It’s Mental Health Awareness Week. You probably don’t need me to tell you that; you may well have seen posts on social media and even on television news programmes.
Our mental health underpins how we think and feel about ourselves and others. It influences how we interpret events, situations and circumstances in our lives. It has a fundamental effect on our capacity to learn, on how successfully we communicate, and on how we build and maintain relationships. Mental health impacts our ability to cope with change and with life events. It affects our thoughts, feelings and behaviour. Mental health matters because it is a key ingredient when it comes to nurturing healthy human beings.
Mental health can be impacted by our genes and in fact, poor mental health can run in families. It can be affected by our experiences in life particularly in childhood. A child raised by dysregulated adults often inherits a dysregulated nervous system too. Aristotle said, “Give me a child when he is seven and I will show you the man” and I see the truth of this every day in the therapy room. I see brave, resilient people working hard to loosen the shackles of their genetics and their childhoods.
Human beings have blind spots. I first realised this as a child when I asked for support in school because of what was happening at home. I knew even as a youngster that comments like “at least you have a roof over your head” were totally inappropriate given my experiences. Later as an adult when I was bereaved, I noticed this again. Close friends seemed at best indifferent and at worst callous to my plight. The truth is that human beings struggle with mental and emotional vulnerability when it is outside their frame of reference. Until they experience the very same challenges themselves, they often remain disengaged and distant from those in crisis. Of course, there will always be exceptions, but by and large, it’s a human trait.
I see it time and again in companies where the leaders who claim good personal mental health misunderstand and mishandle those members of staff who struggle. I’m also seeing it a lot on social media, and I can’t tell you how cheesed off some of the pompous posts I’ve read lately, make me. I don’t know if it’s because people have had too much sun, but my social media feed is full of people who should know better crowing about their positivity and judging those of us who they pronounce are not like them. And it’s flipping offensive!
When I was a trainee hypnotherapist we were asked to consider,
“Imagine that you were born to the next-door neighbours or to the house across the road, how different might your life experience be?”
Please think about that yourself for a moment. What might have been different about your life? Would it be better or worse? Then ask yourself what input you had into the parents you were allocated? How about the environment into which you were born? The answer is that you didn’t influence anything; neither the calibre of your parents, the place you grew up in, or the people who surrounded you. None of it was down to you or to any of us; it was a simple lottery. When you think about life it’s so arbitrary, and not without some luck. Your good mental health isn’t generally down to the choices you have made, and neither is poor mental health, it’s down to the foundations that were set even before you were born.
It’s surely time that we moved away from the narrative that somehow people with good mental health are stronger or more resilient because for some reason mental health has been erroneously linked to weakness. It is exactly the opposite though. Imagine running the London Marathon with a rucksack full of bricks or with glue coating your trainers. That’s how many of us live our lives. We still participate. We still do our best, but we do it with a handicap, be that genetic or life experience. Other runners can’t see the handicap but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
For all of us, good mental health is fragile. Please don’t take it for granted or be complacent. Resilience is a muscle that needs flexing and if you have rarely had to use it you yourself might struggle when the bad stuff finally hits the fan. Please don’t use the blessing of good mental health to buoy yourself up at somebody else’s expense either because whether you consider mental health under the umbrella of genetics, or upbringing, or personal choice, it’s time we stopped the comparisons. It’s old but it’s true, if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree then you have totally missed the point. The foundations of good mental health are not down to you at all; they’re arbitrary and you’re lucky if you have them. If you landed on the other side of the mental health fence, then please ignore the crows. Focus instead on your strengths, on understanding your nervous system, and just give those cawing crows a wide berth.
Carol Hickson is a Therapist, Life Coach and Workplace Trainer. She is also the author of The Resilience Template – 7 Steps to Improve Your Mental Health and also, Beeston, The Anxious Pup.