Mental Health Awareness Week 2020
Beginning tomorrow, it is Mental Health Awareness Week (MHAW) here in the UK.
In 2020 it still strikes me as odd that we need to have a mental health awareness week at all; when are people going to start treating physical health and mental health with parity?! However, with the world as it is, I believe it is still needed and support the premise even if I think people should be aware of mental health everyday.
I am a little ambivalent towards this year’s theme of kindness though. According to the Mental Health Foundation, they chose kindness as the theme because
“it is a cornerstone of our individual and collective mental health”
and it can help build self-esteem, battle isolation, raise confidence, reduce stress and create a sense of belonging. I agree that all of these things are great for creating good mental health but I feel that in MHAW, the idea of kindness could be taken a step further. That step is to explicitly promote kindness towards those who have, or have had, poor mental health or mental illness.
I understand that there is a fundamental difference between mental health (which the week is promoting) and mental illness but there is still so much stigma, unkindness and negativity concerning the latter that it seems to be a missed opportunity not to link the two when raising awareness.
We could all be universally kind to each other, which would raise everyone’s mental health but some people would still be mentally ill - kindness is not a cure for anxiety, depression, OCD, bipolar, schizophrenia or personality disorders to name but a few. And whilst the world still sees these conditions as something to be afraid of, to avoid and to stigmatise, those unwell people are still experiencing unkindness towards something they cannot help having.
I recognise that in order for people to start treating physical and mental health equally, we need to start somewhere. I also know that, as with physical health, the majority of the population are mentally healthy as opposed to mentally ill. Therefore it makes sense to promote a theme that can build on that health and which everyone can access and benefit from. It just seems a shame that when there is only one week of the year set aside for raising awareness of the vast area of mental health, mental illness rarely features at all. This is especially true for this year’s theme where kindness towards those with mental illness could so easily have been explicitly mentioned.
Do we need a Mental Illness Awareness Week to focus on the needs of those who are mentally unwell? Perhaps so.
In an ideal world, a generic theme such as kindness for MHAW should apply to everyone but it feels to me as if this year, the theme is almost adding insult to injury for those with mental illness, which I’m sure is the last effect anyone involved in the decision wanted.
As it happens, May is also BPD / EUPD Awareness Month so there are opportunities for people to raise awareness of this particular personality disorder and its related issues through that. However, these separate awareness campaigns do not generally gain the attention of the whole nation and are often left to be promoted by those with the condition themselves. That is why I feel so strongly that this year’s MHAW has missed an important opportunity - and feel that once again, Mental Health Awareness only does so much to raise awareness of so many people’s daily struggles both with their own mental health and other people’s attitude towards it.
If you would like to know more about BPD / EUPD or read my post promoting awareness of the condition, please visit my article: https://eupdrecovery.com/home/2018/6/11/bpd-awareness-how-does-it-really-feel-to-have-eupd-bpd
