Changing Reality Through Mental Health

In the beginning of my experience with the Mental Health system, I had many, many thoughts concerning why I was becoming a part of this new experience, what had I done that warranted my taking group therapy, and taking medications.  After many years of being a homeless person and a drug addict I slowly began to reason that someone other than my own self cared and this turned me around as to how I thought about people and how people saw me.

We read and hear about Mental Health and how it may be the new wave of modern times.  There are clients (consumers), and others outside of mental health that don’t think so, at least not many of them, yet mental illness affects millions of people every year in America; whose to judge. Most people who need mental health assistance, having become diagnosed or not, rarely receive the help they need and the reason is money and of course their own feelings of receiving mental health assistance in short, shame.

Because Mental Health has a stigma of its own coupled with its high cost, many people despair; while others become lost.  They say Mental Health these days needs a new uplifting, where there would be a newer point of view as to how people can see their lives and how their challenges can be approached.  We are all potentially under the guise of being mental health patients, we all have concerns, issues and problems we don’t care to admit to.  Our challenges may make us weak or feel imperfect and threaten our way of survival; yet when we see these are categorized and labeled as “symptoms” of mental illness, we turn and run in denial because we have lived a certain way for a certain time.

The attitudes of society about Mental Health and its culture, threatens us every day, more than the issues we are dealing with and with this, many prefer to suffer in their own way rather than to be known as suffering from a mental illness, and so many others who may be suffering from a mental illness go to extremes to obtain drugs, illicit or prescribed instead of becoming labeled, move on to live in their perfect world.

Mental health is set in motion by good will, professionalism, empathy and caretakers who treat our malignancies or disorders not knowing the feelings that are brought down upon us.  There are solutions which can help a person who suffers from a mental illness which help to maintain an emotionally healthy way of life.  It’s simple.  If we converse, we will find these conversations the necessity of our emotional well being, and that missing link can improve the early-stages of mental health care.  Conversation is constructive and has always been proven to be therapeutic to help others become empowered and to become a part of the social structure, instead of withdrawn and living a life in despair.  We become constructive through conversing about our ideas and problems and we move forward from the old reality of suffering into the new reality of acceptance and self-esteem not only of ourselves yet of the Mental Health system itself. 

Written by Donald S