I think and write a lot about mental health. Since being diagnosed with anxiety and clinical perfectionism, writing has become an important way of coming to terms with my own psychiatric ailments, while trying also to raise public awareness. It’s not an easy task. Despite my eagerness and many importunate attempts to give a voice to mental illness, I am often left feeling like the world isn’t ready to listen.
But when mental health week ticked around this year, ears pricked up. My news feed was awash with articles about mental health, friends brandishing popular hashtags and events popping up all around my city.
Finally, a week where mental health was a hot topic, where my issues were on the frontline. If ever there was a time when my humble opinions on the human brain might count for something, this was sure to be it. I panicked.
Determined to seize the opportunity, I started bashing out stories and pitches with intensity, like I was trying to give my computer’s motherboard some kind of frantic deep tissue massage. My mind turned cartwheels. Within 20 minutes I had chewed all my fingernails back to the quick and yanked out a few generous handfuls of hair – telltale symptoms of my escalating anxiety.
I forgot to have lunch. I forgot to pick my little sister up from school. I missed two calls from my partner. But somehow I still managed to singlehandedly pluck all the tiny hairs on my leg, another delightful habit I tend to deploy with fervour whenever I need to curb my anxiety.
As time ticked by and the pressure mounted, I realised I was heading for a nervous breakdown. Maybe I was making too big a deal of mental health week, but that is the very nature of my mental illness – the tendency to inflate and catastrophise. It was a bitter irony: my anxiety was the very thing that stopped me from writing about it.
So I closed my laptop and resolved to stay silent for mental health week. I decided that protecting my own mental state was more important than writing about it. And I reassured myself there would be other opportunities.
See, that’s just it with mental illness. Often we cannot talk about it when the world wants us to – whether that be our families, therapists or the media. And when we are ready to speak up, we can’t find the ears.
Even with efforts to reduce stigma, mental health is an extremely sensitive topic. It takes a long time to develop the personal insight and vocabulary to be able to communicate about our mental states. In my experience, you can only really talk (or write) about it on your own terms and in your own time. This means we need a culture that is receptive to discussions the year round, not just at designated calendar points.
While initiatives like mental health week are exceedingly important, they are not always as beneficial to sufferers in the ways they intend to be. The sudden spike in publicity may feel like a fleeting injection of sympathy that leaves us even more isolated once the week is over and our issues fall into the background once again.
The ephemeral support for mental illness shines with a suspicious veneer, tarnished by the knowledge that talking about mental illness might earn you a hundred likes on Facebook on one day but compromise your job application the next.
On the other hand, the sudden spotlight on mental health can also cause people with mental illness to cringe and withdraw, unnerved (so to speak) by the unfamiliar pressure of public exposure. And then there is the risk of triggers that comes with a disordered flurry of news articles and tweets about mental health.
I am not disputing the merits of mental health week and the media’s reporting of it. I think these initiatives are noble and necessary. I think they are crucial to creating a society that makes it easier to live with a mental illness. But if listening to people with mental illness and understanding their experiences is the most important step in dissolving the silence and stigma, we need to be open on a more general, everyday basis.
We need a culture that is attuned to the nuances of mental illness and accepting of the silences as well as the disclosures. We need a world where mental health is an acceptable topic regardless of time and place, beyond the field days and short-lived social media campaigns.
Bitter irony: I wanted to speak out about mental health but my anxiety stopped me | Marian Faa
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