When people are suffering from mental health challenges, often enough people just want to know the cause, why they are having this issue. Naturally they suppose if they can find the cause of their issue, then it will be solved.
What most people do not understand is that causality is not one dimensional. There is not only one type of cause, not only past> present>>future causality.
Mental health causality deals in more dimension than temporal stacking.
What is Actually Happening?
As a clinician, I am never satisfied with “that’s just the way I am”.
While coping skills can be helpful, the point of mental health as I see it is to not to help the person by emphasizing to them that just have to learn to cope the rest of their lives.
It is an odd thing for a person to be coming for help with an issue that in trying to get better, they fight to keep it.
This kind of experience is not uncommon. It is what clinicians know, but often, the client does not. It literally is as though the mental issue is exactly an issue because the person does not want to get better.
Perhaps a better way of putting it is that the disorder is that the mind is working properly, that the issue is because the mind is working the way it is supposed to act: perfectly to supply and deal with the reality that makes sense to the person.
This is so much that case that the “disorder” is indeed the mind and body making sense.
This is what is actually happening.
Having a cold or a flu is not an indication that a person’s body is behaving incorrectly, but that it is behaving correctly.
This is why mental issues can be such a conundrum, and why people tend to want to learn something so they can cope: because this mind is working to keep functioning the way that is proper and makes sense for a persons’ reality.
Philosophy for Mental Health is not just thinking about Ideas
Mental Health Philosophy proposes to help all the things involved with mental health, to get back to the thing itself, which is the experience of the person over theories, but also how we can know what is actually happening.
If we put those together we have an oddly simple goal:
Having anxiety, for example, does not tell us what is happening with a person. It tells us a name for a set of symptoms. To begin to move forward, a suffering person needs to begin to notice what those experiences are made of, the things that constitutes the experience itself.
To get back to what is actually happening in mental health and the person itself, a first step is to raise your awareness of what your experience is.
- During your day, whenever you remember, stop what you are doing.
- Take a breath.
- Notice what your body feels like.
- Notice what your thoughts are doing.
Keep in mind that noticing is not problem solving. This exercise is not for the purpose of solving a problem. It is to begin to find out what the problem actually is.
As with any problem or project, we cannot know what we need to do until we find out what pieces we have, what they are, and how they are involved with other parts.
To start to address the metal issue itself, you have to begin to find out what your experience actually is.
Or, you can just cope.
It is up to you. No one is here to judge your decision.
However: I believe you don’t have to only cope.
you are mattering
You. Matter.
Agency Matters Mental Health