Thursday, October 31, 2013

Awareness on Mental Illness: Let’s Be Positive!


Prasanna Basnet
10/31/2013
I was overwhelmed by the responses that I received from my followers on “Let’s Talk about Stigma on Mental Illness.” I would like to thank you all for reading my post and encouraging me to write more on this topic.
I often encounter patients who have co-morbid conditions along with mental illness. Despite the fact that there are different types of mental illness, the first step is to tackle and accept you have a problem. Focus should be given on finding the reasons of a problem and what you can do to make this better from today onwards is important than neglecting the troubles that you have faced. Since I am doing my preceptorship in charitable clinic, most of the patient I see every day cannot afford healthcare, some of them are homeless, do not have insurance, job, and abused. It is obvious to have mental problem when they are living in insufficiency/failure and I do not feel that they are responsible for all bad things that happened to them because life is unpredictable and time is inescapable. Those people who scamper with the time, despite the circumstances learn to gain stability in their life. However, if they dangle from the track even at once it will take a while for them to pull alongside where they were left behind. Often I relate the life of a person with the Erickson theory of psychosocial development and I find it confides with the life of an individual in real. Each stage of life from birth to lifespan plays a critical role to make an individual satisfied and unsatisfied. According to Erickson, self identity is all teen want, young adult want intimate loving relationship, adult want a family, older adult need a sense of fulfillment when looking back on past life. Success in each stage gives a sense of worth on being wise, useful, and full, while failure leads to regret, loneliness, and despair. Mental illness is just an emotional state of mind if you deny catching up the day you missed and undervalue the need to recover, it will get worse every day and turn into a form of psychiatric disorder.
Each individual has a unique personality, style to analyze failure, and strategy to tackle the problems. For some person it takes a while to get over it, some needs counseling, some needs medication to numb their emotions and other heal on their own with time. Learn to give your own needs as a priority, show positive attitude towards others and abscond jealousy nature. Develop an effective strategy that has worked for you in the past and learn to live gracefully by bringing positivity that is hidden somewhere inside you. Psychiatric medications do not only numb your emotions, but also delay the normal healing process. Thinking too much about stressful situation and ignoring your feelings both are harmful, so you need to ventilate your emotions with the person whom you trust that will help you to heal sooner. If you try you will find a way, if you do not try you will never know if there was way to reach where you wanted to be. It is never too late to restart; you can make this day as day One and set a goal to make you happy and go for it. It might be hard to forget the past and scars that you got, but do not let that distraction to be a hindrance of your path to be a healthy person. I wish you good luck and a lot of positivity in your life.

You've done it before and you can do it now. See the positive possibilities. Redirect the substantial energy of your frustration and turn it into positive, effective, unstoppable determination. -Ralph Marston