Mental Health Awareness week

You can guess from the title what this article is about.  I want to talk to you about mental health today.  Often people assume that it’s either depression or suicide, but there is a LOT more to mental health than just that.

In fact, mental health can be a wide variety of conditions that can impact you not only physically but mentally or emotionally as well.  Even something as apparently simple as major life changes can impact your mental health.

As you can imagine, not all health conditions are the same, and just as physical health conditions need different diagnosis and treatment, so does mental health.  And sometimes it isn’t easy to get the diagnosis or the right treatment, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Personally, I have unfortunately ended up with different mental health conditions and initially I believed it was my fault entirely that CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) wasn’t working for me no matter how many times I went through it.  One of the main reasons I think that it didn’t was because when I was asked what I was thinking I would look at the questioner blankly as I literally had no idea.

And every time I had this particular therapy I believed it was something I was or wasn’t doing that caused the failure.  I ended up feeling really guilty, trying to work out what it was I had done wrong.  So when it was suggested again, I would try again with the same results.

However, now that I have discovered a therapy and therapist that suits me, there has been a big difference.  I’m not saying I’m anywhere near cured yet, but I now know and understand that it has to be right for each individual and that because I have struggled for so many years I won’t “recover” quickly.

TREASURE

There are many health conditions that can be physical and/or mental and just like with physical health there are different answers, it is exactly the same with mental health.  I don’t have to feel guilty if one particular therapy doesn’t work for me.