“You have been criticizing yourself for years, and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.”
- Louise L. Hay
Mental health is the level of psychological well-being or an absence of mental illness. It is the state of someone who is "functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment". From the perspectives of positive psychology or of holism, mental health may include an individual's ability to enjoy life and to create a balance between life activities and efforts to achieve psychological resilience.
Thus it is an influential aspect of life and should be taken actively. It is now due season to be shameless and to talk about it blatantly.
“I am not crazy.” That’s what the touched community answers when accused by the judgmental society, who cancels people and behavior out of their area of expertise. This social stigma surrounding mental health is uncanny in a world where mortals are portrayed through their emotional and behavioral adjustments. Progress in mental health service delivery has been slow in most low- and middle-income countries. Barriers include the existing public-health priorities and its influence on funding; challenges to the delivery of mental health care in primary care settings; the low numbers of those trained in mental health care; and the lack of mental health perspective in public health leadership. There have been numerous calls for invoking political will, for enhancing advocacy and galvanizing community participation; all with scant improvement in outcomes.
Thus, the need to explore the paradigm of mental health awareness as a means of
combating stigma, enhancing prevention, ensuring early recognition, and also stimulating simple and practical interventions within the community becomes increasingly urgent.
Today, there are opportunities in terms of growing acknowledgement of mental disorders as key targets of global health action. Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that’s mentionable is manageable. We just have to fight through it with bolsters from our families and also a very close-minded society. We, as the youth of this society, have to destigmatize our elders and help in removing it for our touched friends to deal with their emotions, which make them human. Health literacy has been described as the “ability to access, understand, and use information” to promote and maintain good health.
Awareness and health literacy are two sides of the same coin. Stigma and discrimination are negative consequences of ignorance and misinformation.
“What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor and more unashamed
conversations.”
~Glenn Close
- Avni Chaturvedi