My Internship with MyMind: Part 2

I came across a quote recently that resonated with me:

“Your mind is the brush with which you paint reality. And for all intents and purposes you could be the next Van Gogh” – Anonymous

---

“Your mind is the brush with which you paint reality…”

How we conceptualise the world around us, and more specifically, our mental health, is unique to us. We paint our own realities: we cannot see the world the way another sees it. This is not through a lack of trying though – we formulate metaphors and comparisons in an attempt to better understand our own existence and to explain it to others:

Getting a tattoo feels like a cat scratching your sunburn.

To be worried is to have a weight on your shoulders.

When you can’t get through to someone, it’s like talking to the wall.

Churchill famously called his depression a Black Dog, reflecting the tenacious grips and unwelcome persistence of depression that is often reported. Bressie gave his a name he didn’t like (Sorry to any Jeffreys out there!) so that he could personify it, and therefore stand up to it.

MyMind focuses on the individual and how their experience is unique to them. The service can provide face-to-face or online sessions via Skype, individual and couples counselling and caters for everyone’s unique needs: students, parents, children, older people, and even those whose first language isn’t English. Among other things, I have been developing feedback surveys to allow clients to express this unique experience, and so the organisation may continue to provide tailored support for those who need it.

“… And for all intents and purposes you could be the next Van Gogh.”

Your mind is a powerful tool, but a paintbrush cannot perform its function if it isn’t maintained and cared for. Over time, the paint of our experiences accumulates on its bristles, weighing heavily, their movement becomes constricted and eventually they can no longer create a Louvre-worthy landscape. Keeping our mental health in check is vitally important to the overall picture that is created. This procedure varies from person to person, but typically, exercise, a balanced diet and a good support network make up the clean and bright colour scheme to paint our own uniquely priceless masterpiece.

Of all the issues faced in the mental health sector, stigma is the gloopiest, ugliest paint on the palette, corroding the bristles it touches and ensnaring the victim in a vicious and unnecessary cycle. Organisations like MyMind are slowly scrubbing away this stigma by spreading the word on mental health issues. Stigma often comes from a lack of understanding: when people don’t understand something they fear it and attack it. The more accessible mental health information is, the further we can wash away the stigma.

Much like how humans only experience a tiny fraction of the colour spectrum, and therefore cannot even comprehend the vast remainder (any Bat Whisperers out there?), we all have our own individual experiences of the emotional spectrum in different ways and at stages of our life. Therefore, it can sometimes be difficult to empathise with somebody’s mental health experiences if they are not our own.

MyMind breaks down this stigma to foster the unique artist in everyone, painting a brighter picture of mental health in Ireland. No one has the same feelings about the same experience. What we can do is to accept and embrace individual differences, the colours of our collected experiences facilitating in producing a rainbow canvas that we are proud of. We all see the world in different colours.

“There’s no way of knowing if red means the same thing in your head as red means in my head when someone says red” – Matilda the Musical

My Internship with MyMind

Since I was very small, I wanted to help people for a living. It was a broad criteria, and I played with the idea of teaching. If I wasn’t so squeamish, nursing would probably have been a logical career path, or if I wasn’t so clumsy, maybe a firefighter!

It soon became more apparent that I wanted my career to be relevant to me. Not that I hadn’t had any experiences in hospitals or accidental pyrotechnics courtesy of dodgy microwaves, quite frankly though, I didn’t fancy any more, nor did the idea of heading back to school again appeal to me. I was going to need a bit more time to recover from that!

Mental health and mental illness are always relevant. I don’t believe there is a single soul in Ireland who mental illness hasn’t affected, either directly or indirectly, and this coupled with my frustrations at the stigmatisation surrounding it and my generally inquisitive nature lead to my interest in psychology.

I applied to MyMind because I value their mission to provide accessible and affordable mental health services: I consider this vitally important, and increasingly so in today’s fast-paced society. I arrived in the hopes that I would gain a greater insight into the inner workings of mental health service provision. Thus far I have not only had this opportunity, but one that has allowed me to develop my creative writing skills, and learn a vast array of information that I hadn’t at all anticipated surrounding the process of company branding, website building and communications.

Centres like MyMind open the door to conversation about things that we should never have been afraid to talk about in the first place. This whole stigma behind mental illness leads not only to a stubborn reluctance to accept when we have a problem, but being genuinely unsure of what is happening to us when we do, leading to delayed interventions and prolonged feelings of alienation that are so easily prevented. Mental health in Ireland has been a taboo topic rarely discussed, and as a result, up until recently, our mental health literacy left much to be desired. People cannot comprehend something and articulate about it appropriately if they don’t have the language to first describe it. This lack of understanding leads to a fear of vocalising about mental health, and more so, mental illness. Of course, this is a byproduct of stigma, which is a byproduct of a long history of avoiding mental illness and anything to do with it. Nowadays, organisations such as MyMind have the challenge of deconstructing this dated approach, which is admittedly a huge task, one that we shouldn’t be faced with in the first place. We as a society are getting there, albeit very, very slowly.

“Mental health issues do not have a limp” (Niall Breslin, 2015). In the absence of a physical problem, it can be very difficult to empathise with no visible bandage, scars or wheelchairs. More specifically, with depression, it is difficult to treat an absence of something – because I feel like that’s what depression is – a distinct lack of what most of us would deem to be normal human affect. What do we do with nothing? How can we combat nothing and make it something?

The vital first step is to open the conversation that has remained closed since time immemorable. What is so different about anxiety from a broken leg anyway? With any luck, this fear and uncertainty around matters of mental health will ebb away as the stigma is slowly doing now, and the elephant in the room will run from it with burning ears when everyone can talk freely about it without judgement.

“Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

– JK Rowling

Issues going on inside your head are just as relevant and real as any going on in any other part of your body, so treat them this way. Part of my internship with MyMind sees me sharing this message via social media. I have covered topics such as understanding suicide, as well as providing helpful links to articles and news relating to techniques such as mindfulness and stress reduction, flagging the services of MyMind and how they can help in these processes.

My internship lasts until May and I will upload further blog posts of my experiences and views on the mental health situation in Ireland at the moment, so stay tuned!