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Health

Her mother doesn't get why she's depressed. So she explains the best way she knows how.

Sabrina Benaim eloquently describes what it's like to be depressed.

via Button Poetry/YouTube

Sabrina Benaim's “Explaining My Depression to My Mother."

Sabrina Benaim's “Explaining My Depression to My Mother" is pretty powerful on its own.

But, in it, her mother exhibits some of the most common misconceptions about depression, and I'd like to point out three of them here.

Misconception #1: Depression is triggered by a single event or series of traumatic events.

empathy, human condition, humanity

Depression isn’t just over sleeping.

Most people think depression is triggered by a traumatic event: a loved one dying, a job loss, a national tragedy, some THING. The truth is that depression sometimes just appears out of nowhere. So when you think that a friend or loved one is just in an extended bad mood, reconsider. They could be suffering from depression.

Misconception #2: People with depression are only sad.

family, parents, mom, anxiety

The obligation of anxiety.

Most people who have never experienced depression think depression is just an overwhelming sadness. In reality, depression is a complex set of feelings and physical changes in the body. People who suffer from depression are sad, yes, but they can also be anxious, worried, apathetic, and tense, among other things.

Misconception #3: You can snap out of it.

button poetry, medical condition, biological factors

Making fun plans not wanting to have fun.

The thing with depression is that it's a medical condition that affects your brain chemistry. It has to do with environmental or biological factors first and foremost. Sabrina's mother seems to think that if her daughter would only go through the motions of being happy that then she would become happy. But that's not the case. Depression is a biological illness that leaks into your state of being.

Think of it this way: If you had a cold, could you just “snap out of it"?

No? Exactly.

empathy, misconceptions of depression, mental health

Mom doesn’t understand.

via Button Poetry/YouTube

These are only three of the misconceptions about depression. If you know somebody suffering from depression, you should take a look at this video here below to learn the best way to talk to them:

This article originally appeared on 11.24.15

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The rise in mental health awareness has been great—but we're missing an important element

We should all be taught the tools to manage our brain.

Photo by cottonbro studio/Pexels

Can we start taking a more proactive rather than reactive approach to mental health?

Nearly 300 years ago, Benjamin Franklin gave us the saying, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Oddly enough, he was talking about fire safety in that instance, but it holds true for health as well. It's arguably better to proactively prevent a problem than to wait for a crisis you have to fix.

It's taken a while—and there's still a ways to go, especially when it comes to insurance coverage—but disease prevention has caught on in the physical health world. We don't just treat illness when it comes; we know we need to proactively maintain good physical health. We have PSAs about eating a heart-healthy diet and exercising regularly to prevent heart disease. We have dieticians and nutritionists who research what foods our bodies need (and need to avoid) to function at their best. We consume calcium to prevent osteoporosis and wear sunscreen to ward off skin cancer. We talk about the importance of sleep to let our bodies repair themselves.

Kids learn about physical health maintenance and disease prevention in health classes, and they should. Why don't we teach mental health maintenance the same way?

For sure, the dramatic rise in mental health awareness and education in the past decade or two has been extraordinary, fulfilling a long-neglected need. People are far more aware, accepting and understanding of mental health issues than in the past, and we've come a long way in removing the stigma of mental illness.

But our approach to mental health awareness and education is still largely reactive. "If you struggle with anxiety/depression/etc. it's okay to seek help and here's where to find it" is the most common messaging. And that's great—a huge step up from "Suck it up, buttercup. If you need therapy, you're a psycho." It's good that we've normalized going to therapy if you have a mental health issue, and it's good that we've reduced the shame of taking medication to manage mental health disorders. However, as a parent whose kids have struggled with various degrees of anxiety, I think we need a more proactive approach—one that focuses on mental health maintenance and provides tools that might prevent disorders from spinning out of control in the first place.

When I started taking my daughter to therapy for a debilitating anxiety disorder, I was surprised to find out how much I didn't know about how anxiety actually functions. I knew the basics of the "fight, flight or freeze" response and I knew anxiety meant that instinctual survival system was overreacting. What I didn't know was that the logical approaches my husband and I had tried to calm that system in our daughter were actually making her anxiety worse.

Thanks to her therapist, we learned all about the amygdala (the brain's fear center), what it responds to and what it doesn't. My daughter learned to recognize the cues that her anxiety was in its early stages, like a snowball starting to roll down a mountain, and how to manage it before it became a thundering avalanche. We learned that our repeated reassurances that everything was fine actually reinforced her anxiety instead of alleviating it, which is totally counterintuitive. My daughter learned how to talk to her brain when it told her something she feared was going to happen. Instead of saying, "No, that bad thing isn't going to happen," (the amygdala really hates being told it's wrong), she learned to say things like, "Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong—let's wait 10 minutes and see what happens." That small difference in language inside her own head made a world of difference. Literally life-changing.

I don't have an anxiety disorder, but sitting in on her therapy sessions helped me learn a ton about how brains work in general. And it definitely helped me be better able to help my children. In every session, I kept wondering, "Why have I not learned these things before? Why do they not teach us about managing thoughts and feelings in school?" We all have brains. Most of us struggle with our brains misbehaving sometimes. One in three adults will deal with an anxiety disorder in their life, and many more will experience fear or worry that doesn't rise to the level of a full-fledge disorder, so isn't "How to manage the amygdala" something all of us should learn?

Imagine if we started developing skills and tools to manage our brains at a young age instead of waiting for mental health disorders to develop before learning them. Schools started down that road with social-emotional learning (SEL), which teaches teaches kids about recognizing their emotions and manage them with breathing exercises and the like, but SEL unfortunately got wrapped up in the craze over curriculum and has been banned in some states. But we don't need that large of a curriculum umbrella for simply teaching kids how their brains work. This is basic health information. Maybe people worry that proven mindfulness techniques will turn too woo woo or something, but there's plenty of evidence-based, research-backed, non-controversial tools we can share to manage and maintain our mental health.

And I'd argue such knowledge is far more useful to the average person than, say, knowing how to factor quadratic equations.

I have personally witnessed how passing on the strategies we learned with my daughter to her younger siblings helped them learn to manage their own anxiety so much earlier. Could we have prevented my daughter's anxiety disorder completely? I doubt it—some of us are genetically hardwired with certain tendencies. But I do think we could have prevented it from becoming debilitating if we had known from the start how to navigate what her brain was doing, saving her years of anguish and frustration.

While we can't necessarily prevent mental health disorders, we can set people up with a much fuller mental health toolbox a lot earlier than we do. We all benefit from understanding our own thoughts and feelings, and the idea that we should all learn more about how our brains work is…well, a no-brainer. Of course we need to treat disorders when they occur, but let's get proactive in how we manage mental health as well. With mental health issues reaching epidemic levels, it could only help.

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Kristen Bell's advice to her younger self about depression is a must hear for everyone

"We're all just human. And you can do it."

Child Mind Institute/Youtube

Actress Kristen Bell speaks up about coping with depression.

Actress Kristen Bell lives with anxiety and depression.

Maybe you wouldn't have guessed it scanning through her work on IMDb. She's the voice behind Anna in "Frozen," after all; the star of a former hit show called "The Good Place," for goodness sake.

Those seem like, um ... happy roles. Right?

That's why Bell is speaking out again about her mental illness.

The media we consume — on our phones, in the magazine aisle, even in Bell's own delightful TV series and films — rarely convey an accurate depiction of reality. And Bell is advising anyone else living with mental illness not to be fooled.

In a video produced by the Child Mind Institute, Bell opened up about what she'd like to tell her younger self.

"What I would say to my younger self is don’t be fooled by this game of perfection that humans play," she said. "Because Instagram and magazines and TV shows — they strive for a certain aesthetic, and everything looks so beautiful, and people seem like they don’t have any problems. But everyone’s human."

She continued (emphasis added):

"Everyone has problems. Everyone feels yucky on the inside sometimes. And you deserve to feel just as beautiful on the days that you wear no makeup, and the days you don’t shower, and the days that you feel like you’re depressed. And you have an obligation to take care of yourself from the inside out, because that’s how you can truly feel beautiful.”

In recent years, Bell has spoken up candidly about her own mental health in hopes it can benefit others.

The actress was diagnosed with anxiety and depression when she was 18 years old. As she explained to "Off Camera with Sam Jones" in 2016, her mom had been the one to fill her in on their family's history with mental illness.

Bell started taking medication to help — and has no qualms about it. "I still take it today; I have no shame in that,” Bell explained. "You would never deny a diabetic his insulin, but for some reason when someone needs a serotonin inhibitor, they're immediately ‘crazy’ or something."

Her anxiety and depression, Bell noted, is probably the biggest differentiation between her own life and the characters she portrays on screen.

Depression and anxiety affect millions of Americans of all ages. But despite their prevalence, stigma surrounding mental illness — dissuading people from reaching out, for instance, or shaming them for taking medication — remains a major barrier stopping people from accessing the resources they need.

Bell wants every kid to know they deserve to feel better.

"Never feel embarrassed or ashamed about who you are," Bell advises viewers in her new PSA. "Never feel embarrassed or ashamed about the uniqueness that is you, because there are people out there to help. And we're all just human. And you can do it."

Learn more about depression and anxiety — and access the help you or your child deserve — at the Child Mind Institute.

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Child Mind Institute is an organization changing children's lives.

childmind.org

The Child Mind Institute is an independent nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of children struggling with mental health and learning disorders.


This story originally appeared on 5.2.2018



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Education

Why awkwardness is such a real thing for people everywhere and one big key to overcoming it

This is super helpful info for people who struggle with social anxiety.

Pragyan Bezbaruah/Canva

In our brains, awkwardness can feel as painful as being bullied.

Some people fear heights or small spaces, some fear spiders or snakes, and some fear illness or death. When taken to an extreme, such fears can form of an anxiety disorder, but they are understandable fears to have because any one of those things could theoretically spell our demise.

But what about fearing something that isn't physically dangerous at all, but rather psychologically uncomfortable, like…awkwardness?

For people with social anxiety, the fear of awkwardness is as real as the fear of death. "I'd rather cross a glass bridge over a 1,000-foot canyon than introduce myself to someone new" is a totally normal thought for a socially anxious person. The silences and pauses that mark most social interactions are magnified to painful degrees and the feelings of self-consciousness most of us experience in those moments are felt in extremes in the mind of a socially anxious person.

No one likes feeling awkward, of course, but why is it even a thing in the first place? What makes some interactions feel so uncomfortable to our brains? And more importantly, how do we overcome the fear of awkwardness, especially those who find themselves completely paralyzed by it?

The YouTube channel VSauce shared some of the science behind awkwardness, what's happening chemically and emotionally when we feel awkward and some of the perspective shifts that can help keep us from fixating on awkward feelings.

First, the video explains that awkwardness is actually a social good because our feelings of self-consciousness prompt us to avoid certain actions in ways that actual laws and formal etiquette don't.

"People who demonstrate self-consciousness when needed are communicating cooperative intentions, which helps them get along well with others," host Michael explains. "It's no coincidence that brains,susceptible to feeling occasional awkwardness, would become so common.They're successful at cooperating,at social life. Feeling awkward shows that you understand and are keen on smooth social exchanges.Now, too much or too little concern for social rules isn't healthy, but researchers found that just the right amount is great. When a person shows remorse or embarrassment or awkward discomfort, when appropriate,others perceive them as being more trustworthy, and their actions as more forgivable."

In other words, having the capacity to feel awkward actually makes us more likeable. So why does it feel so awful?

Our brains actually respond to awkwardness similarly to how they react to pain or name-calling, flowing along the same neural pathways, resulting in similar physical sensations and triggering our fight-or-flight response. (Thanks, evolution!)

But there are ways to tamp down our overreaction to awkward moments, which can be especially helpful for people who struggle with social anxiety. One reason awkwardness sticks with us so much is that we worry too much about what people are thinking about us, and social anxiety magnifies that worry. The more we realize that people aren't thinking about us nearly as much as we think they are, the more we can let awkward moments go.

In fact, there's a word for the realization that we are just extras in other people's stories, and not the main character—sonder. We are only the protagonist in our own lives. Other people are focused on their own lives.

"Acknowledging this makes your awkwardness look small," Michael says, adding, "But it also makes all of you look small. Tiny. A needle in a giant haystack." That's both a positive and a negative, but that perspective can help us in those moments when we're feeling the pain of awkwardness.

Watch:

You can follow VSauce for more insights on the human experience on YouTube here.

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