Mental health has been a taboo topic for a really long time. And, while I’ll admit that we’re definitely making progress in breaking down the stigma around mental health, we still have a long way to go.

So, let’s start with the basics: what is mental health exactly?

It’s just health. Our mental health is simply how we’re doing mentally (and also, physically). Mental health struggles don’t live in a neat little box. When we’re having a tough time, it affects the way we feel, but our mental health struggles also show up physically, and they even spill over into our personal and professional lives. Mental health affects our emotions, our physical health, our relationships, our career success, and our overall happiness levels, so of course we need to start talking about it.

There’s this big misconception that mental health issues are something only “some people” struggle with. 

Well, my friend, I’m here to tell you that couldn’t be further from the truth. We will all struggle with our mental health at times. It’s an unavoidable part of being human. Yes, even us therapists too!

When we go through life thinking that mental health struggles only affect some people, we tend to minimize the struggles we’re going through. And, I mean for good reason. If only some people struggle with their mental health, we certainly don’t want to be one of those people.

Talking about mental health allows us to see that we’re actually not as alone in our struggles as we might feel we are. We tend to avoid talking about the things that we’re struggling with due to fear that people will think less of us, or we would be found out to be a fraud, or that we should be capable of figuring things out on our own. But, talking about the things that we’re scared of and struggling with actually makes them feel less overwhelming and more manageable.

That’s one of the life-changing things about therapy. Therapy gives you a safe space to talk about things that are really difficult to speak about out loud. Therapy also gives you an opportunity to talk about how you really feel and what you really think without needing to filter yourself or worry about the way it comes across to other people. This allows you to be honest with yourself and dive deeper into how you’re actually doing (instead of focusing on how you feel like you should be doing).

You don’t ever have to wait for your mental health to get “bad enough” for therapy

You may have considered reaching out to a therapist before, then hesitated and questioned whether things were actually that bad. That right there is a byproduct of the stigma surrounding mental health. If you have something in your life that you’re struggling with, that in and of itself is a valid (and super healthy) reason to reach out for support. 

Instead of waiting to see if things will get worse, what if we learned how to preventatively reach out for support and attend to our mental health? That’s exactly what therapy can help you learn how to do. In therapy, you can learn to recognize patterns in your life, so that you can:

• Change those patterns if they are no longer working for you

• Notice the early signs that you’re experiencing stress, anxiety, or depression, so that you can do something about it and stop things from getting more difficult

• Learn when it would be helpful for you to reach out for support

• Develop healthier and more effective ways of coping with difficult things in your life

This preventative and early-intervention approach to mental health makes sense. It also stops us from suffering more than necessary. We apply it to other things in life, so why wouldn’t we apply it to our mental health?

One of the major reasons I do not work directly with insurance companies is because insurance companies will most often not cover therapy services unless they feel like your problems are (in their perspective) “bad enough” for therapy. And, they will stop paying for therapy when they decide your problems are no longer “bad enough” for therapy. 

As I just explained, I don’t think any of us should suffer more than we need to in life, or have to wait for things to be “bad enough” to seek support. I also don’t think it should be up to an insurance company to decide what is and is not a big enough problem. This approach to therapy contributes to the stigmatization of mental health and does a disservice to us all in my opinion.

Mental health doesn’t look like you think it does

It may surprise you to learn that many people who are struggling with depression, actually don’t think they are depressed when they first come to therapy. In fact, I would say over half of the clients I work with that are experiencing depression don’t realize that they are depressed until we talk about it in therapy. 

They have an idea of what depression looks like, and frankly that just isn’t them. But, depression looks like a lot of things, not only feeling sad or depressed. Depression can also look like: losing interest in the things you used to enjoy doing, feeling tired or drowsy all day, forgetting to eat, snacking all day, feeling apathetic in general, feeling hopeless or helpless to change things in your life, and isolating yourself from the people in your life. You can be a straight A student, or run a successful company, or have so many things in your life to be grateful for, and you can be depressed.

This is similar to the misconceptions people have about anxiety. Sure, anxiety involves feeling anxious, but anxiety also shows up as: snapping at your partner, over preparing for things, making plans for any possible worst-case scenario you can think of, having obsessive thoughts, repeatedly trying to reassure yourself that things will be ok, having a panic attack, or avoiding things that feel overwhelming. 

The point is, until we start talking about mental health more frequently and openly, we’re going to keep making a lot of incorrect assumptions about what mental health really is, what it looks like, and how we should be handling our mental health struggles. And as a result, we’re going to struggle with our mental health much more than we need to. We need to talk about mental health, so that we can all start taking better care of it.