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human
Cmv: The best thing society can do for mental health problems is change people's attitude to helping others on an individual every day level instead medication, therapy, charities etc.

Don't get me wrong, I think therapy and medication are useful, and charities are still important to raise awareness for mental health problems and fund studies etc. But I feel that people will often say that mental health is important and a cause they really care about, but at the same time of one of their friends is moody they will stop hanging out with them as much when what they really need is more company. Or if someone they meet seems negative then they will not want to be friends with them.

It's natural for those other people to feel like this but it would be great if we had a culture of pushing through our naturally disinclination to hang around these people because it was important to do so. People being moody, or negative, or not fun be around is what mental health problems look like. People who are lonely and have no friends aren't fun people, but they desperately need people in their lives, and no amount of therapy or medication is going to be as beneficial as simply more people making effort with them.

I met up with a guy from University i knew only a little bit when I first moved to a big city and didn't know anyone. I was a bit depressed at the time because my job was unsociable and my housemates were unsociable and I did t know anyway so this was kind of a lifeline. But because of my situation I don't think I was as fun to hang out with as this guy's other friends were. So he stopped making effort to meet up and I gave up messaging him to meet up because it was always one sided. It put into more into depressed and I basically spend the next few years struggling to make friends even more because I was really depressed and lonely. BUT this guy volunteered for the samaritan's (the mental health hotline) helping people who are depressed or even suicidal. He probably felt like he was doing a good thing and rightly so, but I couldn't help but feel that the people on the phone to him needed that hotline because people in their life weren't willing to be there for them or make friends with them, just like he was doing with me.

Another example is a girl I was seeing who was told me I get into moods sometimes and it's weird. She didn't understand it and she kind of blamed me for it. She thought because she is able to get herself out of a bad mood but I stay in a bad mood for a long time I therefore must not be trying hard enough to get out of it (I explicitly confirmed with her that this is what she was thinking and she agreed). As a result of this assumption, she was less willing to help me get out of the mood I was in because she thought I was being stubborn. The idea that perhaps I just find it harder to get out of a bad mood because I have a personal and family history of depression was less likely to her somehow. She was also a pharmacist so it surprised me that a health professional thought like this. She since ended things with me, which I don't blame her for, but it was at a time when I just loved to a new city and didn't know anyone and it made things a lot harder.


I think the crux of this issue is that we don't recognise mental health problems in our day to day lives. We think people are being weird, or even being dicks because they are acting in a way that we wouldn't act. We see people acting weird on xfactor auditions for example and we laugh at them because we think they are idiots for thinking they could get though with such bad performances.

I told the girl above that people acting weird is what mental health problems look like. It remindas me of the quote from the film Joker: " the worse thing about having mental health problems is that you are expected to act like you don't".

It's like we dish out medication and therapy, and raise awareness about mental health, which do help, but they wouldn't be needed nearly as much of we just had a culture of supporting more the people who need it even if they aren't the funnest people to be around and even if they aren't really close friends.

We give money to others who need it (charity) at a cost to ourselves and this is encouraged in our society because we presumably see these people as being less fortunate and our own situation as being more fortunate, like the roll of the dice. Why should they suffer because they were dealt an unlucky hand?

But we aren't willing to do the same with our time and company, or even respect when this is much more valuable to those same people who were dealt an unlucky hand.
gpt
The best thing society could do for mental health is reduce the contributing and exacerbating factors (hint: it's poverty and overwork) and reduce the barriers that take away people's time and energy to even try and help each other on that personal level (also poverty and overwork)