The right to feel emotionally bad

I’ll start this writing by greeting every single reader as if I was talking in person with them. This week is the Mental Health Week and I could not let go of the opportunity to participate in it. Why? Because I am one of the many humans on this planet who has fallen into the darkness of a mental block but also one of those who has absolutely thrived. I want to show all of my support to anyone who is finding him or herself trapped in their fear and anxiety about what the future is holding for all of us out of this pandemic and even maybe other problems that we can simply not predict. I want to wish every person with unstable mental conditions all the best into their journey towards healthier minds.

Now, I’m going to use this support that I’m expressing to explain my general view when it comes to mental unbalances. Showing support to someone who is having a mental or emotional problem is not fundamentally different from showing support to a person who has a stomachache, the regular annual influenza, or someone who suffers from a more delicate physical disease. And I want to emphasize the “not fundamentally different” because we live in a world and in a society that has not come to completely accept the fact that a mental unbalance is a problem for which we have experts that can help us solve it. If we are home and we cannot eat well because our stomach is malfunctioning, we call our GP for help and treatment. If we have any severe disease, I can argue that a person would rather go to the doctor than staying home crying and suffering in silence. Even now, humanity is going through complete lockdown because of a virus that is killing people, and both, the sick people and the medical institutions are in full commitment to save everybody’s lives. Neither of the two is home looking through the window seeing life passing by. And why is that? because we don’t even question the fact that these physical diseases are something external to us, they are out of our control and scope and we trust the experts out there who know how to help us finding treatment for it. Unfortunately, this is not the case for mental health in general. We reached this level of acceptance for problems such as dementia or Alzheimer’s, but this is still not the case for fear, depression, and chronic anxiety. How do I know that? Because we are speaking up during the mental health week to support people who are suffering in silence in their homes.

As a pretty happy and stable lady, I hit a period in my life in which I could not hold in there anymore. I was hit by a torment of bad experiences at work, with my family, and with the society that surrounded me. I am originally from Colombia and I came to live in Belgium where I could simply not keep a mental balance with so many changes that caused me strong depression crises. This happened in October 2018 and today, May 2020 I can say that I have completely found my way and that I have recovered from my depression episodes in 70%. I still have a 30% to go, but this does not hold me back anymore in silence and despair, quite the opposite, I am more than motivated to go through that remaining 30%.

How did it all happen? Easy but definitely not easy at all: by accepting, digesting, fully interiorizing the fact that I was a person with a mental problem, and that I needed to look for help. Then a lot of things came, but fundamentally speaking, I remained in full silent suffering, months of crying, with darkness in my mind, even with several physical problems such as muscle tension, difficulty to sleep, to wake up, to get out of bed, until the day that I finally accepted the idea that I was sick and I needed a doctor’s help. And no, not easy. Fully digesting that idea is just hard and on our way to make this of general social awareness, we will need patience, a lot of patience but constant work.

A medical treatment together with a full set of strategies has been part of all my journey. Once I heard a sentence that kept being part of me which says that “if it wasn’t for all the risks that depression brings along, I would recommend everyone to get into depression once in their life”. All of this means that this is a fully worthwhile journey for us who have fallen into these unbalances. Nonetheless, this journey, in my most humble opinion, it’s a personal and unique journey in its deepest sense. That said, I will never see another person getting out of depression the way I did. But I do know that we all can and many many more of us will do.

I would like to invite everyone, stable and unstable people to bring a few general learnings from this. We have the right to have a mental unbalance as much as our right to have a stomachache or any type of physical issue. Accepting medical and emotional help is also a matter of trust. I personally and absolutely trust the medical institutions, but every one of us can question and think what the sources that they trust the most are.

I will say goodbye for today saying that just as with our rights, we are obliged to accept and get help on our mental issues as much as we are obliged to cure any other physical issue. It’s not a must and we all have different degrees of commitment, but it is worth to declare that the alternatives are countless, possibilities of many different kinds exist. It is our right to have access to them, and hopefully many more of us each time will acknowledge them and use them.

Stay safe and all the best wishes!