Hello again everyone, welcome to another brand new post! I'm not sure where this sudden inspiration has come from but i'm hoping it continues! Apologies for the long title of this post but this one is quite an important and personal one for me. Today's post is going to be about mental health and the importance of it and understanding it. Now, i'm in no way an expert on mental health and I won't pretend to be either. But as it's something i've suffered with personally and know of others, including some of my best friends, who have suffered in some way, I feel as though I can shed some light on the topic in the form of my own experiences and opinions. I promise this isn't intending to be a negative post, i'm hoping for it to possibly be something positive and, if I can inspire or reach even at least one person, that'll make me happy! I won't waffle on in this intro any longer and I hope you all like the post!
To start off, I just want to talk a little bit about my own personal mental health. I didn't have a good experience at school, I was bullied badly - verbally and occasionally physically - almost every day for 5 years. To this day, I still have no idea why, but I guess no one ever really knows why they become a "victim" of bullies. Maybe because I was quiet? Maybe because I kept to myself? Maybe I was just an easy target? Who knows. But what I do know is that it was an awful experience and I truly wouldn't wish something like that upon anyone. Eventually, I ended up being scared to go to school and i'd be in tears every single day before and after school. Being bullied did lower my self esteem and my confidence, i've always been quite shy but this definitely worsened me. My parents did at one point consider taking me out of school and having me home schooled so I wouldn't be in that environment, but I muddled on, still at the same school, same thing happening. I ended up hating everything about myself so took to self harm when I was around 15/16, for me that was a way of coping I guess. Harming myself on the outside gave me a way of of relieving the hurt and self hatred I felt on the inside. I'd keep my arms covered even in the summer so people wouldn't see. I also had my first suicide attempt mid way through my GCSE's aged 16. I have had another few failed attempts since aswell.
Once I left school and started college I thought "great, new start, new people, maybe now is my time to get away from all the bullying" - this was sadly proved wrong. I was made to feel like an outsider by people I considered to be my friends. I used to hear people talking and laughing about me when they didn't know I could hear them. I think this potentially hurt more than school. People I thought of as friends bitching and making me feel even worse. I put up with this for a further 4 years at two separate colleges and two separate and completely different courses. 9 years in total I put up with it all. I didn't only put up with it during education, I've also put up with it in different work places - one for almost 5 years.
In June last year (23rd June, 2017 to be precise), 6 years after leaving school where all my problems stemmed from, I finally went to the doctors and spoke to someone about my feelings for the first time. 6 years of feeling low every day, anxious, suicidal etc. I ended up being diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. Looking back, I do wish i'd had the courage to speak up before, but at least I now know of ways I can help myself - if and when I choose to seek out that help. I know that so many people potentially have it worse than I do which is why I now know just how important it is to speak up if you don't feel 'yourself'. There's always going to be something that can help you to feel 'okay' again even for a little while - for me that has always been listening to music. It has that power to calm me down, lift me up and help me to forget my problem's for a short time.
Onto the next part of this post - the importance of mental health. Personally, I think mental health quite often gets overlooked and ridiculed. People think it's not real and that it's just "in your head". Wrong. Mental health is VERY real and it is a subject that matters to so many people and needs to be taken more seriously. It can be hard enough for a person to cope with mental health without having a certain stigma and discrimination attached to it and it really is time this ended. Mental health is so much more common than we may realise with statistics showing 1 in 4 people will experience at least one diagnosable problem at some stage in their life and around 615 million people suffer from a form of depression or anxiety. According to the Mental Health foundation, 70 million workdays are lost every year due to mental health in the UK alone.
Mental Health exists in so many forms other than just depression and anxiety, personality disorders, eating disorders and so many more come under the same category and none of which are a joke. I think what people don't realise is that mental health is just as important as physical health. It can be exhausting and draining and there can be days where a person doesn't wish to get out of bed or leave the house. It can also hit at any time, it's not the same as just falling over and hurting yourself. It can act up at random points for no reason whatsoever and it is difficult to understand which is another reason I personally think it's so important.
Mental health affects a person emotionally, pshycologically and in some cases, physically. It can affect the way we react to or handle certain situations, how we relate to another person and how we make choices in life. It's not easy to understand if you personally haven't gone through it. Being honest, I don't think it's that easy to understand even if you have suffered in some way. But it is important to remember that even if you may not necessarily understand a persons feelings, supporting them is a key factor to helping them. Even just listening or offering a shoulder to cry on can help a person in so many ways. You may not always know what to say but offering that support can be a key factor to helping someone.
For me and so many others, mental health is such an important subject and I can only hope that one day, it's taken just as seriously as physical health. I spoke to a few people I trusted before I finally had the courage to speak to a doctor, i'm still a long way from where i'd like to be, but with help and support, hopefully one day, I may get there. If you ever don't feel yourself, please talk to someone - even if it's a friend or family member you trust - talk to someone. And if you do get the courage to seek the professional help and advice, please do take that chance, it'll benefit you in the long run and one day, you'll see it was worth it.
Thank you for reading this post, I hope i've managed to do some justice to the topic and shed a bit of light on the importance of mental health. Remember, always speak up and I promise you are never alone and it's okay not to be okay.
See you all soon for another brand new post!
Love Beki x
No comments:
Post a Comment