Yeah, exactly. Of course, mental health is far more nebulous and complex, and cause and effect interactions are not going to be as predictable as with physical ailments. But there is still scope for determining an evidence based, systematic approach to recognising and supporting people’s needs. There ARE things that demonstrably help, that might be more apparent from the outside - and it sucks that the onus is very much on the sufferer to carve out solutions and explain everything to others.
It would be so much easier if it was just simple accepted that this happens… that’s the one thing that I hold out for is that we’ll eventually get to a point in our culture where we no longer actually have to explain ourselves. Thankfully we’re moving but it’s at a remarkably slow rate, at least slow enough that it feels at times to have stagnated somehow backwards.
It feels like perhaps in pre industrial societies this was more inherently accepted even if poorly understood and often misattributed/mistreated with religious or spiritual interpretations. But if your heart hurt or you felt a dark cloud over your life at least people kind of accepted and knew this was a thing and that you needed some kind of care (even if it involved witchcraft) rather than expecting you to chin up all the time and that it was all a figment of your imagination…
Yeah, exactly. Of course, mental health is far more nebulous and complex, and cause and effect interactions are not going to be as predictable as with physical ailments. But there is still scope for determining an evidence based, systematic approach to recognising and supporting people’s needs. There ARE things that demonstrably help, that might be more apparent from the outside - and it sucks that the onus is very much on the sufferer to carve out solutions and explain everything to others.
It would be so much easier if it was just simple accepted that this happens… that’s the one thing that I hold out for is that we’ll eventually get to a point in our culture where we no longer actually have to explain ourselves. Thankfully we’re moving but it’s at a remarkably slow rate, at least slow enough that it feels at times to have stagnated somehow backwards.
It feels like perhaps in pre industrial societies this was more inherently accepted even if poorly understood and often misattributed/mistreated with religious or spiritual interpretations. But if your heart hurt or you felt a dark cloud over your life at least people kind of accepted and knew this was a thing and that you needed some kind of care (even if it involved witchcraft) rather than expecting you to chin up all the time and that it was all a figment of your imagination…