Mental Health Made Simple

Twin Rivers Rehab

Mental Health Made Simple

What is Mental Health?

Mental health is a blanket term that refers to our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. Mental health also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make day to day choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood, adolescence right through adulthood into old age. Anyone can experience times when their mental health deteriorates either due to inherited tendency to mental health and/or external circumstances. With enough stress anyone can develop mental illness.

Poor Mental Health May Impact the Following:

• Maintenance of personal or family relationships
• How you function in social settings
• Work/School performance
• Ability to learn/absorb new information
• Your ability to manage your own emotions
• Your self-esteem & self-image
• Your ability to understand yourself and your behaviour, to reflect and respond rationally

What Mental Health or Mental Illness Isn’t!

All too often mental illness is misunderstood, feared, and perceived as a weakness which is often projected onto others and often an indication of our own denial and personal struggles with mental health concepts.

Five Warning Signs of Mental Illness

• Long-lasting sadness or irritability.
• Extremely high and low moods.
• Excessive fear, worry, or anxiety.
• Social withdrawal.
• Dramatic changes in eating or sleeping habits.

Mental Illness-The wider view

Sometimes mental illness is obvious, such as when a person develops psychotic symptoms or is severely depressed. At times mental illness is less obvious and its not always clear when poor mental health becomes a mental illness!

Unlike cancer and heart disease for example, mental illness has no objective measures—no biological markers that we can see on imaging scans or determine through laboratory tests—to tell us who is affected and who is not.

Some of the Main Groups of Mental Health Disorders:

• Mood disorders (eg depression, bi-polar disorder, substance induced mood disorder)
• Anxiety disorders (eg social anxiety, generalised anxiety)
• Personality disorders (eg antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, dependent etc)
• Psychotic disorders (eg schizophrenia, substance induced psychosis)
• Eating disorders (eg bulimia, anorexia, binge eating disorder)
• Trauma-related disorders (eg post-traumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder)
• Substance abuse disorders (eg alcoholism and drug addiction)

Did You Know That the Following Also Negatively Impacts Mental Health?

What’s Good Mental Health?

It is not easy determine what is ‘good mental health’. Even if a person believes they are not or no longer impacted by the list above, who is to say that their mental health is good? I would suggest that good and poor mental health fluctuates as we experience and address life and life events. All too often we meet challenging life events such as the death of a loved one but do not realise how this is impacting our mental health. What does contribute towards improved mental health is recognition of your individuality, self-acceptance, being willing and able to regularly review our principles, values, beliefs and behaviour, embracing the difference between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’, taking responsibility for our physical, mental, spiritual and emotional wellbeing and being prepared to seek help and accept help in order to grow.