Mental and Emotional Health is Hard Work

 I was reading an article about how 30% less people seek help from therapists and counselors for their mental health than in the 1990s. And how, instead often people use drugs like Mood altering drugs instead. Though I understand why people do this to "Save Money", I think if you think about the damage you are doing to your lives long term by having to take these kinds of drugs both psychologically and physically in the short and long run, seeing a therapist is a bargain in comparison to the long term damage to a person's life through taking mood altering drugs. The other problem is that mood altering drugs also tend to rewire more permanently the way a brain actually functions. Imagine if you rewired your hands to not feel pain. So then, you could hold your hands over the gas or electric burners of your stove and watch them slowly melt and catch on fire. In some ways taking mood altering drugs is like that.

It is sort of like some children are not born with the ability to feel pain so they bang their heads against the wall sometimes until they die because they can't feel any pain as they bludgeon themselves into brainlessness and death. I sort of see mood altering drugs as being like this in regard to life in general. We feel all sorts of pain because it helps us stay alive and not die. Depression can be useful if we use it to move our lives or where we live to another place where we are not depressed anymore. By forcing ourselves to fit into molds that we never belonged in in the first place we are mutating ourselves into something no longer human. And if some of us are no longer human in our emotions or actions then what are we individually and as a group of beings here on earth? If it can no longer be said that some of us are human what are they? And what does that make the rest of us? In this context  movies like "Shaun of the Dead" make more sense.

One alternative to becoming inhuman is the Human Potential movement and Peer counseling in addition to therapy. By understanding the traumas of most of our childhoods and why we react like we do to many different situations in life we come to separate our personal problems from everyone else's personal problems. When we no longer project what is bothering us from the traumas in our own lives upon everyone else then we can begin to have a more healthy relationships both with ourselves and everyone else in our lives. Without the capacity to be kind to oneself it is not really possible to be kind to others. And if one cannot be kind to oneself and to others, healthy relationships cannot exist either with oneself or with others. No one is perfect but you have to start somewhere and the easiest place to start is to be your own best friend. From there, you can learn to be someone else's best friend too, and they can be your best friend too. Life isn't easy for anyone, but it doesn't have to be impossible. If you just take an interest in your own happiness and health (all kinds) and parent (take good care) of yourself anything good is possible.