Address Your Mental Health: Break the Taboo
Address Your Mental Health: Break the Taboo
by Mahdi Munshi
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Let me tell you a story almost all of you can relate to hopefully. Imagine, you are a fresh graduate and looking for a job. You wake up from a very good sleep, the first thing you do is take your smartphone in your palm and swipe down the notification bar to find an email from a company you applied for. You open the mail and find out the mail says ‘Not Selected’, again. You take this normally and think that there is another job interview in several days and you should start prepping for that one. You call your family, you call your girlfriend, they all console you and say that you’ll ace the next one. Everything was going good until it suddenly hit you that they all are disappointed in you. Suddenly you cannot find anything positive in your life, suddenly you start feeling like crying. Yes, you got depressed, you stop contacting with friends and family, decide to shut yourself in and instead of getting fresh and preparing for the next interview, you went back to bed.
Although the context can be different, almost all of us have faced this feeling, haven’t we? Now let’s move onto the second part of the story.
You got depressed, it’s like you have lost all the interests in happiness and eventually you developed a coping mechanism for your depression. You start listening to sad songs doing nothing and ignoring everything and everyone. You were coping with the situation, not getting out of it, moving toward a grimmer mental issue. However, your mom suspects that there is something wrong with you, so she comes over to find you in this state. She takes you to a psychiatrist and keeps you on regular counselling. Your family and friends also get to know about your situation and they come forward with all kinds of mental support. You eventually get out of depression and start looking for a job again!
Does this sound familiar? Have we experienced anything like this?
I am pretty sure most of us cannot relate to this. A lot of us do not even know how counselling works. In fact, in most cases, we were not introduced to mental health that well in our schools or colleges. The result? The suicide rate in Bangladesh goes to 39.6 per 100,000 people every year (where countries with more than 30 are considered suicide-prone). And not surprisingly, a lot of them are school and college going students. And suicide is just an example. A lot of (and when I say a lot, it is a lot) our young people become depressed and can hardly get out of it, resulting in ruining their lives by decreased productivity, drug addiction and whatnot.
So, what can we do to change the situation?
There is no way we can try to improve the suicide statistics and other outcomes without addressing the real perpetrator of this situation ― the maintaining of mental health being a taboo. The reason we cannot relate to the second part of my story here is because we subconsciously have turned addressing mental health problems into a taboo. And the whole trend starts from our childhood.
The perpetrator 1 of this whole taboo situation is the trend of parenting in our country. Our parents do not follow any parenting guide or any systematic way to raise a child. Nor they care about child psychology and mental health. I doubt a lot of them (and even us) do not even know that there is a term called ‘Child Psychology’.
We do not receive enough mental health education in our schools and colleges. We do not have student counselors in those institutions either. We just wonder, why school bullying is a thing and why there are teenager gangs participating in all kinds of crimes, why teenagers are committing suicide.
Besides them, we have a ‘wonderful’ trend of gender stereotypes that impede us from sharing our mental issues we face. We grow up hearing ‘Men don’t cry’ or ‘Stop being a girl, be a man’ or something along these lines. And not being masculine is kind of a crime for the male people here.
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Even if we get the support from the family and can afford to go for counselling, or at least share our concerns in this matter, there are people around us with very little or no idea of mental health who will make this matter as demeaning as possible. There is a good chance of being identified as ‘crazy’ in the society if you go for counselling and continue professional treatment for your mental health. Even I got the address to Pabna Asylum some days back from one of my college classmates after I shared some of my mental concerns in the social media.
There are also minimal approaches from the government in this issue. We still do not have any visual initiative from the government for suicide prevention, which is disappointing for a country with such high suicide rates. Enough studies are also not conducted on this issue, as we cannot find updated statistics on suicide and other mental health issues.
By the time we grow up and start going to universities and stepping into career, most of us cannot find a reliable source for knowing and maintaining our mental health and subconsciously start neglecting it. What happens is that some of us cannot take those issues and ruin their lives themselves somehow or commit suicide. The rest of us, not knowing and learning about mental health replace the people who were the same as us, embrace the trend, keeping the mental health issue as taboo as before. And this is the harsh reality that has been going on for years.
Now, lets go back to my question I asked earlier. What can we do to change the suicide and other grim outcome situation? We definitely have to deal with the root first, which is the ‘thing’ I have been ranting on the last 6 paragraphs. We have to break the taboo, normalize addressing mental health issues. We, youth are the most important part of the trend, and it is us that should take the first step towards it. Let’s start addressing our mental health, let’s start going for counselling. Let’s share our concerns, not hold them in us. Holding them in will keep on making things worse, for you and everyone around you. We can never know what are you going through, if you do not address your own mental health, and we definitely cannot change the situation in this way.
Let’s address our mental health.
LET’S BREAK THE TABOO!
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