Mental Health

I know this kind of post has been done a thousand times, but please take the time to read it.

Mental Health is one of the biggest issues in the world today. Things such as depression and anxiety plague many people no matter how old they are.

Although steps have been taken to try and tackle this sensitive issue, I truly believe education is the way forward. Teaching people about the various forms of mental health problems and giving advice on how to help them means that awareness is raised and the stigma is removed.

Mental health is nothing to be ashamed of and more and more people are waking up to this fact. We need to help people who maybe aren’t feeling as happy as they could be. We need to help them more.

From my experience of people within my generation, young people appear to be a lot more aware of these problems. And yes, some people in older generations are equally as compassionate however to me, the amount of older people who don’t fully understand the stigma or impact of mental health on individuals concerns me.

This is NOT their fault, they grew up differently to us and some of the mental health issues that are such a big thing today probably weren’t as important in their time and there wasn’t proper medical terms for issues that we know today. However educating them can change that. If more older people knew and understood mental health issues properly, they would not be so oblivious to it.

I understand not all people in older generations are like this and I have a lot of respect for those who feel the same as I do, I just feel that maybe more could be done.

Likewise, young people could also be more educated. Although we know and understand many mental health problems, we may not always know how to help someone. We’re not sure how we can be there for them without them feeling worse and we worry about doing or saying the wrong thing.

From my own experience I sometimes worry about saying the wrong thing and I feel that sometimes I could do more. But I don’t always know how I could do more.

If more awareness is raised in schools, work places and in hospitals, this lack of knowledge towards mental health that exists in both generations would not exist. If more awareness is raised, maybe mental health would not be such a taboo topic.

We need to help people who are suffering to not suffer in silence and we need to do all we can to remove this stigma. It’s okay not to be okay and we need to make sure they know that. But we can’t do that without fully understanding their issues, processing it and knowing what to do to help.