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What is mental health?
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Mental health, as opposed to physical health, involves how we respond to the stimuli that life throws at us. How we think. How we act. How we react. How we respond. How we cope. A person with good mental health can react or respond in a healthy manner and move forward without the event affecting all aspects of his/her life.
It is very normal to worry or to stress over circumstances such as money or finances, job stressors, school, or life events such as relationships, marriages, divorce, deaths and births. Feelings of sadness and anxiety are also very normal unless they linger and affect daily living. All of these feelings help us to make decisions and to move forward, but those who have a mental illness are hampered by these feelings and they are unable to move beyond the moment for a much longer time. They can be seemingly paralyzed by stress, grief, fear, phobia, anxiety, sadness or depression.
Mental illnesses are biologically based conditions which affect mental health; most often how to cope and deal with situations. Often the normal feelings such as sadness or anxiety become exaggerated into depression or extreme anxiety or phobia and the focus changes from the stimulus to the fact that person cannot seem to escape the feelings of doom or stress that the situation has caused. With medications and therapies, the mental illness can be controlled and the person affected can learn to cope with the stimuli and achieve recovery. But he or she cannot “just snap out of it.” Mental illness is not a behavior issue.
Like a diabetic who has consumed too much sugar, it takes medication, exercise, and diet to overcome the symptoms and the body’s reaction to the hyperglycemia. A mental illness works in the same way, it takes medication, and many times a combination of therapies to achieve recovery and control the mental disorder.
Photo: worried man by Ramzi Hashimoto/sxc.hu
