The Mental Health Conversation We Never Imagined We Needed

For literally centuries, mental health has become a question of being exaggerative and that has undoubtedly caused a lot of damage - what with the gaslighting it will entail, the hurt that will be felt, and the invalidation of the very much valid wounds. This is the basis of the narrow outlook many have had when it comes to mental health.

Let's set our perspective straight once and for all. It isn't mental health that is important, per se, but understanding and deciphering what it could mean for each unique individual. Decoding it would entail a fascinating inference - each individual's mindset or, psychology, I daresay, which is vastly different. All of this being taken into account is what is so important but overlooked in the age of crippling social media addictions. How this empire of social media has annihilated our attempts at being sane, once and for all and almost obliterating almost all hope for restoring our mental health, is a topic for a separate blog post in and of itself.

May be making it normal to meaningfully discuss the understandably acute breakdowns all of us may or may not be having is vital for the healing of wounds that have long needed healing. That is the semantics of understanding and decoding mental health. It is to castigate the stigma that surrounds it.

Now I know, if you're my age, you probably already know why mental health is so important. But ask yourself that one more time. Do you signify mental health because some random post on Instagram told you to? Or do you have an organic inclination to understand it? We need to establish this first. 

Whenever we feel a sense of trauma, our body responds to it in two broad ways - implicit and explicit appropriation.

Imagine the following scene,

A: Hey, are you feeling okay today? You seemed a bit under the weather earlier.

B: Can you please back off? Stop being nosy!

Now let's track and analyze what A could be feeling. First, why is A extending their concern to B? Let's assume A wants to be a good person and is simply looking out for fellow classmates. Instead of opening up, or simply giving a casual, glib reply, B takes it out on A, inevitably hurting A's feelings. That is what I call an outward effect or explicit appropriation, that any statement may cause to somebody. 

The counter effect that explicit appropriation will bring about, is what I term implicit, or a silent appropriation. When somebody is extending the courtesy of checking in on, say, a classmate, what they got in return was an insult. How A took that insult, or in general, the reply, is what implicit appropriation is all about. Like rust, it can easily build up, but not impossible to get rid of. 

So what was A's explicit and implicit appropriation?

Explicit appropriation: He (assume it's a guy) was hurt, perhaps upset over the incident for the entire day. He ran the incident over and over in his head, feeling mounting mortification each time. 

Implicit appropriation: He will be afraid to ask someone if they are feeling okay.  He will ignore his friend's red flags because "they're probably doing fine". . He will become distant about his feelings because thinking emotionally is what got him in this position. He will eventually become numb to a certain kind of feeling. This has overall, resulted in gaslighting (when people are manipulated to rethink and doubt the weight and reality of their own emotions. This is a form of abuse.). 

This is one of the most overlooked analogies of why people are generally unhappy. A series of implicit appropriations, without awareness about how they are affecting you, can result in ruinous consequences. The very design of our mindset depends on implicit appropriation, right from your childhood to present-day you. So a hurtful remark, will in many ways affect your overall personality because your mindset is appropriated to operate a certain way - you may face trust issues, become reclusive or cynical.

Bad moments however are crucial for growth. But a more robust and harmless way to prompt character growth is to use wise words of sensitivity and support rather than create scope for scars that will teach you no more than calm and composed advice. It is better to grow by way of mature and sagacious advice, than traumatic instances in life that nearly drowned us. Some pain in life is, however, inevitable

No generation before ours has had a more reachable control over the reams of information on mental health and about its awareness that exists all over the internet. This is also why, we as a collective race, have never been more informed about it and the word is only spreading faster with each passing day. So for every generation before ours, due to lack of awareness and accessibility, trauma was so prevalent, be it in the form of cripplingly low self-esteem or rampant anxiety, it was literally being passed down from generation to generation.

Ask your parents if they know what 'gaslighting' or 'imposter syndrome' means. Ask them to list 3 symptoms of anxiety. In most cases, they'd never know, then how can they ever hope to help out when they see their anxious daughter or a son who is socially awkward. 

Rather than educating ourselves on mental health, we have come to shaming and ridiculing mental illnesses and people who have it. This is no different from oppressing people at their most vulnerable. It is merely yet another form of hurting people so badly, they'll simply never open up again because they can never digest the mistreatment that they assume will follow it. 

Once these factors brew together long enough, what you have is an individual who has no value for their own emotions or opinions and has extremely low self-esteem as a result of being routinely undermined in the most fundamental sense. They find it normal to doubt their abilities, and have little to no self-confidence, thereby unleashing the evil of imposter syndrome. If you find these name droppings of mental illnesses dramatic, then you, my friend are part of the problem. 

Always remember, if someone has been scarred or traumatized, they are likely to pass it down to someone else no matter how hard they try to contain it within themselves. So, try and spread awareness on mental health. Share this with your family and spread the word. Maybe you can break the chain of trauma someone out there is fated for by the awareness you have spread.