If I had a pound for every time someone has said “It is all in your head.” to me, I could have retired by now. A brain tumour is also all in your head (along with various other conditions) but people do not trivialise these. The saddest thing is that on more than one occasion, this has been said to me by someone in the medical profession.

I battled for a long time with the notion that it was all in my head and that I was the problem. I should be able to fix this, shouldn’t I? I can just stop being weak or broken, can’t I? This and other similar comments such as “You just need to be more positive.”, “Smile, you’ll feel better” and one of the worst and most harmful comments “You are just an attention seeker (said to me once by a Psychiatrist of all people) added more fuel to an already well-established sense of self-hatred that had begun when I was about 8 years old. I hated myself even more now because if others were telling me that what I was going through was effectively nonsense and of my own making, then it must be true, mustn’t it?

Let me state this categorically and very clearly NO ONE CHOOSES TO FEEL LIKE THAT. I cannot even begin to describe the depth of the agony I was going through. What I didn’t need on top of it was extra helpings of guilt and self-loathing. Guilt was something I already had enough of as I was aware of the general social attitude towards mental health problems. This led to years of pretending that all was well until it became blatantly obvious that this was not the case. What I did need was someone to listen without judgment and support me while I found my way through all of this. Thankfully, I eventually found this and have come on in massive leaps and bounds. I now look after both my mental and physical health and I do not only do this when there are symptoms of something being wrong.

Society for a long time has taught us that our mental health is unimportant and that when we have issues with our mental health it is because we are weak, malingerers or beyond repair. Such an ingrained attitude is a very difficult one to move as is any belief or attitude that has been passed through many generations. Thankfully, this has been changing albeit quite slowly over the last few decades. Society is beginning to see that our mental health is just as important as our physical health. They have an impact on each other. Mental health is not something only to be addressed when a problem occurs but something that needs to be maintained throughout our lives.

Written By Lorna Smart

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