We Should All Be Mental Health Advocates
If mental disorders are so common, why are we still too embarrassed to get help?
words Ry-Ann Lim
I recently had a Zoom call with my friend Rachana from Cambodia who has been actively advocating for mental health since 2018. She is currently leading Project Philippines 2020: Breaking the Stigma on Mental Health which aims to raise awareness of mental health as the foundation to suicide prevention. We spoke about the different dimensions of mental health advocacy - from the personal to the community and national level.
My own mental health journey began with a stomach ulcer. Growing up, I was a normal kid with a balanced lifestyle: I was eating well, exercising regularly, wasn’t socially isolated and maintained decent grades in school. If I were to evaluate my own life, I wouldn’t think anything was particularly wrong with me. However, I lived my teenage years up to adulthood to the backdrop of occasional episodes of gastric which would leave me in short but intense pangs of pain for a few minutes where I could barely stand straight. I usually had antacids on standby and learnt to live with it. The doctors said that the muscles around my stomach tend to tense up so the digestive juices wouldn’t pass through a chamber to another, probably because of stress. No biggie. What could a 16-year-old with no responsibilities possibly be stressed about other than doing well in school?
Core to recovery is self-awareness
Self-awareness is the first step to healing. AIDS activists once produced an iconic and powerful phrase that sent an effective message: “Silence = Death”. Silence about being abused, about always being anxious, about being lonely, about low self-esteem also results in death – death of a person’s well-being. Silence fortifies mental illness. Being able to admit to another person, “I am struggling” is a good signal that healing can begin. A former Harvard Medical School professor suggests that a more effective way to be in control of a traumatic past is by naming it instead of suppressing it, as it kindles one’s limbic brain to enlightenment (Kolk, 2015). People with mental illness often shift between being uptight or irritable and explosive all without knowing why.
The doctor was treating my symptoms, not the root cause of my problem. The root cause was that my sense of terror was omnipresent as I grew up in a turbulent home. Growing up, I thought of this as “strict Asian parenting”. Although I can laugh about it now, I sometimes still struggle to draw the line between being a “strawberry generation” or being ill. They say it’s “all in the mind” but the body keeps score.
In my experience, talking about painful events doesn’t necessarily establish community - often quite the contrary.
Families and organisations may reject members who air their dirty laundry. Friends and family can lose patience with people who get stuck in their grief or hurt. This was a reason why I would often edit my story into a form least likely to provoke rejection. It was an enormous challenge to find safe places to express pain or trauma. My experiences with expressing painful encounters led me to ask Rachana how can we as a friend listen more lovingly and actively? How do we listen to agonising details of a friend’s life, especially when the confession was too much to bear? While I understand that sharing experiences can re-establish the feeling of community, I personally (still) have not experienced many healing conversations.
This question led me to believe that communities have to advocate for mental health
My cultural perceptions became my greatest barrier to health and well-being. It prevented me from sharing my struggles and asking for help. Rachana and her project on Mental Health see mental health as a community issue that requires a change in perception and a formalised community response as the community is usually a person’s first point of contact. A person who is treated with sensitivity and respect when sharing their struggles openly (such as at the Crazycat Gets Cosy sessions) and is confident that his or her friends and family will support their decision to seek help, is far more likely to be empowered to escape their depressive situation.
Thus, culture shapes the way we perceive mental illness and people living with mental health conditions. Culture also influences whether or where we seek treatment, how we cope, and our social support.
A new narrative for society
We are on the verge of becoming a mental health-conscious society. There are more conversations happening now on how trauma disrupts the workings of the mind, brain, and body. Research by James Heckman won a Nobel Peace Prize for demonstrating the vast savings produced by early intervention in mental wellbeing shows more high school graduation, less crime increased employment and decreased family and community violence. Advances in neuroscience have given a glimpse of how trauma changes brain development, self-regulation, and the capacity to stay focused. Today we know not only how to treat trauma but also, increasingly, how to prevent it.
It was reported in 2018 that depression was “the most common mental disorder, with one in 16 people in Singapore having the condition at some point in their lives”.
If mental disorders are so common, why are we still too embarrassed to get help?
If you’ve come this far with me in this article, you have also become a part of this community. Let’s empower the next generation of youths to break the social stigma around mental health. If you would like to do so tangibly, Racha’s project is currently raising funds to run this project, support them by purchasing:
1. 𝘛𝘰𝘵𝘦 𝘉𝘢𝘨𝘴
2. 𝘚𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘳𝘴
References
Kolk, B. (2015). The body keeps the score. London: Penguin Books
About the Author:
Ry-Ann Lim is currently getting her hands dirty at an EdTech startup after recently completing her Masters in Public Policy. Curious and playful, she seeks to continue learning and creating meaningful experiences around the themes of her topics of interest such as Gender issues, Technology and Education. Her favourite book of 2020 is James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.