My experience with Mental Health Care is varied, from a visit to a mental health hospital, to business oriented counseling sessions and testing that encouraged teams and good communication, to being there to help my brother who is mentally ill. I had high school chemistry and biology and college psychology courses that really helped when I went to research my brother’s illness when I wrote a family memoir because it made the scientific explanations more readily converted into general understanding. I am not an expert in the Mental Health arena, not trained as a doctor or counselor, but I am a computer scientist with a background in data collection and analysis and training in business process improvement. This means I know how to put expert information together to tell a story and it helps as a trained novelist, poet, and essayist.
Mental health issues are also not discussed because of the sensitivity involved with the patient and their right to privacy. Mental handicaps are deemed untreatable, irredeemable by some, and untrustworthy. Psychiatric history has leant a scary aspect. Discussing mental health issues helps cast light on the subject making it less scary, more like being physically handicapped and modern medicine and science has pushed many innovative treatments and improved the lives of many. Some mental health issues resolve after counseling, medical treatment, or once a major source of conflict has resolved.
I realized after writing my family memoir that over the past sixty years of my life I had experienced many life changes that induced stress, experiences that can cause people to have mental health problems and to need a mental health professional. Some of those experiences include:
1. My husband’s divorce from his previous wife
2. Weight loss problems within my family
3. Violence
4. Sexual assault and discrimination
5. Racial discrimination
6. Education choices
7. Job change
8. Job stress due to layoffs
9. Threats
10. Bullying
11. Harassment
12. Step-parent issues
13. Parenting issues
14. Adoption and foster care issues
15. Hormone troubles
16. Loss of my ability to have children
17. Addiction in family members and friends and coworkers
18. Friends with cancer or other illness
19. Friends with grief issues
20. Speech difficulties
21. Reading disabilities
22. Job performance issues with peers
23. Murder
24. Arson
25. Dementia
26. At-risk students
There are other issues. Everyone encounters situations, feelings, adversarial relationships, conflict that they may not know the answer to how to solve or where to go to seek help. Asking for help from friends or family can impose a burden they are unwilling to accept. Asking for help from others may feel like you are inadequate or causing trouble. Asking for help can feel impossible.
If we all had a mental health professional like we all have general medical practice doctors, the first issue of where to go and who to ask would be resolved. For many of us, the variation in mental health care professionals can seem as intimidating as finding a physical health care professional. Once provided, life gets easier.
Doesn’t the idea of a mentor, coach or guide sound good when faced with reams of science, technology, theories, studies?