Mental Health Concerns After Trauma

 Mental illness has become the next pandemic. In America, 52% of women over the age of 40 are on antidepressants. Mental illness presents anytime our emotional and mental stability are compromised. Our emotional and mental stability can become compromised anytime the things that we have come to rely upon for a long time and have allowed to define us are taken away from us - such as going through a divorce, dealing with the loss of a career and grieving the death of a loved one. 

 For families that have a member affected by mental illness, the biggest problem faced by caregivers is the inability to distinguish true suffering and mental anguish from the occasional manipulation tactic and dramatization. Unfortunately there is no way to ever really tell. That leaves caregivers unable to always exercise the proper judgement when choosing to react to a situation or emotional outburst with compassion or with discipline. 

In high conflict relationships where arguments are frequent, each time we explode with an angry emotional outburst and cross that thin line between wise mind and emotional mind, we momentarily feel a sense of release - an empowerment to speak our mind and to raise our voice. It’s liberating. and after we cross that fine line during heated arguments with our spouse or loved one enough times, we start to enjoy not the arguing, but the feeling of liberation that the explosive verbal diarrhea and release of emotions triggers in our brain. 

 When we start to enjoy this feeling of liberation thru conflict more and more, we develop an addiction. The dopamine in our brain’s reward pathway now revs up in response to engaging in high conflict exchanges for some people who crossed that line enough times. 

 Mental illness is a prison within our own mind. Lethargy is associated with many types of mental illness, and the overconsumption of thought, particularly a single thought or group of thoughts, without being able to turn on and off the flow of theses thoughts (ie. what our mind experiences when we feel anxiety, depression, fear, paranoia, etc)

 A hallmark of mental illness is the formation of strong conclusions. The more unshakable the conclusions you form in your mind, the less open your psyche will be to the views and perspectives of others. A classic example is the man behind the wheel of a car who refuses to ask for directions. Even though it would probable lessen the time of the trip if he were to stop and ask for directions, in the moment that he is the man behind the wheel, his ego takes over and a streak of narcissism prevents the man behind the wheel from prioritizing the time wasted in his day over the importance of his own ego. The more malleable the conclusions you have formed in your mind about other people and your reality, the more the psychological reality you have created in your own mind works either cohesively or antagonistically when going through life’s experiences.

 A major contributor to mental illness is approaching life using only your intellect as a lens of interpretation : “I Think therefore I am”. Engaging only one brain hemisphere most of the time leads to compartmentalization and ineffective living. Ignoring the intuition, ignoring our innate conscience, and ignoring these other dimensions of intelligence cause us to fragment our perceptions of reality such that we begin to compartmentalize our emotions and reactions to things that make us uncomfortable and try to pretend they are not there. This is the most significant consequence of ‘toxic positivity’, an untoward complication of “Personality Ethics” and “positive mental attitude” that has emerged in society since World War I.