Making Mental Health a Priority

Making Mental Health a Priority

When it comes to our wellness, it’s easy for us to focus on the apparent. You know? The things that are easily seen by the naked eye and require little in the way of investment to manage. We try to be careful of the things we eat and we make sure to get our bodies even just a little more active to maintain our physical wellness. We are socially encouraged to get regular physical check-ups and most schools require records of said exams and records of immunizations to further our education. We talk about washing hands to prevent communicable disease; we encourage rest when we catch the common cold. It almost seems we have concluded, as a society, that wellness isn’t just about treating major illness but preventing it, and addressing minor infections before they become big.

This awareness, however, stops a few paces short of being holistic because the same approach isn’t being used for mental wellness. We’re getting to a place of awareness in our society as it pertains to mental health, and that is a good thing! Unfortunately, we are still approaching it from the vantage point of mental illnesses rather than on a continuum of wellness. As it stands, many healthcare plans that cover regular physical examinations exclude counseling. At work, we can call in sick for fevers or vomiting, but if we aren’t having a healthy mind day, we are often reduced to feigning physical illness to be excused. The same schools that require batteries of physical exams and preventative shots for admission have students on roster that have never even had a psychological evaluation, let alone 30 minutes of counseling.

Let’s be very clear. Just like every human being hiccups, coughs, encounters bouts of the common cold, food poisoning and the like, EVERY SINGLE human being experiences mental un-wellness. Every single human being and subsequently our society would benefit greatly from a yearly mental wellness exam. How many people found, in a simple routine examination, the early stages of cancer and could tackle it head on because it was caught early? Would not the same happen with fatal mental illnesses if we caught the early stages in routine exams? What would it look like if we could rest through a heavy anxiety day in the same way we rest through a feverish one? What would it look like do things DAILY to maintain our mental wellness in the way we wash hands to maintain our physical wellness?

Our beings are whole entities. We are body and mind. We must tend to both our physical and mental selves to attain to our highest level of wellness. Sometimes that means looking past the readily apparent and taking time to sit with the tougher sides. At the end of it all, our lives depend on it. Let’s be well!

Written on 05/15/17 for Live Laugh Love Nashville's Wellness Wednesday Blog by Del-Amina