Please stop it with the mental health week! I mean it.
I am sick and fed up with people focusing on Mental health for just one week…
I hate it when people turn a life long condition, into just one week of focus. You may know that I have PTSD (read my story here) and just because everyone is talking about it this week, it does not make my condition any better. “Mental health this…” “Mental health that…” it annoys me, in fact after a week of seeing people posting a terrible meme, photo or ‘my mate…’ story, it just grates and makes my condition even worse. I know there is no depth or substance behind any of it and it is a chance for people to grow their following and be seen to be ‘all encompassing’ rather than tackling a real and growing problem.
Not to put a too sharp a point on this, next week EVERYONE will have moved on and Mental Health will be forgotten about, again. This subject is far more important than a share, a like or a post. I will even bet that 99.9% of people, if asked in 2 weeks time, will have forgotten everything they had posted this week, everything they had liked or shared and will be back to blaming those who struggle with a mental health condition on a daily basis.
Mental Health issues
What people do not appreciate is that mental health can take hold of anyone and can have very different diagnosis and personal manifestations. Whatever colour, sex, background or physical state a person can be in, no one is spared, yet we only preach about it for just one week a year. It also groups all conditions in as an ‘all in one’ big pot of ‘Mental Health’.
One person in every Four will suffer be suffering from some kind of mental health. A depressive is very different to someone who panics, we ‘mental health sufferers’ do not have all the conditions but we can suffer from more than one but we are all DIFFERENT.
Time for a movement
Mental Health should be a movement, a constant and meaningful campaign which is splashed over the media, news and then spoken about EVERY SINGLE DAY until it not longer needs to be. It should be bigger that BLM and the MeToo combined. People should be challenged, debated and even new laws created to protect against unfairness and discrimination.
I have many ideas of what to do and why the number of sufferers are increasing, but this is not the post to get into that. What I want is the largest minority in society (by some considerable margin at 25%) to be recognised and given as much support and understanding as other smaller ‘minority’ sections.
My final thought is that I never asked to become a sufferer. Now I have it, I can never get rid of it. It is part of me and part of my life. I have learnt how to cope with it, to hide it from others and suffer in silence, or be penalised and ridiculed. I hope I am not alone in having these thoughts. One week of focus means there are 51 more weeks of being ignored.
If you have an opinion about this, please let me in the comments below, or send me an email carl@carljones.org.