Mental Health Awareness

This Mental Health Awareness Month, join therapists in a compassionate exploration of mental health’s impact on lives and those we love. Learn about the journey through grief, the resilience in healing, and the collective path toward understanding and support. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I wrestled with how to acknowledge this life-transforming issue.

My first experience with suicide and mental illness hit my life at age 8. It started me on a path and mission I am still seeking to fulfill. I had difficulty processing this suicide for years; the victim was only 11 years old and a dear friend. I did not understand; I had seen him just a few hours before. As a child, I saw the intense grief and the weight of emotions as his family struggled to heal.

This early encounter and such profound loss opened my eyes to the depth of human emotion. There are stark realities to mental illness. This isn’t just a polite phrase. That term speaks to a lifestyle. Mental health and emotional dysregulation have the power to make you light or STEAL your light, leaving you in a dark place with no guide to find your way out.

Mental Health Awareness and Wellness

The Weight of Emotions

Our emotions wield incredible power—they can uplift us, imbuing our lives with light and purpose, or they can cast us into shadows, stripping away our sense of direction and hope. Navigating these highs and lows is an intrinsic part of the human experience, yet for some, the journey is fraught with greater challenges and darker valleys.

Mental Health Wellness

Because I am an adult, I choose to focus on mental health and wellness as I believe and live a solution-focused approach. I am aware that the other side of health is illness, and mental illness is hard to see from the outside. It is like a curtain in life; if you have been exposed to the dark nature of mental illness and substance abuse (twins of the same family), you know what to look for, what it looks and sounds like, what it steals and destroys. You may also know the powerless nature of loving someone who is so ill that they make a mistake after mistake while you look on helplessly, trying to get them to help.

Advocacy

There is little sympathy for those whose disabilities we cannot see; there is even less assistance or advocacy. After your life has been touched by anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, alcoholism, addiction, and all the other faces of emotional pain, you become part of a club of fighters. We advocate for more compassion, more understanding, more training, more patience, more policy, more humanity for those vulnerable, valuable human beings who struggle for what many take for granted. These are human beings such as Robin Williams, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mozart, Paul Dalio, Mel Gibson, Tim Ferris, and 20 percent of all Americans.

The rise of suicide as a mental health crisis

The tragedy of mental illness is the rise in suicide. Suicide rates have risen and are especially high among our youth. Our youth are struggling to find their place in a world filled with mixed messages. The themes of life have not changed; teenagers in 2018 struggled with rebellion and identity just as teenagers in 1918 struggled with finding themselves. The difference in 2018 is the lack of hope that our youth feel. Our next generation is hurting themselves and others; they are crying out for new tools to cope and trying to find a way forward.

What in the World is Happening?

Presently, there is breaking news of another school shooting in Texas, resulting in more death and despair for the next generation. There is a thirteen percent correlation between UNTREATED mental illness and violence in the US, accounting for other correlates, including trauma and poverty. The issue of mental illness is a spectrum issue, and we learn more with education and exposure to mental health. It is our duty as citizens of the human race to discover the faces of mental illness and mental health; I guarantee that someone that you love has struggled with mental health issues in their lifetime.

Compassion may be the key to solving our mental health crisis. If we live with compassion, our energy moves away from judgment and towards workable solutions. Inevitably, those solutions will include education, identification, treatment, and encouragement. On another note, I am speaking about removing the stigma of mental illness at Shiloh Baptist Church. The location is  340 Rev S Howard Woodson Jr, Trenton, NJ 08618. The program will be held on May 19, 2018, from 9 am to 12 pm. Hope to see you there.

Final Thoughts at the Holistic Store

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“Let us be kind to one another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle.”-   I. Maclaren