What you need to understand about mental illness
Most people get bogged down in the diagnosis and don’t mistake me, diagnosis are important in that the person often feels relieved to have a name for what they have been experiencing, which has been often greatly distressing. Patients frequently tell me ‘I’m glad… I thought I was going mad’. The other reason why a diagnosis is important is because there are certain risk factors associated with some illnesses and it is important to consider them. In addition, some patients require medication treatment and hence it is absolutely essential to have the correct diagnosis. In some cases, in addition to psychological aspect, there are also organic causes e.g. hereditary factors, biochemical or hormonal imbalance, which obviously would need to be treated accordingly.
Once I have considered all the above information, my main interest as a psychologist, is to get to the root cause of the illness. In my experience, regardless of what the name of your illness may be, they are all an expression of the underlying psychological and emotional discomfort. I always tell my patients, it is like saying ‘I love you’ in five different languages; you are still saying the same thing!
Emotional & psychological discomfort
What do I mean by emotional and psychological discomfort? Emotional and psychological discomfort is caused by any unresolved emotional and psychological stress and distress, which has been either building up over a period of time or is a result of a particular incident or event. Many people live their lives as if they are some kind of robot or machinery, just press the button and here we go. WRONG! As I always point out, even machinery needs looking after if it is going to function efficiently and last. So the question is, why so many people perceive emotional and psychological self-care as indulgent and unnecessary? I tell you why. The reason is that whilst the majority of us are brought up to understand and take care of our physical needs e.g. brushing teeth, keeping ourselves and our clothes clean, eating, sleeping etc. very few of us have actually been taught to do the same on the emotional and psychological level.
Apart from a few lucky ones, who were born in families were people naturally dealt with their feelings appropriately and they model learned, the rest of us less fortunate ones were expected to just muddle our way through unawares of the consequences.
How to deal with emotional & psychological needs
The first step is to identify emotional and psychological needs. It is extraordinary, how many people don’t actually have the language to name their feelings. Some can identify feelings to a degree but stay very much on the surface of things. Sometimes people just pick up on the most prominent feeling with regard to a situation, to the detriment of all the other ones. Some people have suppressed their feeling for so long that it all turns into one “big blob” of unease and discomfort or in other cases into one singular feeling like anxiety. The next step is to acknowledge and validate your feelings regardless of whether they make sense or not and try to express them appropriately so instead of throwing up because one feels angry, perhaps one should think about the why that is and try to do something about the cause of it.
Sometimes people get worried when they can’t find the “why” of a feeling so they give up. NO! I always give my patients the following example: “ if I find a broken vase on the floor, of course I’ll try to find out WHY that is but fact remains that I still have to pick up the broken pieces whether I find out the reason or not.” The third step is to start looking for patterns in situations or interactions with people to establish triggers for feeling a certain way as well as situations that don’t bring about that particular feeling in you. The more insight you gain into how everything affects you the more in tune you become with yourself!!
