(Nimue)
When you suffer from depression or anxiety, the messages you often get from both medical and spiritual sources are much the same. Your feelings are the problem. Learn to change your thoughts and feelings and you will be cured. That's never helped me, and I know other people who struggle and have not been able to fix themselves either.
What this leads to is treating your 'negative' emotions as suspect, and perhaps even trying to fight or suppress them. That's very hard work. It's also at odds with much of what we know about mental health, because suppressing things tends to make matters worse, not better in the long run.
I can trace all of my mental health issues to things I've experienced. There's nothing weird about being anxious when you're dealing with something that scares you. There's nothing weird about being sad if you're suffering. These are natural, normal responses to distress. However, we tend to pathologise grief and distress, and there's a big economic dimension to that..
What would happen if we treated these kinds of mental illnesses as things that had been caused, not as personal failings or brain chemistry malfunctions? What if we assumed a person was most likely having a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation? Rather than medicated them, we'd have to fix the problem. Poverty, abuse, toxic workplaces and insecurity would explain a great deal of this. What would happen if we tackled mental health as a social issue for everyone, not a medical problem for some?
Imagine if workplace health and safety included not being allowed to stress people to the point of making them sick. This would include paying people enough that they could afford to live decent, healthy lives. Imagine the mental health benefits of universal basic income and how many people that would liberate from constant stress.
This winter I've been experimenting with taking myself seriously. If I feel sad, I no longer try to fight it. If I'm anxious, or stressed, I give that some space. This might result in a few tears, but I find when I do that, the distress passes and I get on top of my feelings. I had to remind myself repeatedly that with my partner going through some scary and unpleasant stuff, it was reasonable to feel sad and worried. This was nothing disproportionate or inappropriate in how I was responding to that.
I'm having to learn how to be sad about things. It's taking practice not to see fear or sorrow as a sign that my mental health is falling apart and that I should be fighting to cope better. Making the space for what I'm feeling results in coping far better than trying to cope does. The less I try to tough things out, the more resilient I am. It still feels paradoxical, but it definitely works. Part of this is about not seeing myself as the problem, but shifting my understanding of what I'm dealing with. Being upset by upsetting things is not an illness. I've had to deal with a lot of awful stuff along the way, that's all.
If you start from the idea that how you feel is a fair response to what you're dealing with, you don't invalidate yourself. You don't end up mistrusting your feelings or habitually treating yourself like you are the problem. When the problem is not inside your head, you can't fix it by changing how you think, and going that route can take you away from the real-world solutions that would genuinely help.
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