Why we need to keep talking about mental health

Topics mentioned: mental health, reaching out for help

About: Laura writes about how vital mental health awareness has been for her recovery, and why it's so important that we keep talking.

When I first started to feel like something wasn’t right, my initial thought was: Is this normal?

I think it’s important for people like me, who have gone through mental health issues, to discuss why and how mental health awareness has helped.

Some people who have never experienced any form of mental health problems might ask: Why is it so important to raise awareness about mental health? People may think it’s something others should just deal with in silence – this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The bottom line is that everyone should spread awareness of mental health to normalise the topic. I know when I first started feeling down, I had never investigated any mental health charities before, and so I felt alone and desperately needed to find others who felt the same as me.

As I started to research mental health (trust me I sat on Google for days!) I began to realise that I was not alone and lots of other people were dealing with the same issues as I was. Social media gets a huge amount of criticism these days and to some extent I agree with what is said.

However, social media platforms are great for finding out how other people feel. If you scroll through Instagram, for example, you can find hundreds of personal accounts about what people are going through – they are normalising their feelings, thus helping to normalise the topic of mental health. 

Also, awareness isn’t just projected online – talking to my friends and family helped me, not only to let them know how I was feeling, but also to ask them if they were doing okay. It’s so important to check up on people and not just ask your typical every day questions, like “how are you?” but ask if they are truly okay within themselves. And more often than not, there is something they’re struggling with, and that’s completely normal.

I want to end this post by stressing the point that spreading awareness of mental health, especially if you have personal experience, is crucial to helping others with their own journey. I say ‘journey’ because it’s a process – whenever I see a post where somebody has expressed how they are feeling, it mentally helps me. It reminds me that I am not alone, and that’s why awareness is necessary for recovery and growth.