Are you feeling blue?

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On September 18 Squamish will host a charity bike ride called: “Ride away the stigma of mental illness”. What a great idea! There is certainly a lot to do in order to change our thinking about mental illness and its effect on people.

According to Canadian Mental Health Association, one in five Canadians will live with a mental illness at some point in their life. It’s astonishing, isn’t it? I wonder if we are facing a horrible social crisis, or maybe something else?

To me, the important question is how we define a mental illness, or how we define an illness, period. Aren’t we a little obsessed with being healthy at all times and by all costs? We take vaccines for everything: flu, mumps, chickenpox; we hammer a common cold with antivirals and antibiotics that are more harmful to our health than a common cold itself.

Not that long ago people were sad, blue or shy. Now they experience depression and social anxiety disorder. We cannot be nervous or tired anymore, we suffer from high-level stress and nervous breakdown instead. Kids used to be absent minded, daydreaming and super energetic; now they are diagnosed with an ADHD and treated with chemicals to keep them calm and manageable at school and at home.

We treat everything as an illness and do everything to prevent us from becoming ill. It makes sense, of course. It is much better to be healthy and strong than sick and weak. It’s not healthy, however, if we get into a panic mode at the smallest sign of feeling sad, a bit low, or “out of sort” and try to medicate our way out.

We need to be low, sometimes; we need to be tired. This is the way in which our body and mind are telling us that we need a break or a change in our behaviour. We need to experience unhappiness, grief, and heartbreak. They are all parts of our human experience. How else would we know what happiness is, if we have never experienced unhappiness?

I am not trying to minimize the hardship of people who suffer from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or clinical depression. Just the opposite; what I am trying to say is that putting everything in one bag, in fact, takes away the real weight of living with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or clinical depression.

Common cold and chickenpox are not life-changing disasters like cancer or Multiple Sclerosis. Social anxiety, grief, and stress are normal occurrences related to life events, they are not mental illnesses you have to live with till the end of your days.

I would really like to destigmatize mental illness and people that it affects. I would also like us to become more realistic in our expectations and see the difference between feeling blue and being clinically depressed.

I would like people to see that they can deal with their “mental common cold” with the change of lifestyle, the help of a friend, or a therapist. I would like people to gain some understanding of what life is about and how to use their life events to grow, expand, evolve to a more mature and better person, without panicking and taking meds to minimize the discomfort.

Life is everything: happiness and sadness; heartbreak, grief, and joy; love and the dark night of the soul. Don’t shortchange yourself by believing that you ought to be joyful and happy at all times.

Use your “down time” for a reflection on who you are and what you want from your life. Balance yourself by taking time off when things get too overwhelming or stressful. Accept all your feelings, “good ones” and  “bad ones”. Darkness never lasts forever. The sun will rise again, either you want it or not.

By Eva Sadowski

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