Staring at the Sun

So as usual I’ll start with a quick explanation of my title -  Staring at the Sun is a song by Rooster, which (I think!) is about losing out or getting hurt due to being ‘blinded’ by someone – “I’m tired of staring at the sun; can’t stand the way you burn my eyes so I can’t see… You took everything, while I was staring at the sun”.  Anyway, I think it’s quite a clever little lyric and is relevant to today’s blog post, which is partially about society being blinded to certain things.  It also, I realise as I write, gives me a good excuse to sneak in a little picture that captures the literal blinding sunlight phenomenon, which I took on a beach in Ireland a couple of years ago!  Hope you like it.

Anyway, I digress!  The inspiration for this post comes from a recent Mayor’s Debate with Young People in my local area, which I was reading the report for last night (yes that’s right; I read reports about Mayor’s debates in my spare time!).  There were three motions passed that evening, one of which related to mental health and wellbeing in young people.  Specifically ‘there should be more effective and integrated mental health services for young people and their families’.  According to the report, the person supporting this motion drew listeners’ attention to a lack of mental health services tailored directly at young people, to the mental health problems caused by the pressures of growing up on today’s society, and to an overlooking of these as a result of adolescence being viewed as a carefree time.  The opposition, on the other hand, noted that there are already good, well integrated services for young people, but that in fact there should be more investment in health, exercise, youth clubs and general wellbeing for young people.

Now, I’m all for improving mental health services and there do need to be services specifically for young people, but I’m inclined to agree with the latter approach.  We need to invest in preventative strategies to help stop young people developing mental health problems in the first place.  If you haven’t already, by the way, this would be a good time to take a look at my previous post, which is all about simple ways to improve wellbeing and mood.  And from first-hand experience, they really work.  If we can get young people engaging in exercise, in positive social experiences, in healthy eating (NOT dieting!), then I strongly believe we can get young people out of mental health problems.  And in fact I think these strategies would also help to treat the symptoms for some people that have already developed mental health problems, such as mild depression.  As noted in my previous post, evidence suggests that simply doing things is an effective treatment for depression.  Furthermore, using this approach will help young people to avoid the stigma associated with getting therapy or taking medication.  That said, it is also important that we work towards reducing and ultimately eliminating the stigma associated with mental illness.

This brings me nicely on to my next point, which is that in my view there is an urgent need to increase the awareness of mental health problems in society.  This is really where the title for this post becomes relevant, because I feel that society is largely blind to mental health and mental illness.  Ok, so that is a somewhat bold and exaggerated statement, but some serious work needs to be done to open people’s eyes to it.  How many of you were taught about mental health at school?  I would be interested to hear from you if you did, as I certainly didn’t.  Well, I did, but only because I chose to study psychology at A level.  By the way, I’ll just mention that I like to refer to mental health as well as mental illness, because it’s important to see it as a positive thing and not just an uncomfortable topic to avoid. 

Anyway, I think it should be a requirement that mental health and illness is taught to people from a fairly young age, just as physical health and illness are taught in science, P.E., PSHE.  Depression is just as much an illness as cancer, so why shouldn’t people have an awareness that it exists, what it is and how it might be treated?  Please correct me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick here but as far as I can see, schools aren’t really teaching this sort of thing in this country.  It doesn’t even seem to be on the education agenda; I did a search on the TES website last night to find that the last mention of mental health in any of their publications was July 2011 – nearly a year ago!  I’m kind of incredulous that it’s not being talked about more to be honest.  I also read in a publication by YoungMinds that “The Ofsted report on PSHE (2010) found that mental health and emotional wellbeing is a neglected aspect of the curriculum”.  By the way, I’ve included a link to this report at the end of the post so feel free to take a look for more detail.

I strongly believe that simply raising awareness of mental health and mental health provision can go a long way towards preventing mental illness and making treatment of it more efficient.  Yes, we need effective mental health treatment provision, but what use is it if people do not know it’s there?  And what use is knowing it’s there if people don’t recognise the symptoms and therefore don’t know when they or someone they know is experiencing mental illness?  If we simply start helping young people to develop some kind of knowledge base in this field, then we can better equip them to recognise when there is a problem, in some cases to take steps to prevent the problem becoming more severe, and to know when, where and how to seek help.  Further, if mental health and illness becomes part of the syllabus that young people are taught, just as physical and sexual health and illness are, it will become a less uncomfortable topic, more widely understood, and the stigma surrounding it will be reduced (the YoungMinds report I mentioned earlier provides some evidence to support this notion).  More importantly, I really do believe that an increase in awareness would better enable people to take steps to avoid mental health problems developing in the first place or becoming more severe.

So, to summarise, it is my view that mental health should be a compulsory topic in PSHE education and that work needs to be done to increase awareness of mental health and illness in society from a young age.  It is also important to improve provision of strategies such as exercise and general wellbeing, in order to prevent mental illness and decrease the prevalence of this, not just in young people but in society as a whole.  I would be interested to hear about other people’s opinions on this so please do leave a comment if you have any thoughts.  

As always, I’d like to say thank you for taking the time to visit my page and read my blog.  I hope you’ll agree that this is an extremely important issue that impacts on the whole of society and so I’d really appreciate it if you could share this and ask others to share it to really get the message out there.  Thanks again and please do come back in two weeks for my next instalment! 

Links:

http://www.youngminds.org.uk/assets/0000/1410/YoungMinds_response_to_the_PSHE_Review.pdf