You heard me from the title. Now you may be wondering what do you mean when someone is struggling it isn’t pretty. What I mean ids that when things get really bad and when someone is struggling in a certain way suddenly no one wants to help. For some examples when it gets so bad someone won’t brush their teeth for weeks on end or when it’s at a point where they can’t get out of bed and there is food and clothes strewn all about their room. Things like that make people who say they are advocates for mental health shrink away or leave. Because they can deal with someone who just lacks motivation or who’s room is just clothes dirty or even someone who just is having a moment of weakness and just wants someone to cry to. Though what do they do if it’s worse than that? What do they do when the person is going through active si or won’t listen to anyone and can only focus on their own thoughts. Those people are hard to work with, so most people simply won’t. That is why I say mental health is only important if it’s pretty or if a person feels they can help the affected individual. I’ve been a part of and watched from the sidelines of those who try to help an individual who is struggling in one of those ways and I have seen it is very rare for them to not be given up on or not lashed out at due to how they themselves act. It’s true most people struggling are going to lash out and push away their loved ones. And it’s true some loved ones will not help or will simply turn a blind eye to it. That is also not their fault they didn’t sign up to deal with that or they may not even know how to deal with such things at all. But at the end of the day who truly does? Sure, people are trained to work at places like inpatient for when things get too bad for people on the outside to manage but even, they don’t truly know how to handle all the patients they receive. That is why at the end of the day I think it is hard for a person struggling on a different level than others may not even get the same level of treatment someone would receive who doesn’t struggle with such things. Because people get intimidated right off the bat and leave. This does not go to say that they can’t receive help at all as plenty people in the world are strong advocates for mental health and try to help others. This is just my take for people who don’t have a strong support system.
I think it is so important for us to recognize the biases we have against “unpretty” mental illnesses and this post illuminates exactly why. We need more of this kind of blogging. Thank you for posting this.
this is absolutely true. it seems like people expect others suffering from mental health issues to be perfect in every other way, besides their mental health. those people seem to want to fit everyone with mental illnesses into a very specific box, rather than acknowledge the true spectrum of issues that are plauging our populations right now. i plan to talk about this in a future blog post, but this sort of gatekeeping in regards to openly discussing mental health is how pro ana forums were started in the late 90s/early 2000s. they were started by teenagers and young adults who felt trapped in their everyday life and were unable to openly talk about their struggles, so they migrated to online forums to vent, where they found community with others who shared their struggles. “pro ana” has come to mean something entirely different today, but it was started with the intention of being a support group for people with eating disorders, rather than a community of people promoting eating disorders.