Mental health awareness month.

Once again, like every year, we find ourselves on the mental health awareness month: May. I’ve been reflecting a lot on what this means, beyond this huge name that seems more complex without bringing further explanation.

To be truly aware of mental health is to acknowledge in all of its depths what it implies, to truly accept all of what mental health brings with it. And the base of that, which is logic basically, is to know that you and I, and every single human being we cross our paths with should be informed and involved at least in a minimum way with things regarding mental health. 

Why? Because we all have a mental health. We all have thoughts, emotions, psyché, mental state, mind, call it how you want. But as well as we all have a heart and know even if it’s a minimum of how to keep it healthy and avoid a heart attack, or how to recognize one and what to do in that case to preserve life, why can’t we do the same with our mental health? Because it isn’t tangible, because we can’t measure it so most believe it to be nonexistent. Mental health shouldn’t be a matter that only professionals of that field and the lucky (not so few) people that have to deal with conditions. It’s a matter of every single human, and a social issue that needs to be dealt with. Because we keep listening to in growing statistics that show us that at least the conditions aren’t slowing down. It isn’t about every one becoming a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist. Rather, it’s about having a more educated answer that “I don’t believe you have it so I’ll treat you tough enough so you’ll be shaken to the core and that take depression goes away” to when someone decides to share their mental health condition reality with others.

It’s a good way to start, and we shall continue to open ourselves to the conversation. Because we carry our diagnosis, the ones who have it, a burden. As a deep dark secret that no one else has. But when we dare to talk, as far of our comfort zone as it may seem and as scary as it is, we find that people around us are just like us. Some even share symptoms or experiences with us, some of our family members who we thought were untouchable share our diagnosis and the road goes from something very lonely and isolated to one in which we comfort and support each other with a common, before unspoken, reality. We need to talk because that’s all it takes, one person opening up to their inner circle, to make other voices raise up and give them the chance to heal even a bit by knowing they aren’t alone.

Mental health awareness is also creating a space in which no one has to feel ever again the shame that comes when accepting out loud the fact that they go to therapy, or take medication, or have a lifetime condition, or all together. Someone asked me before that if I had changed my future plans of being a mom, having chronic, hereditary mental health condition. And of course it scares me that my hypothetical kids could suffer, and I have no other option besides prevention, monitoring and faith. But I can do my part to create, at least in the people that surround me, a space with less and less stigma every single day. By talking openly. By being honest. By educating. Because I know that I won’t be the last person with a mental health condition, and no matter if the people to come include more of my family members or people I’ll never met. No matter that, the present and future mental health patients deserve a world with less stigma that the one people before us had. And the ones sometimes we still have.