Talk To A Professional About Getting Help

There’s a lovely cartoon drawing about therapy, where the patient or client has a speech bubble above their head containing a knotted tangle of multicolored wool. The threads of wool travel across the room to the therapist in another chair, and in her own speech bubble, the threads have all been separated out clearly into balls of different colors. But even that description doesn’t quite explain it. They don’t tell you what they think, or what you should think. Instead, they very gently help you work it all out for yourself. But the sad reality is that the people who are able to access therapy are the lucky ones. Many people with mental disorders try to talk to a professional about getting help only to discover that help is not available. It is a tragedy and a mess that talk therapy and specialist services are not sufficiently well funded and that people in need cannot get the right help quickly. Every time we have a mental health awareness week my spirits sink. We don’t need people to be more aware. These campaigns are asking people to reach out for help, it’s okay to feel this way, it’s okay, like there’ll be help there if you reach out. And so I actually think it’s dangerous that we’re telling people that and it’s not the case.

Thinking About Things

The drive to get more people to go to their doctor has undoubtedly been helpful in many cases. When people who are struggling can access treatment, it means less suffering and more saved lives. But when we tell everyone in distress to get help but do not match that with appropriate funding, we create two problems. One is that people who need medical help and are persuaded to seek it face the blow of finding it unavailable to them, potentially compounding their sense of isolation and hopelessness. The other is that, combined with the widespread misapprehension of what mental illness actually is, we drive people to seek medical help who may not actually need it, depleting scarce resources. The potential impact of this on the availability of treatment is truly scary, and utterly ironic, since the idea of these destigmatizing campaigns was of course to get help to the people who needed it. The obvious problem here is lack of resources. There is a serious underfunding problem, and more money is needed. But another remedy, alongside properly funding mental health services, is to promote the message that, for milder or more transient levels of distress, there are many things that people can do themselves to manage how they’re feeling. Most of the talks were by academics or university administration staff, but one talk was by James Murray, father of Ben, a student who had taken his own life at the university the year before. James described how they had gone for lunch together on the day Ben died, and Ben had given no indication to his dad that anything was wrong. The talk was devastating and powerful.

All The Things You Are

And I really remember, in particular, one thing that he said. He implored university staff, especially personal tutors, to ask how their students were, and to not just do it once. But it’s such an important message for everyone. We all have a role to play when it comes to supporting those with mental health problems. Even if you never experience mental illness personally, throughout your life you will come across many people who do, and there’s a lot you can do to help. It’s hard to just come out and say you’re suffering. I feel so low and hopeless. I think the neighbors are tracking our conversation. I’m making myself sick after I eat. So one simple thing we can all do is make it easier for the people around us to talk about how they’re feeling. Ask them how they really are. But we then need to know how to respond, and not enough of us do.

Failure Is A Bend In The Road

Opening up isn’t much help to anyone if it’s met with a blank and awkward stare. In fact, seeking emotional support from someone who responds badly like this can easily make a person feel worse. Active listening is important, and often explicitly taught, in many professions. In psychotherapy, of course, but also in education, medicine, and social work. Verbal components include paraphrasing what the speaker has said and reflecting back their thoughts and feelings. What the participants didn’t know was that some of the partners had in fact been trained in active listening by the researchers. At the end of the five minutes, the undergraduates who had been paired with the active listeners were more likely to report that their partners had high levels of emotional awareness, and more likely to say that the conversation improved their mood. Another important and worthwhile thing we can do is to become familiar with how to talk to someone about suicide. When someone is depressed, people are often afraid to bring up the topic of suicide, for fear that doing so will put the idea into the person’s head or make them feel worse, but research has shown this isn’t the case. In one study from 2005, for example, high school students in New York State were asked to complete a questionnaire. Half of the questionnaires included questions about whether the respondent had experienced any suicidal thoughts, and half of them didn’t. Two days later, they all answered another questionnaire about depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts, and there was no difference between the two groups in terms of the number of these symptoms reported. If the person says yes, they suggest the active listening techniques mentioned above. Also. I recommend doing what you can to keep the person safe. If you are together in person, or staying on the phone call them back. Alternatively, if they’re not at immediate risk, the advice is to talk together, if you feel able, to work out who else they can involve and what else you can do.