this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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You know how when you feel physically sick and the meds or the hot drink kicks in and you feel momentarily relieved? That's me right now and getting the odd text from a friend and having that moment of connection and safety. Can feel the mind and heart lightening for a second like nurofen for the soul.
I wish this kind of ill feeling was better supported... get a prescription and time off for promoting healthy social connection. Whatever it is I think my next job as an employee will need more of that, either in terms of more time outside of work to foster that or better connections in the workplace.
I do wonder whether we'll get to that point. I hope we do. And I wonder whether we'll see advancements enough where we can point to something and say "see, this is what's wrong with me right now". Having something like a sprained ankle or infection is easy - they're visible signs of why we're not physically able to do something. But if there was like a... I don't know... some kind of test that showed a serotonin imbalance (for example), you know?
Yeah, exactly. Of course, mental health is far more nebulous and complex, and cause and effect interactions are not going to be as predictable as with physical ailments. But there is still scope for determining an evidence based, systematic approach to recognising and supporting people's needs. There ARE things that demonstrably help, that might be more apparent from the outside - and it sucks that the onus is very much on the sufferer to carve out solutions and explain everything to others.
It would be so much easier if it was just simple accepted that this happens... that's the one thing that I hold out for is that we'll eventually get to a point in our culture where we no longer actually have to explain ourselves. Thankfully we're moving but it's at a remarkably slow rate, at least slow enough that it feels at times to have stagnated somehow backwards.
It feels like perhaps in pre industrial societies this was more inherently accepted even if poorly understood and often misattributed/mistreated with religious or spiritual interpretations. But if your heart hurt or you felt a dark cloud over your life at least people kind of accepted and knew this was a thing and that you needed some kind of care (even if it involved witchcraft) rather than expecting you to chin up all the time and that it was all a figment of your imagination...