A quiet stigma around mental health still exists and it’s time for us to collectively address it. By Clinical Psychologist Lynn Jenkins w/ editorial by Eliza LeMessurier.
The term ‘Mental Health’ gets thrown around much more commonly these days, from pop psych to the billion-dollar wellness market, the quest for a healthy mind has perhaps never been so profiled in the history of humans (!). However, while chat around mental health has become much more ‘normalised’ in the general media, a quiet stigma around the topic still exists and it’s time for us to collectively address it.
Mental health stigma is about perception.
Stigmas about mental health have to do with the ‘perception’ of the word ‘mental’ and the ‘perception’ of what a psychologist does. Ironic really, when shifting perspective is a big part of what we (psychologists) do! When it comes to the many ways, we humans suffer emotionally, it is the ‘meaning’ we put to these perceptions that cause us pain and suffering. For example, if the meaning we put to ‘mental health’ is on par with ‘looney’, ‘crazy’, or ‘unstable’, it totally makes sense why we think that seeking assistance for our ‘mental health’ is a type of pain and suffering. Part of de-stigmatising mental health in general is normalising the fact that humans suffer emotionally all the time. If we aren’t suffering emotionally, we aren’t human!
Kicking the stigma begins at childhood.
It is a normal human function to develop beliefs about aspects of life and of ourselves. We think or feel in certain ways and are driven by the effects of these beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. These individual notions are developed from childhood and are carried on into our later lives. As a Clinical Child Psychologist, I say a lot to parents, kids are great observers but terrible interpreters, meaning, that young children can hear and see but do not have the ability to make correct meaning and interpretation of what they hear and see.
So, if for example, a child is told that seeing a therapist means you’re ‘unstable’ or ‘weak’. Then that child cannot discern that information and believes it to be true purely because they have ‘observed’ this behaviour. It is often these inaccurate and self-negative beliefs that stick to us like Velcro and govern us from an early age into later life. THIS is mental health. The way our inaccurate beliefs and ways of thinking (plus the consequent feels they create) are causing the pain and suffering in our life.
Seeing a psychologist should be as normal as going to the gym.
The act of kicking the internal stigma can be hard to do and it takes practice. The ‘going to the gym, every week and exercising’ kind of practice. If we have an old stigma story that we’ve been telling ourselves, our minds will need to be exercised to readjust our ways of thinking and learn new ways of thinking. Expecting that we can just click our fingers and poof that perception of ‘seeing a therapist means I’m mentally unstable’ is gone, is kind of like expecting we can do a headstand after one trip back to the yoga studio. Our mental health needs exercising, time, support and nurturing.
Seeing a psychologist is an act of revealing parts of ourselves in a safe and supportive environment. When we face our own belief systems and ways of thinking, we can gain the skills to ensure that going forward, life can be lived with much less suffering. If this is the meaning of mental health, we can all support one another to embrace it, practice it and kick the stigma.