I've been actively working to improve my mental health for about eight years now, and I really feel like I've been making progress lately. It's so strange and difficult to take one's development into one's own hands, to try to teach oneself skills that one's teachers and caregivers weren't able to transmit--especially when one doesn't already have the skills they need to flourish!
It's also really fucking empowering.
A sunrise somewhere in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. All the stock photos regarding mental health were HELLA cheese-ball, and a sunrise captures the feel I'm writing from, so here's one of my own!
Most of the things I've learned in my journey so far are very personal. I don't mean personal in the sense that I'd be embarrassed to talk about them; instead, I mean they're more like perspectival shifts and changes in habits and behaviors-- things that are just really fucking difficult to put into words or evaluate intersubjectively at all. But all these subliminal changes have really added up into a much-improved quality of life.
Improving mental health is no quick fix, and even when we commit to the practice, it can take a frustratingly long time to get up to speed. That said, here are three core ideas that have really helped me along the way, that I wish I'd had access to in my early days. I hope they'll resonate for some of y'all who are at different places in your process and perhaps engage with different parts of the mental health movement.
I remember learning how common mental illness is back in high school. I remember wanting to be comforted by the statistic-- that it was a relatively common (or at least substantially-impactful) experience, rather than the taboo defect it had been made out to be in the brief introductions I'd had in earlier years.
Instead, it kinda freaked me out-- that there are close to 20% of the population experiencing mental illness in a given year, and that nowhere near 1 in 5 people talk about it or were actively and/or openly working on improving it!!!
I mean, what the fuck! Less than 1% of the population is diagnosed with cancer in a year, yet cancer survivors are lionized in the media, and cancer advocacy groups seem to be a dime a dozen. I don't know about you, but I sure don't see anywhere near the kind of visible or positive community around mental health, and I think that's a problem! That means there are a lot of unwell people out there who aren't doing anything about it or who don't have access to the support they need. Pretty fucked up, if you ask me.
But then I came across the concept of neurodiversity (aka I stopped trying to learn about mental illness from people who had no personal experience with it), and it really changed a lot for me. As Lord Wiki explains it:
Neurodiversity is an approach to learning and disability that argues diverse neurological conditions are result of normal variations in the human genome.[1] This portmanteau of neurological and diversity originated in the late 1990s as a challenge to prevailing views of neurological diversity as inherently pathological, instead asserting that neurological differences should be recognized and respected as a social category on a par with gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability status.
As I've learned it, the concept of neurodiversity was developed by the autistic community to describe the broad range of neurological experiences (including many "mental illnesses" and "learning disabilities")-- not as defects which need to be cured, but instead as a legitimate form of human diversity (as in NOT TABOO).
Perhaps even more important to me than that paradigm-shifting reframe was the ability to assess the world as an interplay between neurotypicality and neurodiversity. In other words, if your shit is based on the assumption that everyone is neurotypical, it's not based in reality. Not only can I better understand my place in the world and my relationship to other people with different neurological experiences, I can also assess situations and patterns along their accessibility and inclusiveness of neurodivergence, which has proven to be a phenomenal way to find the pain points in situations I may never have understood otherwise.
Turns out my computer vision platform thinks this photo is "warm." What do you think?
Another amazing thing I owe thanks to the autistic community for is the act of stimming. Again, Dr. Wiki:
Self-stimulatory behavior, also known as stimming[1] and self-stimulation,[2] is the repetition of physical movements, sounds, or repetitive movement of objects common in individuals with developmental disabilities, but most prevalent in people with autism spectrum disorders.
I've always been a nervous leg-jiggler, fingernail picker, and finger popper, which I certainly wouldn't elevate to the level of your classical autistic stim, but would certainly put at a lower level of the same spectrum. At the end of the day, my biggest vision of a stim's utility is in a person's ability to change their own state of being, whether that's their thought process, their mood, their anxiety level, or whatever it may be, even if conscious or unconscious.
Meeting people who share stims and discuss ways to improve their impact or adapt their behavior for different outcomes was an extremely healing experience for me, but that's not quite why stimming made this list. Instead, it's because of my recent exposure to the concept of behavioral activation (I actually wasn't aware that it pays homage to the legendary behaviorist B.F. Skinner until I sat down to write this article-- how 'bout that!) Behavioral activation takes the practice of stimming to a whole new life-hack-y level, and has really helped me develop some positive new habits in my life. Still basically stimming, though!
Mountains. I fuckin' love 'em! These are definitely NOT in EKY, tho, but they do make me think of mindulness
I was introduced to mindfulness pretty early in my mental health journey, and have definitely benefited from the practice. That was BEFORE I really got into Buddhism and learned how to meditate, though, and ever since, Mindfulness has just seemed like a cheap Western knock-off of the real thing. That said, it's WAY more popular here in the United Snakes than Buddhism seems to be, so hey! Who am I to criticize the messenger if the message is the same?
Mindfulness seems to have reached a new point of social saturation lately-- case in point, I saw it on the cover of a magazine in the grocery store checkout line. Not just mentioned-- the whole cover was about mindfulness! I never imagined grocery store pulp mags would be spreading Enlightenment, but here we are-- and good for the Mental Health Industrial Complex for bringing it to new audiences in new ways!
Mindfulness, like the other entries in this list, has allowed me to take more control over certain aspects of my life in a way that leaves me wasting less energy struggling to be ok. It's another tool I've got when I experience adversity in my life that helps me get through, or to bounce back quicker when I can't. And the fact that it's been adapted into so many different practices and cultures for so much of human history definitely says it's more than just a happenstance. A grocery store rag may not be enough to get one to Enlightenment, but if it puts one on the path, what more can one ask for?
And it's been going on for some time now. It may not be as public or popular as the cancer movement, but when it's ready for the mainstream, I'd expect there to be quite a bit of social change-- for the better, of course! Because what better way to make our communities a better place than to heal the silent suffering of 20% of our neighbors?
