Are You Maintaining Your Mental Health?
Jack West, AMFT
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I’ll never forget the day my mental health gave out. It was the middle of the day and I had just finished running a group. As the group ended I was talking with my friend and mentor when suddenly a wave of nausea come over me. Pushing the feelings aside, I continued with the conversion. However, the wave didn’t peak and subside. Instead, it kept building. Five minutes later I found myself slipping out of my chair and closer to the ground. I felt like I was on the deck of a ship be tossed in a storm.
My mind raced. I couldn’t focus. All I could do was try to balance on my knees gripping the chair I was previously seated in, but I eventually found myself on the floor in a fetal position. My friend broke the silence and calmly said, “Jack, you are not alone.”
I immediately broke into tears. My tears turned into sobbing. My sobbing turned into weeping as I convulsed on the floor. My mind stopped racing and simply broke with my body.
I’d like to say that after a good cry, I got up off the floor, hugged my friend and got back to work, but my friend actually helped me get to my therapist’s office. (Yes, a therapist can have a therapist too!) My road to recovery began there.
That experience was a turning point and helped me learn two very important things. First, my mental health affects my physical health. My unattended stress and emotional suffering was affecting me physically. Loss of sleep was the first signal that my mental health was beginning to impact my physical wellbeing.
Second, keeping a healthy mind is all about maintenance. When my mental health crisis hit, I had been under a considerable amount of emotional distress for quite a while. In less than six years I had lost 5 people in my life to suicide (including a family member). I was caring for the mental well-being of others, but not keeping up with my own mental health.
Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.
Like our physical health, our mental health needs maintenance. Too often we defer that maintenance until we face a crisis … and too often people suffer in silence. We all have our reasons. For me, that’s another blog for another day. However, the bottom line is that awareness, with the right support, care and attention, leads to improvements in our mental health.
