It's Mental Health Awareness Month
And it was Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK this month. Here's why I've not written about it (until now)
Before we get to the content: news! Remember that book I talked about? I’m self publishing the digital version over on leanpub, which means I can publish as I go. I’ve got 25% up and there’s a free sample ready for download! For my readers, if you’re interested, email me and I’ll send you the version that’s published for ✨free✨
Now on to your regularly scheduled programme:
I’m cynical about mental health awareness days/weeks/months. I’m not here to shit on people who find them useful, or a safer way to share their own story, but the commercialisation of it, and the way social media works means the ‘advice’ is washed down to the point of being repetitive and useless for teh most part. It’s the equivalent of changing your corporate logo to have a rainbow for Pride and post a ‘love is love’ image and doing literally nothing else.
Here’s a list of why I’ve stopped engaging with mental health awareness, other than to support people sharing their story:
The advice is shallow and assumes a baseline that’s the same for anyone AKA stop telling me to put my phone down, fucks sake
Here’s the thing. What’s self care for you won’t be self care for others. There is a very small list of things that are self care for everyone:
Take in nutrition and hydration
Sleep
Move your body in some way, preferably outside, even more preferably, somewhere with greenery
Everything else? Up for grabs. A big pattern I’m seeing is people advising taking phone breaks, and here’s the thing: my phone has saved my life more times than I care to think about.
The communities I’ve been a part of on livejournal, tumblr, twitter, slack, have all been lifelines when I’ve been struggling. Taking a break would be the opposite of self care. Now, have I made strides in using my phone in a way that’s more deliberate? Yes, absolutely. But taking a break? Nah, stop it.
Amateur interventions without support aka are you trained in mindfulness?
Now mindfulness in and of itself is fine - take a walk and pay attention to your surroundings, spend time doing gentle crafting. But when we start paying attention to breaths or body, then we need to be careful. There’s plenty of people who find mindfulness makes their stress worse, and this is being researched (though difficult as most of it requires self reporting).
The theory is that focusing on the moment, and your body and breath can amplify what’s going on there. As someone who is in some sort of pain basically every day, it has helped me get that kind awareness and lose some bitterness about being chronically ill. But I did mindfulness specifically for chronic pain, and I have had support through that.
Mindfulness can bring up some big feelings, especially if you tend to ruminate, and without management of re-grounding yourself, you may find yourself adrift in a big wash of feelings. I’m kindof thinking of it as a similar thing to sub-drop in kink circles. Without after care and support, you’ve gone through something intense and then expected to go back to ‘real life’, and this can be the same with mindfulness.
Everything is very neat aka what do I do if I can’t brush my teeth?
Laugh! Take time for yourself! Take a phone break!
All the graphics are pastel coloured, swirly writing, and gentle, rounded imagery. It’s clean, and neat. It’s not ‘hey, have some of those chewable toothbrushes you see in airport toilets in your bathroom, so when you can’t brush your teeth you can use those. It’s better than nothing.’ It’s not ‘here’s how to wash at the sink so you don’t have to shower’.
It assumes everyone’s relationship with mental health comes from the baseline of ‘healthy’ and you just need to top it up, and not ‘I’m exhausted just existing, how do I make myself suitable for public consumption?’.
Without support, this is a series of people keeping their head above water until they’re not
As I wrote in a previous newsletter, we can put a lot of pressure on joy and and similarly things like this, to make us feel better, and achieve mental wellness. How many times have I decided that I was going to get a Notebook and Be Organised and Exercise and Be Healthy and this will make me less anxious? So many times. Some of it helped! Some of it helped long term!
But all of this became a lot easier once I got help in the form of medication and therapy. I’m incredibly privileged to be able to afford these things, and the fact that that is a sentence I have to type is the problem. This shouldn’t be a privilege. It should exist. And this is my larger point. All of these tips - laugh! Spend time outside! Practice gratitude! - may work, but they may not be enough. Mental illnesses are often exacerbated by things entirely out of our control, and the line between ‘here’s some tipe for in-the-moment self care’ and ‘this is how you fix things and if they don’t work you’re doing them wrong’ is incredibly thin when you’re struggling.
I know that people who share these tips aren’t implying at all that if they don’t work it’s a failing (they probably even work for the people posting it) but when you’re struggling, you’re desperate to find things that work. When the same tips are shared over and over and they don’t help you, it’s not hard to see how the leap is made to ‘I’m doing this wrong’, ‘I’m broken’, and ‘I’ll never be able to cope’.
So I don’t really post things for mental health awareness weeks or months. Awareness isn’t enough any more.