Thankfully, we're now living in a time that is adamant about revolutionizing mental health awareness and vocalizing our issues in an effort to reduce the stigma surrounding them, but we can't deny that there's something still so affecting about revealing that you go to therapy. In a way, it seems to legitimize your concerns to others to a greater extent, like your problems are "worthy" of the ears and mind of a professional.
It's easy to understand this response to it. With this increased awareness, there's also been a gross romanticization of mental illness as well. Influencers have deemed it exploitable, trendy, and profitable.
But those of us who have and continue to endure them know this couldn't be farther from the truth.
While realized mental health problems are just as valid without treatment, I'm still a firm believer in the fact that everyone, with or without a diagnosis, can benefit from therapy. Of course, we have to acknowledge it as a privilege. It can be expensive, time-consuming (depending on how often you receive it), so on and so on. But if you have access to it and are able to spend the time — and usually money — to go, it can only make you a healthier individual.
However, I think there's still immense repulsion to the idea. The media we're exposed to on a regular basis presses the opposite, but an implicit stigma exists around the concept of treatment despite its growing popularity.
Just as it seems to make a mental health issue that much more "real" to the masses, it makes it so much scarier to people who have never been.
This is another topic that I could and certainly have dissected before, but what I really want to drive home is that it's time we start prioritizing mental health just as much as our physical condition. No, most of us don't visit the doctor every week — usually just on the occasion that whatever physical ailment we're experiencing is too much to remedy on our own (or, you know, you need a Tier 2 for that one class). But we do receive physicals, checkups, and stuff of that nature every now and then.
In the midst of our hectically booked lives, I'd say we're incredibly likely to endure some amount of stress, anxiety, really anything that we are always capable of coping with in a better way.
Having been to therapy for many different concerns of my own, I'm not only actively learning how to resolve them, but I'm essentially rediscovering what it's like to live as me from now on.
I'm healthier and a hell of a lot happier than I ever could've been if I had disregarded the things that bothered me even when I wasn't struggling with what would be considered a diagnosable mental illness.
If we ever want to live better lives — even if we're already what we perceive as "good" — we have to start taking ourselves seriously, in every possible way.
