every person on this planet has problems. issues of their own that they wish werent existent in their lives. some have bigger problems than others, but we shouldnt be allowed to dismiss other peoples problems just because they dont seem “big enough”. big or small, problems are problems, and my question is; why do we have to feel guilty about feeling emotion over issues that seem irrelevant.
we should be allowed to feel however we want to feel. a major problem to someone, might be considered a minor one to another. but we shouldnt be allowed to judge people based on that. emotions are something i dont think we can control, so why should we feel like we need to hide them as much as possible?
i guess this is where some of the stigma on mental illness comes from; our inability to be accepting of our emotions. i mean for myself, i suffer from depression and anxiety. and for some reason, people think that because my life seems picture perfect on the outside, things are perfect on the inside too. but we are all different, and i hate how people think i dont have a reason to be depressed, or im making this shit up for attention. i shouldnt need a reason to justify my illness, it should just be accepted. accepted just like how a physical illness is. i shouldnt have to feel shame that ive spent 6 weeks in a psych ward. i shouldnt have to feel shame that i wake up every day wanting to die. i shouldnt feel shame that i tried to kill myself. suicide is a public health concern, not just some attention seeking cry.
someone will always have it better, and someone will always have it worse, but it is what it is. mental illness is funny in the sense that it affects people at random.
in my country, its suicide prevention month. people are posting all over social media about suicide prevention, trying to seem like theyre “accepting” and “want to help” those in crisis. but what i think most of these people are missing, is the fact that most people who die by suicide usually have a mental illness. and suicide cant be prevented without first treating the persons mental illness. so i think instead of saying we want to prevent suicide, we should say we want to stop the stigma on mental illness so that more people can get treated without feeling ashamed of themselves.
2 comments
People judge people: that will never change. The only control we have is if we choose to accept their judgments or formulate our own.
What do I care what anyone thinks of me as long as they leave me live my life.
You’re right, people should not judge an emotional reaction to something, whether the cause is endogenous or external, according to what they believe is acceptable. Emotions are perfectly natural. There are ways to work on improving emotional reactions over time, but it’s not some easy fix and doesn’t work for everybody.
I don’t believe that the majority of people who are suicidal have a mental illness, because there’s a major fallacy in the way psychiatric researchers arrived at that conclusion – namely, they decide that the very state of being suicidal makes a person mentally ill, without being willing to accept that situations can make a person want to die, and too often make this determination post mortem.
I actually think automatically labeling a suicidal person as mentally ill is one of the ways in which people dismiss those who are suicidal so easily. During Suicide Prevention Month how many people actually volunteer to go out and help others and how many spend their time online talking about how the government needs to make it easier for us to get “professional help”? Exactly. They figure there’s nothing they can do to help us because we need psychiatric intervention, and that makes it easy to turn away. I’m not saying that the pain and other symptoms that people experience are not real – they are very real – but the way people are labeled is entirely subjective and in some cases downright harmful. It contributes more to the stigma than it does to helping anybody.