With the winter only just beginning, it’s time to grab a blanket, cozy up to the fireplace, pour a cup of herbal tea, and talk about mental health – a particularly important subject considering that 1 in 5 adults experience mental illness.
The last year of the pandemic has created uncertain and isolating times, which have impacted our wellbeing in many ways. It’s made us more aware of just how important our health really is, and what can happen when it’s not intact.
With dewy skin or smaller thighs or better proportions or longer lashes or tighter abs, life’s a freaking dream with all the rainbows and butterflies and unicorns attached. We often buy into this messaging, not only from our own thoughts but from the help of a society that sometimes celebrates this messaging as we’re bombarded with tales of what could, would, might make us happier if only we did, tried, bought the thing.
Life can be messy, and you might be wondering if you should involve your friends with your mental health ups-and-downs. You might be afraid because your friends are undereducated and misinformed about people living with mental health issues. They might be in the dark.
As a psychologist — i.e. one who studies the mind and human motivations — my mind periodically returns to Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist who is lovingly known as the father of psychoanalysis, which is the foundation of psychology and the basis of many of the psychological treatments that we use today.As part of his theory explains, the Oedipus complex is a childhood psychosexual stage, wherein young people harbor unconscious sexual desires that fuel their anxiety and/or frustrations that may, or may not, appear negatively in life — depending upon the successful resolution of this puzzling, internal conflict.I have periodically come back to this tenet of psychoanalysis, always with the nagging inclination that this somehow explains America's issues with racism
What we are going through as a nation and a world is completely unprecedented in our lifetime. Other than finding reputable advice on COVID-19 from the CDC and WHO, we are all looking to one another for support to create a daily road map for this uncharted territory we are all traversing with high anxiety. Everyday, we are stuck wondering how we will get through this experience and questioning if we are making the right decisions or not. It is nervewracking. I know these feelings well, as I endured them for more than a year after the onset of PTSD back in 2016.