A Precursor To An Upcoming Post About Volunteering with Mental Health Patients

Mental health has always been an interest of mine. I find it fascinating and I love learning about the different ways people think, feel, and function in the world as a whole.

You’d be surprised by how many people are affected by some sort of mental health disorder – in fact, 1 in 4 people have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Severity varies, but it’s so common in today’s society and it shouldn’t be a taboo subject. I’d like to write more posts on mental health and the different degrees of it, because it affects everyone differently.

However, I thought I would take another approach on mental health – one that I use to address just about everything: humour.

Seriously, if you can’t laugh about things, your life will be very sad. Being able to laugh about things not only makes it easier for people to talk about, but also gets rid of the “hush-hush” mentality that so many of us employ when addressing the issue of mental health.

I’ve started volunteering at the local mental health centre in a town near mine, and they talk a lot about the stigma that follows mental illness and it’s perception in society. It’s true, everything thinks of mentally ill people as being crazy or nuts, but I think it’s because they don’t understand. And who can, really? What we have to understand is that people with mental health issues are still people, and they still have the same feelings and thoughts as everyone else. You don’t call someone with cancer a “cancerous person” (or maybe you do, but that’s your deal); why would you call someone with schizophrenia a “schizophrenic person”? It’s not an identity.

So laugh about it, if it’s easier to deal with it that way. Make jokes, but do it with the knowledge that it is serious, that there’s so much to learn about it, and that more people than you realize suffer from it.

Now that I’ve expressed the fact that I get the importance of creating mental health awareness and that people who suffer are wrongly represented in society, please stay tuned for a soon to come post detailing my experiences of my first day of volunteer orientation.