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Thread: This article is good overall on the ways we unconsciously keep ourselves from managing our emotional lives, and with it, our overall mental health and wellness. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-f…
That said, I have some things to say about the pathway to mental and emotional health and wellbeing write large, and how we as a society, not just as individuals, place roadblocks in the way
Articles like the one I cited are great. At the same time, we can't "read" our way to emotional health. We can't study to get there, or at least, concepts/ideas/insights/study are not enough. Early in my clinical training I learned how "insight is not curative," and it's true.
"Insight" into ourselves is not enough. After all, taking an example of myself as a young man, I intellectually knew it was fine for people to be attracted to and have relationships with the same sex, but. . .
on a deeper, emotional level, I did not, because I cold not accept myself as gay. Shame, social conditioning, early childhood soclial and cognitive development, all got in my way for myself. My point is this is not unique to me or to LGBT. Many have moments of great awareness
But that awareness cannot break us from our cycles of emotional short circuiting that leads to suffering, and emotional self- regulation behaviors that can do us harm, or even harm others. These things certainly impact relationships, which influence highly our wellbeing
The missing factor is connection through human interaction that allows us, through our own vulnerability on the one hand and acceptance/understanding/support from another person on the other, to begin to rewire our complex cognitive and emotional systems that drive to behavior
Therapy is often intended to fill that gap but there are a couple of problems with how we think of and deliver therapy in the US. But let's leave that aside for just a moment, because good friends/family/non professionals can provide us with these growth enhancing experiences.
People we know, who have wisdom and empathy and who can act, at least in moments, as caregiving receptacles for our pain/fear/etc., and help us connect insight with some catharsis, can allow us to experiment with being and becoming different. Positive relationships -> health
Finding people like that can be hard, though. And even when we find them, the depth many people's challenges are too much for a friend like that to take on. Plus, sometimes the very things that we do with our pain make it hard to establish connections with such people
So that brings us to therapy, which not many people have much access to because of all the problems with health care in the US, and also because there is still stigma in accessing it. How do you tell your boss you need to attend a weekly shrink session on a weekday?
After all, other medical appointments are easier to talk about if you choose to do so, and are more often one time events. Plus some law protects people from discrimination based on illness or disability, but not so much for mental health. So, access is a big problem.
On top of that, the way mental health is modeled in the US is. . . problematic. The DSM approach seeks to categorize mental "illness" according to the medical disease model. This was originally done in psychiatry to develop the profession in the US under an accepted framework
It appealed to the American positivist approach to measurement, in reaction to all that fuzzy European (often Jewish?) psychology that got very meta-theoretical and frequently, just, weird.
So that allowed American psychiatry to get academic positions and do research using the disease model, and eventually get insurance reimbursement. A lot of this came from fed funding to help WWII vets coming home and suffering from "battle fatigue."
The medical model has some merit and utility as a heuristic, especially in the treatment and understanding of some more serious and persistent conditions affecting reality perception, or more persistent mood or anxiety disorders. These can and do benefit from drug treatments
At the same time, the medicalization of mental health and wellness has combined with capitalism and big pharma to turn a lot of therapy into drug delivery and sales. The goal becomes the mitigation or alleviation of "symptoms," and then go away.
None of that gets to helping people find & define for themselves "what is a good life, and how can I live it?" That's not a disease model issue, but that is the core of mental health and wellness - not merely the mitigation of symptoms or (the worthy!) alleviation of suffering
So all of that is to argue that our mindset about developing and promoting mental health needs an overhaul, not just in access and delivery, as in #M4A, but in how we define mental health, how we promote it, how we systematically encourage it and destigmatize seeking it out
For the practical advice portion of the loooooong thread, I'd say do whatever you can to seek out and promote positive relationships, especially by trying to model the kind of behavior with others that you would like to experience. Cut off toxic relationships.
Don't think you can stay in your own head alone to fix your head - you have to let one or more of the right people in there with you. And by way of daily "brushing and flossing," as corny as it sounds, try keeping a gratitude journal daily for 90 days. huffpost.com/entry/gratitud…
That's all folks. That took longer than I expected. Sorry. Hope anyone out there may find it useful.
I'll tack onto this, for the few people who get this far down the thread, you can use this thread to ask me anything AMA
