Mental health is a funny thing and having a mental health condition is even funnier. Not-funny-ha-ha, more like wow-my-brain-sucks-funny. Or some-people-don’t-live-like-this-everyday-funny.
The thing is, with mental health, it’s something you have to take care of every single day of your life. And if you end up developing a condition, either because of a chemical imbalance or a trauma response or even a bit of both, it’s not necessarily something that can be ‘cured’.
A lot of treatments seem to focus on this, or at the very least the attitudes around treatments do. ‘Just go to therapy for a few months and then you’ll be fine’ or ‘just take these pills for a few months and you’ll be okay’. I have heard these comments in varying degrees for most of my life since an official diagnosis, and I’ve even heard them when I was in counselling without a mental health diagnosis.
That’s not to say that these comments are always coming from a place of ignorance or apathy but are based on love and concern. But sometimes these people don’t understand what it’s like living a fight with your own brain every single day. Your own mind telling you every single day you’re not good enough, that you’re worthless, that nobody loves you, despite the glaring evidence that says otherwise.
Mental health battles are not necessarily always something to win. They’re something to deal with. They’re something to grow with or grow from. If I need to take a pill every day and talk to someone once a week for only an hour just to make it through, then I will continue to do so for the rest of my life. So that I do end up having a life. A life worth living.
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3rd year English and Journalism student and secretary of Brig Newspaper
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