If someone asked you to define what mental health is what would you say? If you google the definition of ‘mental health’ the first thing that pops up is: “a person’s condition with regard to their psychological and emotional well-being”
I’m willing to bet that most people view mental health in the same light. The trouble with defining mental health as a psychological and emotional condition is that it limits prescribed treatment to the mind and brain. This may temporarily alleviate some symptoms (such as stress and anxiety) but more often than not this approach doesn’t tackle the cause. This often results in the symptoms re-emerging over time.
Mental health is not an isolated condition limited to the mind and the brain. It is a condition that is symbiotic with physical and spiritual health which means you can’t simply treat mental health by treating the mind alone. You need to look at your mental health holistically with every other part of you. After all our mind, body and soul affect each other and we are also greater than the sum of our parts. This means that true healing happens when we see ourselves in our entirety rather than as fragmented parts that are separate and are treated separately.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that you’re suffering from chronic depression and life generally sucks right now. Negative thoughts keep popping up in your mind, every morning when you wake up you don’t want to get out of bed, every night when you go to sleep you hope you don’t wake up, you’re easily triggered to anger and living is exhausting. You know something is wrong but you don’t know what.
Then one day you go to the doctor to seek help with your depression. Naturally they refer you to a mental health therapist because the doctor determines through a checklist that you’re condition is in the realm of mental health.
Now you’re at your first session with the therapist. They ask how you are and what’s going on. Obviously, you’re not doing well and you explain to the therapist that you’re always angry, have trouble sleeping and that life really sucks. This is normally the part where the therapist will use a pre-determined checklist to characterise your problems and provide treatments to tackle the symptoms. If you’re chronically depressed, the therapist may use Cognitive Brain Therapy (CBT) to help recognise the thoughts and behaviors that are causing you the feel the way you do. They may incorporate this with some mindfulness based cognitive therapy to help you maintain focus on the present moment. In extreme cases you may even be prescribed medication.
You will often hear that these types of techniques and therapies see great results in helping people with mental health. What you never hear about is the re-emergence of issues like depression over time because the underlying cause still exists.
Let’s explore this.
Let’s now say that you have seen the therapist over multiple session who see some great results from you. The therapist thinks you’re now able to carry on and you no longer need to see them. Maybe you’re now exercising a bit more during the week, taking a breath and slowing down when negative come in to your mind and so on. You do everything that came out of therapy and you feel much better and more in control of your life.
Now it’s 6 months have passed and once again start falling back in to depression, abnormal sleeping patterns and again life sucks.
Why are the strategies that worked so well for you no longer working?
Now let’s explore some reasons why you’re falling back in to the chronic depression you hoped would leave you forever.
First of all, keeping a track of and trying to change negative thoughts is incredibly exhausting. Every time you think a thought your brains uses energy and gets tired. The mitochondria (energy centers) in your brain cells need to recharge. If you’re constantly trying to practice mindfulness and CBT exercises for example you will get mentally and emotionally burnt out over time, start getting lazy and fall back into your state of depression.
You may also have an intolerance to some foods or are consuming a lot of sugar which causes inflammation throughout your body and especially your gut. What a lot of mental health therapists aren’t aware of is that the gut also has a neuronal network (a brain) that is connected to the brain in your head through the gut/brain axis. We now know there is link between gut health and mental health. If you have poor gut health this can be a cause of your depression because your body out of whack with imbalanced hormones among other imbalances which affects your brain and your mind. You may also have an undiagnosed allergy to a certain food that is causing gut inflammation. Your food you eat might be the cause of your depression.
Now let’s have a look at one of the most important and unrecognised contributors to chronic depression and poor mental health in general. This is what I can ‘Life Purpose’. If you look at yourself in your entirety and with an honest and open mind you will sense that you are born for a reason. You have a purpose in this life. Unfortunately, our educational and social systems rarely give people the opportunity to explore they’re actual life’s purpose. When you look at the spiritual part of you that is connected to Universal consciousness (what some people call God or Allah or Source depending on denomination) you begin to have an innate intuitive sense that you are born for a reason. Your life has a mission or a purpose that you agreed to fulfil before you were born. When you begin to align your life with your life’s mission you will still go through pain but you will no longer be suffering. The difference between pain and suffering is that pain still hurts but you can bear it. In fact, you may even welcome it because you know that it is aligned with your life’s mission. You recognise that it is only temporary and is put before you as an opportunity to grow. Suffering on the other hand comes from a place of ignorance. Something is happening to you and you don’t know why it is happening. You try to paint over the suffering with mindfulness as this doesn’t work long term and leads to more suffering. Find your life’s true purpose and acting on it the greatest thing you can do for yourself.
Mental health can no longer be viewed as a condition of the mind. It must be viewed holistically as the totality of who you are. You are a complete being of which the mind is only one part.
A good therapist will work with you on every level to get to the cause of your mental health issues.