What Mental Health Means to Me

Mental health is an ever-changing and ever-growing descriptive device used to encompass the many different illnesses that plague the human mind. In year’s past, mental illness has been surrounded by stigma and shame, as told in my lovely colleague, Sadie, in her most recent post Mental Health Goes Musical: Twenty One Pilots Drop Fifth Studio Album, Trench. It has been portrayed in the media as the middle-aged divorcee, using Xanax to numb her depression following the separation from her husband. It has been the lunatic, forced into an insane asylum by his family and then forced onto the streets by a government no longer concerned with funding of mental rehabilitation and treatment. It has been the sociopathic killer, hunted by the elusive detectives and entertaining our TVS for decades. What they never show you, is the teen just coping with her changing surroundings, a successful student who no longer can handle their highs and lows, or even the mother failing to thrive after giving birth to her new born baby.

Recently, there are new findings concerning the spectrum that is mental illness dispersed amongst the public now becoming widely aware of their effects. A paper recently published on PubMed.com by a Dr. M. Agius has an abstract describing the mental illness spectrum as a “more dimensional approach to the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric patients” and “encompasses first the idea of a spectrum of symptoms correlating to severity within a single disorder, and secondly, the idea of spectra of different disorders sharing overlapping collections of symptoms.”

This idea of a spectrum is important to me, because in my family the idea of an existence of minor mental illness could not be rationalized. Whenever mental illness was brought up, there was no scale. You were either “crazy” or you were fine. As I have gotten older, this type of generalization had been hazardous to my own mental health. I’ve come to realize that acceptance of this scale is most important to the preservation and well-being of my mind.

Now, there are all types of ways to address how mental health is an all-encompassing being similar to and as important as physical health. MentalHealth.gov publishes a basics introduction to the idea that “Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being” and “is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.” Mental health transcends circumstance, gender, socio-economic status, and more. Its broad, and varying for everyone.

To me, mental health is just that: always important. Mental health for me is an extensive detail of my life that requires delicate care similar to that of a flourishing garden. There is always room for growth, and work to be done.