Thursday, the 12th of September, 2024. R U OK Day. Another year has rolled around. I’m starting to wonder if every year, every R U OK Day, I am a little more cynical than the last. In saying that, though, this is probably since I lost my friend to suicide late 2022. I didn’t get … Read More
“Are you okay?” The words are being thrown around left, right, and centre today. The school children are wearing yellow. Businesses send out emails to their employees. Supermarket and retail employees sport their yellow wristbands. If only people took it seriously every day, instead of just one day a year…
‘Just look on the bright side!’
‘It’s not as bad as you think it is!’
‘If you just focus on the positives, you’ll feel better.’
‘Your life is wonderful, you don’t need to be depressed!’
We’ve all heard them, and a lot of us have even said them. But you know what? These things don’t help (believe it or not)! I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again; people like us, we can’t just look on the bright side to feel better. If it were that simple, who would need antidepressants? Therapists would be out of a job, and we would all be ‘okay’! Here are a few reasons why you really shouldn’t tell someone with a mental illness (or even someone who is seriously struggling with something) to just ‘look on the bright side’:
A phrase that often goes through my head is “some days are better than others”, and I have often used this in my posts and stories, simply because it is so true. Some days are great! Other days are average. And some days, we feel like we are in a living hell.
We might be too tired to fight it; things seem too difficult to keep pressing on. But even if some days the only thing I do is survive, I will not give up. If I wrote out my entire life story, not once would you read that I gave up, and this is why:
There are some days, where you simply ‘have’ hope. It’s just there. And then other days, you really have to fight for it. A quote that I love and can really relate to is “Sometimes you have to fight a battle more than once to win it”. If depression, anxiety or other struggles are something … Read More
Feelings. They creep up on us out of nowhere, confuse us, bring us joy, and even pain. But what do you do when they hit you like a tonne of bricks? When you’re overwhelmed by this perhaps foreign concept, these things called feelings? A lot of us struggle when we begin to have different feelings, … Read More
One day, everything is perfect. And then the next? The darkness is back, and it’s threatening to take over. Again. The sky is a beautiful rich blue, velvety and bright, but then in the distance, clouds begin to appear. They are just beginning to scatter across the horizon, puffy and white, and to start with, … Read More
Part III: How to help a loved one with a mental illness Do you have a friend or family member who is struggling with mental illness? The way you respond to them can have a massive impact, but it’s hard to know if it will be negative or positive. Here are some important things to … Read More
Part II: You’re Not Alone. One of the hardest things to do is to acknowledge and accept the fact that you are struggling, especially if it is something to do with depression, anxiety, or other similar issues. We don’t want to admit that there is something wrong, many of us don’t like to ask for … Read More
Part I: Stop the Stigma Even though in today’s society there are many things spoken about that have been silent until now, mental illness is something that still has huge stigma around it. For people who don’t know what that is, it literally means “a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or … Read More
