Getting the right support to ensure positive mental health

YOU MIGHT have guessed over the years that I am passionate about mental health, and so it will come as no surprise that I’m chatting about Time to Talk Day, which is today – an opportunity to bring together the right ingredients to have a conversation about mental health.

Even though one in four of us will suffer from mental health problems in our lives, it’s staggering to think that we still don’t want to talk about it openly and have so many stigmas and stereotypes about it.

While I don’t work in the field of mental health diagnoses, I do work in the field of mental health and I see this lack of openness first hand when I work with organisations. So often if I’m brought in to run workshops that deal with mental health, depression, anxiety and stress, no one wants to raise their hand and sign up. However, if I create a workshop that is marketed as ‘reaching your potential, ditch the stress’ or something like that everyone wants to attend – even though the content will be the same.

I get this, when I was in that space I would never have asked for help or gone on a public course with colleagues where I publicly admitted I wasn’t coping. I would have seen it as such as such a failure, it’s such an admission that I couldn’t cope, that I was weak in some way.

On the outside I had everything, the great career, the lovely house, the beautiful kids, the fairytale marriage. But inside, I felt like my world was crashing down around me. I’d cry myself to sleep because I was so unhappy, I didn’t see what everyone else saw. I felt that the reality was I was going to be found out at any moment, that my colleagues really didn’t think I was as good as I was, I had such a low opinion of myself and could only find fault. I have never experienced stress like I did during those years, I felt like I was permanently in a state of flight or fight and the slightest thing would make me feel like I was being pushed over the edge.

But no one knew. Because I had perfected the art of putting on a brave face, the confident, capable women who could juggle everything and excel at everything that she did.

I suppose that is why I’m on a bit of a mission to change this, to change how we respond to people who are in that space and how we can properly support them. To get to a point where we see this more as part of our human condition rather than a failure or flaw in their character, or something that needed to be fixed.

In my view, the first step, if there is someone in your life who is feeling like this, is to simply hold the space for them. Allow them to talk about how they feel, with no judgment, no solution, no responding to what they say, no trying to make sense of it and taking none of it to heart.

But importantly we know what it is that we need, it’s like we have an innate wisdom that comes through for us. It may not be the long term solution, some may need more support, however, it is such a vital first positive step that we can all take to help those around us work towards achieving good mental health.

■ andreamorrison.co.uk