For Mental Health Try Focusing on the Heart
The answer's in the heart. Not in the head or a pill bottle.
We have a mental health epidemic. The World Health Organization states approximately one million people a year die by suicide. Every 62 minutes someone dies due to an eating disorder. Approximately 1 in 4 individuals will suffer from a mental illness in their lives. 3.6% of the world's population suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Something drastic needs to happen. We need to change the world that is evoking such an unhealthy environment for our minds. Depression, trauma, anxiety, self-esteem and eating disorders all disordered coping mechanisms our minds create to deal with the world we're in.
Psychiatry takes the approach of developing medicines by the thousands to change the chemicals in the brain. There was a time psychiatrists did much more than just monitor and prescribe medications.
There is a great deal of research, science, and patient outcomes that prove medications help. I don't down play the importance of medical interventions.
Some patients need chemical intervention to treat imbalances in their brains. I do not deny or dispute their purpose or importance.
I don't believe this is the approach that is going to solve our world wide mental illness emergency. I believe if we want to cure our minds we need to start with our hearts. Serving others, thinking about others, losing ourselves for a while in making someone else's suffering better.
Have someone struggling with anxiety, PTSD or depression foster an animal that has been living in a depressing cage at the SPCA. Relieve two broken creatures suffering and let them give each other love.
Give time to Long Term Care Facilities where our elderly sit long lonely days in depression and sadness. Have seniors share stories of their childhoods and adventures from the past. Let them impart their wisdom of life. Give both lonely souls someone to care about, connect with and learn gratitude for.
Encourage them to use their talents to serve others. An artist or writer could create books and illustrations for children in need, musicians could write songs to promote mental health or brighten someones day.
Worthwhile activities to build their knowledge of their own worth. Time spent creating smiles in a day, gratitude in a heart and love in a life. Moods would be lifted, anxieties would be eased and spirits would be healed.
People are bruised, broken and damaged and they are surrounded by a world just as broken...but also cruel and spiteful and mean. Everyone in this world is just trying to get through the day the best they can. Some are misguided, being shown examples of money being the biggest priority. Power being everything. And what has it given us a world full of people focusing on themselves.
We're a selfish world but we're obsessed with what everyone else is doing. Everyone seems to feel entitled to tell someone else what they are doing wrong or how to live their lives. If their opinion isn't the same as the other person than 'They must be wrong'.
If we just concentrated on what we were doing to make the world better instead of what someone else was doing to make it worse than the world would actually be a better, happier, more mentally healthy place.
So many are broken in this self centered world that they are either hurting someone else or killing themselves. We need more love in the world. We need more gratitude in the world. But to have gratitude we need to create something to be grateful for.
Concentrate on creating healing rather than labeling and medicating the broken minds we have produced by focusing on the science rather than the soul.
