnosed and treated for physical illnesses as doctors will often blame their psychiatric diagnosis or the medications that they are taking on the symptoms that patients are experiencing.
A diagnosis of a mental illness can be a roadblock to getting diagnosed with a physical health condition…
In the end, I got help and treatment from the anxiety disorder, and thanks to therapy and graded exercises my world once again started to become larger as I started to visit the places, I once avoided. The relaxation techniques that I were taught, helped with the anxiety I was experiencing; although the dizziness was still very much there and still as intense. Now, I still find that anxiety is still an issue; an issue that can affect my mental and physical health,for example when the dizziness becomes so intense when out, my first instinct is still to panic and become anxious, although the anxiety I find is something that I am able to control, unlike the symptoms relating to my neurological condition, such as the dizziness, and the weakness and trembling in my legs, etc.
It is not only the anxiety, however that can be a problem for my mental and physical health however; depression is also another mental health issue that I have experience of, and can which still be a problem, years even after it first started. The depression, can still rear its ugly head, when I am experiencing bad flares in my condition. I often experience the depression, when my symptoms have been really severe for a long period of time; for example recently the dizziness has been so bad for several weeks now, and that has been making me feel down a lot of the time because of it; and because of the depression, the fatigue that I already experience becomes even worse, and that has a knock-on effect on the rest of my symptoms.
Depression can appear during flares in my condition…
That is the thing with mental health conditions when already living with a physical health condition – it is a vicious circle and one of the health conditions become worse, it automatically affects the other. So, to survive living with a physical health condition, we also need to look after our mental health…
Do you find that the best way to live well with your chronic illness is to also look after your mental health? I would love to hear your thoughts and comments regarding this issue. Please comment below…
Welcome to another post of the WEGO Health ‘National Health Blog Post Month’!! It’s Day 21 so, the end is nearly nigh! I hope you are all enjoying the posts so far. Ready for the next one?
Today, I have chosen the prompt asking to write about mental health.
As you may now already know, I have a BSC in Psychology, and currently volunteer for a local Mental Health Charity, so this topic and area is of importance to me. I suppose, I decided to study Psychology at University and later to volunteer for a mental charity because of my own battles with mental health difficulties – that of depression and anxiety. But what I have found with studying Psychology, volunteering and living with mental health conditions myself is still the stigma attached with mental illness.
We have all been told the statistics – that 1 in 4 people will at some point suffer with a mental health conditions themselves. The statistic for the prevalence of dandruff, to compare is 1 in 5 people!! Fancy that, mental illness is more common than dandruff!! Yet, having dandruff doesn’t have the same negative stigma attached to it!!
In my 3rd year of University, I decided to study the stigma of mental health for my dissertation. The results were shocking, especially considering that the population that took part in my study were well-educated students; a generation that were supposed to be open-minded and less judgemental. However, after reading a statement regarding a hypothetical person with paranoid schizophrenia, this all changed. They deemed the person to be dangerous, less inclined to give the person a job and less inclined to give the person a place to live.
Schizophrenia although producing symptoms such as paranoia, voices inside their head, and often delusions, they are seldom a danger to others – in fact, after reading several pieces of research for my dissertation, a person with schizophrenia is more likely to be the victim of a violent attack than the perpetrator. So why the ever-increasing negative attitudes towards mental illness?
Well, it could be said that the majority of the blame could be placed at the media’s door. Although, it is said violent crimes carried out by patients exhibiting mental illness is said to be rare, there are however endless reports in the media, of patients, among them schizophrenic’s, being the perpetrators of such attacks – often resulting in the loss of life of members of the community. Although, these instances are rare, when they do occur however, they are headline news; published on the front papers with sensationalist headlines – making the connection of their mental illness and the crime.
So, although these crimes are rare, when they do occur and become headline news, they stick in our mind, therefore, making us think that they occur much more regularly than they actually do. This is known as the availability heuristic.
Perhaps, these false beliefs are also due to the lack of knowledge of such disorders – people simply, believe what they read or hear, without gaining all the facts. Fear born out of ignorance and misinformation, perhaps? Or perhaps, the mentally ill are so heavily stigmatised as they deviate from the norm, and as history has shown society has often marginalised people who are different from the society’s view as being ‘normal.’
So, how as we as health activists, and society as a whole start to destigmatise mental illness? Should media outlets encourage stories of mental illness in a positive way – show that there is hope for people who have been unwell from mental illness? To encourage celebrities and other well-known faces who has been inflicted with such illnesses, so that there is a face to mental illness; to make it less fearful and show that the mentally ill are not so different to the rest of us after all!
I have had the pleasure to meet, through my work as a volunteer to meet many wonderful people who have been touched with a mental illness, from depression to schizophrenia, and can say that they have been the most friendly and kind people I have come across.
So why still the stigma surrounding mental illness?
