I started to re-watch The Sopranos recently. For the few who haven’t heard of it, it’s a ’90s TV show about a mobster going to therapy.
Apart from the cool plot, it shows a lot of the preconceptions that we still have about the mental health business.
‘If I talk about my feelings, that just shows me vulnerable.”
“If I am preoccupied with my mental well-being, then it means there’s something wrong with it.”
“It’s not cool/ polite to talk about the bad states you are in. You just deal with them.”
These are just a few of the ideas I heard about mental health in my experience. Do you have any more?
Before reading further, just take a moment and think about the first thing - an image or word - that comes to mind when I say mental health.
Needless to say that we have a big preconception about mental health. I challenge you to search on Google images “physical health” and compare it to “mental health”. You find the images strikingly different. This is odd because they refer to the same thing - what is working in our mental & emotional realm, not what is not working.
We associate our physical health with its benefits and positive aspects. We know that being physically healthy is a good thing, which helps us enjoy life.
In contrast, we tend to connect mental health to its negative aspects, to the problems we may encounter in relation to it, such as depression or anxiety.
Did you know that mental health contributes to our quality of life as much as the place we live, how much we earn, or even our physical health?
Mental health refers to our emotional, behavioral, and psychological well-being. It's about how we feel, how we behave, and how we think about the things in our lives.
Did you ever want to have a conversation with someone about a difficult topic and the words just stuck in your throat? Or you knew what decision to make, but you just couldn’t go through with it?
Well, that has to do with your mental health.
Every aspect of our lives is affected by our well-being, mental health emotional health, and so on. The way we work, we make decisions, we have relationships, we raise our children, or manage our teams.
Like physical health, mental health is something we have, whether we actively deal with it or not.
So, for the next few weeks, you will read about:
What is mental health (today’s topic)
What do we mean when we say you have a good or poor mental health
What’s the difference between a therapist, a coach, and a psychiatrist
Are parents always at fault for our poor mental health? (spoiler, no)
What’s the difference between anxiety, panic attacks depression?