Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make healthy choices.
Mental illnesses are characterized by alterations in thinking, mood or behavior associated with significant distress and impaired functioning. Examples of specific mental illnesses include: Mood disorders, major depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder.
Mental health changes in our lives. Sometimes the changes can be subtle over the course of several years. Other times, it can be sudden or can change daily. The biggest contributing factor to our mental health are the things happening in our lives – it’s a continuum and its quite natural that we move back in forth on it, depending on what is going on and number of other factors.
Stigmas around mental health issues are very often systemic and a cultural change is required. It marks an entire group of people as socially different, unacceptable or undesirable; it is this belief that leads to discrimination. The fear of labels, exclusion, discrimination or ostracization keeps many people from feeling that they can comfortably access supports to help them with their mental health, whether it’s a single event-driven issue or a more complex, long term issue.
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