Katie Meegan | Contributing Writer
It’s been nearly a month since Mental Health awareness week and something just still isn’t sitting right with me. I volunteered. I ran around the Arts Block on a miserable Wednesday morning, coercing unsuspecting couch sitters into taking a lollipop, hugging the welfare bear, and taking a card with a list of support services on them. Which was fine, practically fun in fact. Mental health is something that we all have to address. According to Trinity Students Union Welfare officer Ian Mooney, ”You’ll often hear that 1 in 3 young people will experience mental health problems, which isn’t entirely true. Everyone will experience mental health problems at some point.”
So mental health is something that everyone needs to look after. Mental illness, on the other hand, is something entirely different. And this is where the general advice of talking to someone over a cup of tea really got to me.
It is not just the individual that is suffering but it is also family, the friend group or the work place that is affected as well.
Firstly, I am not discouraging those who are going through mental difficulties not to seek support of those around them. I am in no way encouraging the silence or the stigmas attached to mental health in Ireland nor am I undermining the experience of those who have undergone or currently are struggling with depression. I, however, wish to express concern for the partners, friends and family of those dealing with depression. According to Aware, approximately 450,000 people in Ireland suffer from depression at any one time. Having a mental illness is something that no one deserves and a situation that I, luckily, cannot fathom. I do not know what is like to be diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder or any other mental illness.
What I do know comes from my experience as a supporter of someone with depression. If we believe that support is lacking for those with depression, the support for those who live with, socialise with, and befriend people with depression is at least as dismal.
What support services both in Trinity and in this country generally need to realise is that it is not just the individual that is suffering but it is also family, the friend group or the work place that is affected as well. Encouraging the seriously depressed to talk to those around them instead of a professional is a good first step, but not the solution we ultimately need. Talking to someone about your problems is good: it improves communication, strengthens emotional bonds, and can make the individual feel much better in the majority of cases. However, what if these problems are not fixable? Where does that leave the well-intentioned listener, worried about their loved one with nowhere to turn?
Psychologists train for a minimum of seven years to provide the skills that I was trying and failing to mimic over homemade sandwiches in the canteen.
When a very close friend of mine became depressed during our final year of secondary school, I was at first relieved when she confided her problems in me. Here was a girl I cared very much for, and I would’ve gladly given up the points that scraped me a course in Trinity to ensure that she was happy. I didn’t understand what was happening to her and I was terrified. One minute she was the bright and bubbly friend I knew and loved, but the next she would be a foul-mouthed demon, lashing out at those around her. A lot of what she said hurt me, but I felt that I didn’t deserve help when there were problems much bigger than mine standing right there in front of me.
Eventually the rest of our group started avoiding her. I sat through lunches with a sick feeling in my stomach and an awful sense of obligation and duty that kept me awake at night. Everything I knew and researched about her disorder advocated that I listen to her and support her in all ways possible. Psychologists train for a minimum of seven years to provide the skills that I was trying and failing to mimic over homemade sandwiches in the canteen. The day she hold me that she had tried to kill herself I cried on the bus home. That was when I told my mother and we called her unsuspecting parents.
By urging someone to talk to a loved one about their suspected depression we are transferring the individual’s responsibility for self-healing to a second party. There is only so much we can do, and by supporting the vague belief that just talking will fix everything we are deferring the responsibility of mental well-being from psychiatric institutions and the State to untrained lay people. And the majority of the time they have no idea how to cope with the upsetting and frustrating situation they suddenly find themselves in.
We need to realise that, although steady support from family and friends is essential for curing depression, it is not the full solution to the issue of mental ill health. We don’t expect talking to someone with a flu about their current condition will make them better, so why treat depression the same way?
Photo by Matthew Morgan
