I think this isn’t addressed to people with mental illness. It’s more of a general mental health awareness education. I worked therapy sessions and you’d be shocked by the amount of people with truly atrocious coping mechanisms because they didn’t receive healthy emotional education.
Playing video games for hours without rests, bathroom or stretch breaks. Self medicating, alcohol abuse, binging junk food at 3 am, etc. This people didn’t have a mental illness that I could diagnose directly. Usually they were just overwhelmed by life circumstances. But they were spiraling downwards because of their habits and beliefs on how to deal with the stresses of life.
We did something called mental health hygiene. And they were things just like these. Not just knowing about them, but switching attitudes and habits around them. There’s so much people that aren’t capable of identifying emotions and needs that we even give them names. People who get hangry are individuals who are easily irritated who can’t identify their hunger and it makes them reactive with aggression to almost any social stimulus. That’s not a mental illness, it is just bad mental health hygiene.
Saying to such a person “hey, I think you’re hungry and that’s making you angry and aggressive, go eat” sounds stupidly obvious. But for the person going through it, it isn’t that obvious.
Aside: the amount of times I’ve had to work sleep schedules with depressed and anxious patients is ridiculously high. People with mental illnesses do forget to sleep. And my job was telling them, “you need sleep ASAP” then work with them how to get it done. Nothing is obvious.
Yeah, I was in therapy at 27 for my ADHD, which was diagnosed fifteen years earlier, when I learned how to make an ADHD-friendly to-do list.
In those fifteen years I never thought “maybe to-do lists are so frequently recommended because they’re actually valuable” and no other therapists or mentors had thought that I might not know that to-do lists for people with ADHD are different from the ones that work for neurotypical people (my list doesn’t say “wash dishes,” it says “collect dishes from the bedroom and kitchen, soak silverware in a pot with hot water, stack plates next to the sink, soak any cookware or cups that need it, wash plates and bowls, wash silverware, wash cups, wash cookware”).
It’s so obvious in hindsight, but I felt almost condescended to when people told me to write a to-do list. Finding out not only were they right, but I need a to-do list that’s broken down into smaller steps than normal was humbling in a good way. I hope I’m less dismissive of seemingly basic ideas now.
I think if someone had seen my therapist’s notes to me and made fun of them, I might not have been able to be open to their advice. Or maybe I’d just be embarrassed about the experience, instead of grateful.
I think this isn’t addressed to people with mental illness. It’s more of a general mental health awareness education. I worked therapy sessions and you’d be shocked by the amount of people with truly atrocious coping mechanisms because they didn’t receive healthy emotional education.
Playing video games for hours without rests, bathroom or stretch breaks. Self medicating, alcohol abuse, binging junk food at 3 am, etc. This people didn’t have a mental illness that I could diagnose directly. Usually they were just overwhelmed by life circumstances. But they were spiraling downwards because of their habits and beliefs on how to deal with the stresses of life.
We did something called mental health hygiene. And they were things just like these. Not just knowing about them, but switching attitudes and habits around them. There’s so much people that aren’t capable of identifying emotions and needs that we even give them names. People who get hangry are individuals who are easily irritated who can’t identify their hunger and it makes them reactive with aggression to almost any social stimulus. That’s not a mental illness, it is just bad mental health hygiene.
Saying to such a person “hey, I think you’re hungry and that’s making you angry and aggressive, go eat” sounds stupidly obvious. But for the person going through it, it isn’t that obvious.
Aside: the amount of times I’ve had to work sleep schedules with depressed and anxious patients is ridiculously high. People with mental illnesses do forget to sleep. And my job was telling them, “you need sleep ASAP” then work with them how to get it done. Nothing is obvious.
Yeah, I was in therapy at 27 for my ADHD, which was diagnosed fifteen years earlier, when I learned how to make an ADHD-friendly to-do list.
In those fifteen years I never thought “maybe to-do lists are so frequently recommended because they’re actually valuable” and no other therapists or mentors had thought that I might not know that to-do lists for people with ADHD are different from the ones that work for neurotypical people (my list doesn’t say “wash dishes,” it says “collect dishes from the bedroom and kitchen, soak silverware in a pot with hot water, stack plates next to the sink, soak any cookware or cups that need it, wash plates and bowls, wash silverware, wash cups, wash cookware”).
It’s so obvious in hindsight, but I felt almost condescended to when people told me to write a to-do list. Finding out not only were they right, but I need a to-do list that’s broken down into smaller steps than normal was humbling in a good way. I hope I’m less dismissive of seemingly basic ideas now.
I think if someone had seen my therapist’s notes to me and made fun of them, I might not have been able to be open to their advice. Or maybe I’d just be embarrassed about the experience, instead of grateful.