Mental health awareness week isn’t for me (or, err, is it)
I’m already acutely aware that I am batshit fucking mental and that limited resources and treatment options exist for this, the problem is that unless you have experience of it, it’s amazingly difficult to convince anyone it’s real. And if you’re experiencing it yourself, it’s amazingly difficult to convince yourself you deserve support.
It seems patronisingly 101 to explain that depression is not ‘feeling sad about something.’ It’s feeling sad about nothing, it’s feeling sad about everything, it’s being so railgun-floored by sadness and meaninglessness that you cannot get out of bed. Not, ‘oh, feeling a bit sorry for myself today might watch some Netflix’ but like, staring at the wall for 14 hours doing nothing because your brain is not so much a warzone as just a series of abandoned, foggy trenches.
And depression’s a relatively basic concept to get past people. Most people know someone who’s had depression — as a teenager or an adult. They could be your family member, they could be your friend, they could be you. Depression is alarmingly common, across human existence, which isn’t that surprising when you know it’s caused by emotional stress and takes a variety of forms that basically involve neural wiring breaking or fritzing. Or all the things that you used to be able to do straightforwardly taking on the difficulty of making a Bake Off showstopper with your hands cuffed behind your back, while Paul Hollywood screams ‘YOU’RE WEIRD AND EVERYONE HATES YOU’ at you.
Look, I know I’m mad. Most people I’m friends with know they’re mad. I’m sort of fortunate in that I’m one of the more-able-to-hide-it ones, for about 10 or so minutes after you meet me, provided I don’t have a glass of wine in my hand. I chug along basically functional except when I don’t but that tends to only be revealed as financial disasters induced by freelance admin failures and sudden inability to believe I can do anything, let alone write it.
And I have that straightforward depression stuff. Mixed with other things from time to time because illnesses are so often co-morbid and conveniently slot together in an Escher painting of nightmare staircases where you think you’re going up to a good ol’ Anxiety but then the camera flips and you realise you’re walking upside-down on some Paranoia.
Anyway, yeah, I’m kinda relatable. You know those days where you wake up feeling shit and have nagging ideas about suicide? Ending in a ‘y’, amirite lads? I know you know that because if you’re reading this, you probably follow me on Twitter.
Check me making articulate jokes about the way I’ve spent most of the last week so stressed I can barely function and slipped into total numb denial when an additional, unfulfillable duty turned up lol. You know the feel.
Well, not everyone does. Lots of people do — even most people I work with but that’s because I’m a journalist and you only become one of those if you can’t cope with having another job, so technically we are statistical outliers experiencing several hundred mental health problems a week and should not be counted. My friends are kind of self-selecting because you probably have to find me a degree of relatable to get on with me and again, we’re all journalists because what is work/life separation.
But not everyone does. Awhile ago I was working in a big company and discovered, to my extreme alarm, that there are people walking around without mental health problems. Not even a bit of stress or anxiety! Literally nothing beyond the normal range of human emotions that includes getting angry or sad or confused sometimes but not in a way that derails your entire life for the next minimum-of-a-week.
I felt like David Attenborough. Well, no, I felt extremely paranoid and like a fish out of water and increasingly aware I was in the wrong job because we seemed unable to communicate with each other on even the most basic levels. It was probably because I have mental health problems and I’ve got so used to everyone else around me having them, too, that although I’ve found ways to appear on top of my game (for a mentalist) I am nowhere near as good at passing for healthy as I’d lke to pretend I am.
The thing about telling people to talk about their mental health is that’s all well and good up to and within a relatable context, as lay therapy. You can absolutely rant to me in the pub about how shitty the week in your brain has been and we’ll have a bloody good laugh about it and feel slightly better because then it’s all normalised. Which is an unhealthy form of coping but one that’s effective in lieu of suitable clinical support.
Whereas if I’d spoken to any of these people about it they would’ve thought I was properly mad. Like, fully off my rocker. Because I am and I just forget that because you all are, too.
I know people with quite complex mental health issues that are well beyond my own experience so I’m sympathetic to the normals here. Describing the way you, y’know, spend a lot of time during your commute wishing you could cease to exist before getting to the office is, to someone without decades of increasingly normalised appalling mental health, as inexplicable as some of the things my dearly beloved friends experience that I can only accept and understand as things happening to them, without my own direct reference.
I can get that because I’ve experienced enough mental health problems to know that which doesn’t kill you does make you weirder and less relatable beyond an increasingly specific niche. It’s not per se ok but certainly not your fault you’re ill and that you shouldn’t have to feel like that, support should be available — and I hope you get it, if you’re struggling.
But you know that because you’re reading this and you’re probably as mad as me. You’re extremely aware of mental health because as soon as you don’t have a chunk of it, the difficulty mode on life suddenly turns way up and also every single day is a boss fight.
Everybody is potentially at risk of mental health issues. Even moreso than cancer, it strikes at any time and there are so many potential carcinogen-equivalents for enhancing that risk that you can’t presume you can guard against it any more than most physical injuries. Yes, you look after yourself and get appropriate exercise or whatever but that doesn’t mean a piano falling from a sixth-floor balcony is going to defy physics to avoid you.
Awareness weeks are slightly bullshit, a lot of the time. Do I need to be made more aware of cancer? Not really, it preys on my mind a lot, as someone who’s just dodged a second diagnosis. And Mental Health Awareness Week is one of the trickiest — because do I need to be made more aware of the shitty, tar-slick cesspool that is my garbage brain and its attempts to ruin everything I try to do? No, I do not. God, I wish it would give it a rest for ten fucking minutes.
But there are people out there who are totally unaware of their mental health. Same way you don’t really notice your cardiovascular system ticking along until something goes badly wrong with it — just breathing n shit, no big deal. Mental health as a body in which things can grow like a tumour or wither like frostbitten toes is utterly alien to a lot of people who haven’t felt it do that. Or they might not even realise something is wrong.
Mental health awareness has to start in two places: firstly, people who don’t even realise they have it and that if that ever changes, they need support and secondly, to be honest, the rest of us who’ve perfected the art of normalising being absolutely crazypants bananatown because it’s good for memes.
You deserve people trying to make an effort to understand you. You don’t reserve a right to do whatever the hell you want under the banner of mental illness but you do deserve empathy and acknowledgement of the illness you’re fighting and the limitations and complications that places on your ability to perform, societally. Your worth is not your output, your worth is not your relatability, your worth is much beyond what you can summon to think of yourself.
Which haha lol like I think any of that about me but that’s cus I’m piss-hooves-horse mad and have yet to find any effective way of dealing with it beyond semi-cathartic erotica writing and taking a minimum of 10 flights a month like I think I can somehow outrun the contents of my own skull if I just experience enough Airbus landings to make them come out of my nose.
So actually, perhaps, the title is a lie. Perhaps it would help my smartass ways to not just salaciously divulge the fact I can barely get through a week with only crying on the sofa and feeling incapable of anything like, five or six times.
Like someone who’s never experienced mental health problems, I’ve now fully normalised my own. And I know I have them — if I didn’t, I guess I’d just assume everyone sometimes feels the bleak grimness creeping over them.
Which is the perfect situation for not getting any help and pretending I can cope with it even though I manifestly can’t. Most people with mental illness minimise it — and think we ought to be able to cope, that it’s just some small thing, that if we just pulled ourselves together we’d somehow be healthy.
Which sounds a hell of a lot like the sort of unsympathetic crap we’d criticise anyone else for saying. But like, all my friends are kinda depressed and we’re all kinda struggling so really who am I to make a fuss about it oh wait this is exactly the literal problem that is killing people isn’t it.
Whether your mental illness is at the relatable points of the spectrum or not, if you’d go to the doctor if your leg suddenly fell off one morning then it’s probably worth giving it a go for that total inability to feel any form of joy or happiness that suddenly set in 20 years ago. If you’d want a friend to get help, maybe — even though your foul little brain will try to tell you otherwise because it is a tricksy liar — you deserve that help too before things get extremely bad. Even if they have got extremely bad.
Treatment is complicated and somewhat hit and miss. It’s staggeringly hard to get anywhere with it and even harder when your own brain is desperately trying to hold on to the illness that’s sitting there pretending to be part of it like some nightmare chimera virus.
But to steer this back because I don’t know what will happen if you — or I — reach out for help, let’s actually put the health awareness bit back into conversations about this. For instance:
Me: lol guys having a really bad week I stared at the wall for three hours panicking and feeling unwell about opening my text messsages
You, an empathetic person with a responsible attitude towards mental health: while faving this relatable content I will also remind you that that sounds like you might be a bit unwell and perhaps you should keep an eye on your symptoms or book an appointment with a health professional
I can’t guarantee it will work because I am a stubborn bastard with appalling coping methods and, I note, so is each and every one of you fuckers. And I don’t think we should stop writing about the bad brain times because although the relatable content isn’t healing anyone, it might actually be keeping some of us alive and that’s thousands of grades better than nothing and might be one of the first and only ways people get to reach out or understand their own mental health.
But, you know. We’re all an internet rando to someone.
