Facets of Human Wholeness - Mental Health

Never lose infinite hope

*Before we begin, I want to note that I am not a mental health professional, so while this post represents some of my knowledge and research, you shouldn’t treat this as professional advice about your situation.*

Mental health has been a buzz word for a while. In 2010, Bell Canada created its mental health campaign that has since raised over $120 million, while at the same time drawing criticism for corporatizing mental health and also inconsistency, for example, in how high Bell and the government set prices for inmates to call out and connect with their community.

So what is mental health and how does it differ from intellectual health and other similar terms? There is some overlap, mainly because a lot of these terms are general and not technical. However, I’m going to focus this post on cognitive, psychological, and brain health, as opposed to intelligence and learning or emotional wellbeing.

Cognitive health deals with our brain functions, including memory, attention, processing speed, executive functioning, visual-spatial skills, auditory processing, social cognition, and language. Cognition can be impacted by genetics (abilities or impairments), lifestyle (diet, exercise, sleep, and social engagement), environmental factors (toxins, head injuries), medical conditions or psychological conditions - whether temporary or permanent (chronic inflammation or depression), and aging. Poor cognitive health can make it difficult to deal with other challenges to our mental health, and mental health conditions can have an effect on cognition.

Brain health involves cognitive health, and can include things like tactile function, sensory function, motor function and emotional function. It can also examine neural connections, brain structure and processing, and neuroplasticity.

Psychological health is a branch of science that examines the mind, mental processes, behaviours, and what influences them. It tries to understand, predict, and modify actions. It may focus more on interventions like cognitive-behavioural therapy, humanistic therapies, psychoanalysis, and research, but treatments like medication, lifestyle changes, increasing support, and other forms of counselling can also be valuable.

Beyond these things, mental health also addresses identity, personality, perception, and resilience. As you can see, it’s connected to and overlaps with many other aspects of our health.

While healthy minds have been part of diverse cultural traditions, many Euro-western approaches have tended to view the mind as academic capacity without necessarily understanding mind-body connections or by spiritualizing many of the psychological conditions we know more about now. These approaches have typically privileged the medical model of understanding illness, emphasizing solutions like surgery or medication. Currently, the social model is gaining favour, attempting to look at broader health, social, political, economic, and legal systems at play in individual health like chronic poverty and homelessness and the responsibility that governments or other agencies also bear in improving societal health.

What good mental health looks like will in some ways be unique to you and your circumstances. We can sometimes have a sense that we’ve either achieved mental health or not, but a more nuanced perspective might recognize health as less linear or static and acknowledge that we all have and respond to different bodies, environments, families of origin, and support networks. Good mental health might mean treating a condition you have had since childhood. It could mean pursuing recovery from a serious head injury. It could look like managing heavy metal poisoning. It might involve short- or long-term leave from a job that has caused you physical, mental, or vicarious trauma and taking prescribed medication. It could look like getting therapy to address childhood abuse or a horrific attack. It may mean relying on your family as you age and monitoring and addressing things like memory loss or confusion. It could mean fighting daily for sobriety. No matter what you have been through and where your journey has taken you, you can take steps towards better mental health, and your story is worth writing, living and sharing.

Alignment to Values

You might think we all agree mental health is a good thing and we should do what we can to support it. And while that is generally true, many of us have differing opinions of what mental health looks like in practice, how we can address our own mental health, how our behaviour impacts other people’s mental health, what treatments are effective and how we can access them, and how we can advocate for better societal conditions that uplift the health of others at large.

Sometimes we might think that if we just don’t talk about our problems, they go away. While there is science to support that consistently dwelling on the negative or positive can impact your mindset over time, it’s also true that ignoring or not talking about issues doesn’t resolve them any more than cancer goes away on its own. Sometimes we wish mental health was something we all dealt with privately. However, just like physical conditions, mental health issues can range in intensity and complexity, so it’s helpful to navigate them with compassionate and competent professionals and to be honest about their nature and extent with your support network. Sometimes we fail to consider our responsibility for the impact of our behaviour on others, particularly those younger or more vulnerable than us. This may be because of our own difficult upbringing, unaddressed personal challenges, a false belief that others are resilient, a lack of awareness of our true impact on others generally, self-centredness, or something else. We need to grow more aware of and sensitive to the effect we have on others and take accountability for how we treat people.

Diagnosis and treatment can be very controversial aspects of mental health. While diagnosis is often a key to getting support or effective intervention and it can be challenging to access, it is also true that diagnoses can come with stigma, long waitlists, streaming into less stimulating or resourced school environments, and they can also be incorrect due to incompetence, the politics of a particular diagnosis, or a change in our understanding of a condition over time. Because of a lot of mistakes we’ve made and misunderstandings both in relation to physical and mental health, but also in relation to oppressive practices against women or other marginalized groups, many people are hesitant to accept diagnoses and treatment out of suspicion. I have interacted with people who have had a child impacted by a medication that should never have been approved to take when pregnant, women being told they have a mental illness when they are experiencing severe physical pain or being dismissed when they know something is wrong, BIPOC individuals who have experienced racist or insufficient treatment when attending emergency, and others who experienced having a surgery on the wrong body part, or incorrect assessment or diagnosis, etc.

In the last post, we discussed epistemic rationality, the idea of applying what we know to our lives. We should make very sure that we understand research processes, medication components, health systems, and medical consensus about issues before we make up our minds and spread information that may be inaccurate. We should also be very careful about the sources we use, even when they are professionals, as individuals can mislead others for their own gain (for example, the Motherisk Independent Review, the Goudge Inquiry, the Purdue Pharma opioid crisis, or the Macchiarini scandal at Karolinska Institutet). Health systems can also be impacted by corruption, flawed paradigms, regulatory failures, and bias. But our approach should be one based on the best information and understanding we can gather instead of suspicion and guesses.

I attended a gathering where an Elder asked how we typically speak about mental health. When you consider English, words and expressions like crazy, insane, dumb, slow, on drugs, homeless, suicidal, or even slurs like r*tard are ubiquitous in our everyday language, and deeply connected with concepts of stupidity or badness, as well as practices of ignoring, avoiding, impoverishing, fearing, labelling violent, or committing violence against (especially state violence). Becoming serious about improving our mental health and supporting others in that endeavour must begin with changing how we speak about it, because how we speak about it impacts what we think about it and the stigma around it.

Further, we need to draw a line between the personal and the systemic. Sometimes we allow inconsistency between how we believe people should be treated and the power structures we support and how they treat people. We should become more aware of how our past and current systems have harmed and continue to harm individuals and communities. This can range widely, and includes things like environmental racism and dumping toxic materials near Indigenous communities, putting fewer public parks in Black neighbourhoods, consistent incidents of racial profiling, assumptions made about addictions or who has them, or spiritual practices of assuming mental illness or disabilities are signs of immoral behaviour, God’s displeasure, or demonic possession.

Finally, we should cultivate openness, honesty, and discernment in addressing mental health challenges in ourselves and in others. We can tend to react with discomfort, ignorance, fear, anger, or defensiveness instead of care, compassion, or connection. But we also need to recognize our own limitations, respect our own and others’ boundaries, and ensure people receive professional support when that is what’s necessary.

What Practices Build Mental Health

We may think that good mental health is just about therapy or treating an illness, but mental health relies on the basic practices of physical health too. So to start, nurture your mental health with good sleep, physical activity, nutrition, time in nature, and sunlight. Not all of these things are achievable for everyone, so focus on what you can do and keep doing it consistently. See if you can structure your relationships around some of these goals to make it easier.

Social connections themselves are also important for mental health, as well as taking breaks, managing your stress, and stimulating activities like reading or puzzles or new things. Keeping a positive affect and outlook and doing things that put you into a positive mood can be helpful to your mental health. Consider maintaining a gratitude journal and practicing meditation or mindfulness as well. Bring more intention to what you do in a day. Some of these may seem difficult at first or at times, but remember that we can’t control the world, but we can do our best to stay positive and work on changing our perspective over time. We may also connect with people or practices in a spiritual context toward more inner peace.

A further note on stress - it can be really useful to map out the areas of stress in your life and think carefully about how to eliminate, reduce, mitigate, or better cope with specific stressors. Activities like doom scrolling or exposure to violent scenes or images can impact us negatively even when we know they’re not real or it didn’t happen to us. While we need our anger to activate us toward social change, we also need times of rest.

On the environmental side, first, protect your head. This means wearing a helmet, mitigating the risk of falls, safe driving, and noting other ways in which people can experience brain injuries like standing up and hitting the back of your head on the freezer door. If you play sports, find a league or team where people respect physical safety. Never play through a suspected concussion, seek treatment, and specifically ask your medical professional about the signs and appropriate responses as they can present differently. Head safety also means addressing physical violence in relationships. Women especially are more likely to suffer injuries and more severe injuries from intimate partner violence, which contributes to short- and long-term disabilities. This means direct violence but also throwing objects that could hit your head. No one should ever have to tolerate that kind of behaviour.

Second, avoid toxins that can compromise your physical and mental health. You can find resources online about air quality, identifying and addressing mould, ensuring soil is safe before consuming what’s growing, etc. Again, these won’t always be possible because accidents happen and we can’t always know everything about our environments.

Maybe most importantly, acknowledge your own humanity when it comes to mental health. In the same way that at some point in your life, you will experience an injury or a medical condition, you will likely experience mental health challenges at some point too. The more you are aware of your own abilities, circumstances, baseline, and your reactions, is the more equipped you will be to prevent and quickly address anything that comes up. This is especially true as we age. Do your research, stay informed, have discussions with your family, monitor yourself especially as you age and check in with professionals about your health, including physical conditions like chronic inflammation that could impact your mental health over time. Work towards identifying and treating any issues or suspected issues that come up for you. If you’ve experienced trauma in your life, particularly significant or long-term trauma, consider reading The Body Keeps the Score, which suggests exploring multiple types of practices and therapies in addition to talk therapy that help us process and integrate our experiences both mentally and physically such as expressive therapies (writing, art, music, dance, or other), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), yoga and treatments involving physical touch (e.g. massage), internal family systems (IFS) therapy, PBSP (Pesso Boyden System) psychomotor therapy, neurofeedback, theatre, and community involvement. Another very useful resource is Beauty After Bruises which is dedicated to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), but has a lot of content that is useful for anyone dealing with trauma. Find blog posts on grounding, distraction, sleep hygiene (nighttime 101 and 201), flashbacks, and imagery techniques like colour breathing, modulation, healing pool and light, etc. Additional resources to explore are Mad Maps (various workbooks to explore struggles and strategies), Fireweed Collective has one here, or this page on Toolkits for Navigating Mental Health Crisis and a pamphlet on creating an advance directive to help your support network take care of you when you are unable to communicate your needs or wishes.

And finally, consider the attitude and stereotypes you hold towards mental health. Reducing stigma and including people with disabilities starts with self-examination and humility and these should drive us to find ways to connect and learn more, as well as support and uplift each other, both in our personal relationships and in our communal and political ones.