From my personal experiences, my biggest takeaway is that a fundamental difference between mental progress and debilitation comes from understanding your current situation.

The thoughts and worries we all experience are real and important regardless of whether our situation conforms to others’ ideas of mental health.

We can begin to move forward, I’d say if we can accept our current state. Usually, actually, it was only through understanding the complexity of my father’s mental illness that I gradually came to learn through trauma, confusion, and grief more about myself and the human condition than I had ever thought possible. Also, this change doesn’t come easy. Therefore, my journey has also become an adventure all across the nation advocating for a more humanistic perspective of mental health. I have seen how learning more about the underlying biochemical pathways holds great promises for the future, while our current generation of medication and treatment can be frustrating at times.

Initially, I dismissed my father’s illness as simple craziness.

Show love.

Simply speak up Whether a late night conversation with a loved one in desperate need of support,, or this takes the kind of a quick post on social media. Speak out. Fact, in a manic state my dad hallucinated that he was dealing cards with Christ’s apostles and during his crippling depression he couldn’t lift himself from his bed for weeks. Now let me tell you something. How can we start a dialogue, if I dismiss you as crazy. It was naive to ignore the fact that look, there’re people behind these diseases, and that their illnesses don’t encapsulate their personalities, despite the fact that my dad’s physical reality didn’t match my own.

We need to begin by empathizing and loving those who we don’t fully understand. Be heard. Tonight, however, I’m still a young, confused teenager making an attempt to process what mental illness really means to me and my family. My greatest fear, however, isn’t that I am hopeless to change our society’s perception of mental illness, nor that I can’t adequately solve the world’s disconnect between mental and physical health problems. Dr. In an effort to better see the subtlety of mental illness, I’m quite sure I have sought out opportunities that have changed both my life and my perception of mental illness. Nonetheless, everyone reading this can simply increase their familiarization with those living with mental illness around them to broaden their spectrum of receptive comfort, Therefore if nothing else. Nevertheless, hearing the stories of others can widen our capacity for love if we only allow ourselves to learn from a wider types of experiences. Of course, we will never get people the treatment that they need, Therefore in case we don’t recognize mental illnesses as physical health problems.

The few certainties that I have learned from living with a father with bipolar disorder is that mental health is just as important as physical health. Accordingly the two are inseparable, In fact, mental health is physical health. They are sometimes more difficult to understand, they are just as real. Ironically, similar fluidity and complexity of mental disorders that I find so fascinating has prevented those same disorders from gaining societal acceptance in identical way that physical illnesses have. Now look, the social stigma that those living with mental illness experience essentially stems from this fundamental lack of understanding of mental disorders as physical illnesses.

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