Six Things You Need To Know For Your Mental Health

Just in time for World Mental Health Day, a handy list

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Three more days until everything is fine

Sunday is World Mental Health Day. The one day of the year when every single person in the world suddenly becomes totally mentally healthy. The next day: boom, back to being bonkers.

Not really.

But it’s a good effort, though. It’s more about spreading mental health availability around the globe, especially to areas without as many advantages as others. The WHO is behind it:

Thanks, fellas!

Oh, it’s the World Health Organization? Okay, that makes sense.

For our purposes, we’re going to use the occasion of World Mental Health Day and the fact that we’re now six months into our show to do a kind of State of the Union thing in regard to minds and the feelings we might have about them.

So tomorrow, Friday, we’re putting out a special bonus episode of Depresh Mode that will share the same title as the top of this newsletter or the subject line in the email you got.

It’s just me in this one. Me and a microphone. Well, and you. And listener ears. I’m not some tree falling in the forest.

Here’s the script I used to tape today. It won’t be precisely identical to what you hear on the pod because I tend to improvise a bit like some sort of sad, non-musical jazz man.

Totally unrelated but awesome:

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This is a special edition of Depresh Mode. I’m John Moe. I’m glad you’re here. It’s just the two of us today. Me and you. And it’s coming out a couple days before World Mental Health Day on October 10th. That seemed like a good time for a kind of state of the union address. A state of our state. Our state of confusion, terror, anxiety, depression, and, yes, hope. I wanted to share some discoveries I’ve had over several years now of making mental health my career thing. Specifically, discoveries I’ve made that have hardened into beliefs. Things I think you ought to know. 

First one is: you’re okay automatically. You don’t have to be mentally stable enough to be okay. There is no benchmark you need to reach. There’s no state exam to determine worth. You don’t need to have a certain amount of money in the bank or a clear enough idea of the future or something below a maximum amount of problems. There’s no breathalizer test that if you blow above a certain number, you don’t deserve personhood. Nah, you’re in. No initiation ritual, no hazing. There aren’t any special jackets but you can wear a Members Only jacket if you like.

This was a tough one for me to learn. This is a tough one for me to remember. I know it but I sometimes need to shove it back into my belief system. You’ve maybe heard me say it before, I’ve certainly heard me say it before, but it’s the kind of thing I don’t think you can hear too many times. By existing, you are okay. By being a living creature, you deserve respect. You deserve kindness. You deserve healthcare treatment - including mental healthcare treatment - to let you live as fully as possible in this world. 

You never ever ever need to earn that. Your worth is not in danger.

This one took me a while to learn. I would see people interacting with the world, people who were unencumbered by complicated minds, and there would be such ease to it. Which meant one of two things. A, they were skilled at covering up how messed up they felt or B, they didn’t worry about qualifying for personhood. They didn’t need to impress someone or announce their credentials in some way. And even if someone was trash to them, they still had the innate knowledge that this was someone else’s problem, not theirs.

And those people, the unburdened confident ones, you know, it must be nice, right? The rest of us? With the complicated minds and maybe the big bumps in the past? Well, we can have what they have. It might mean working at it a bit more. But we can do that. It can be better than it is. And we are entitled to assistance to make it that way.

You’re already okay. You have always been okay. You’ve always been good enough. You can’t not be. That’s point number one. You want to write this down? You deserve pencils.

Two. It’s not your fault. If you are feeling messed up, if you are feeling depressed in the real down deep clinical sense, if your anxiety is spiking, if you’re just washed up on the fucking rocks half the time, you are not to blame for that. 

How do I know this? Because I know that you did not choose that way to be. You did not opt in. You didn’t get a form and select dysthimic depression. No box saying social anxiety disorder was ticked. There is no waiter to whom you are able to say, “Ooh, I think I’ll go with post traumatic stress. And cole slaw.” You know what it feels like. You would not order that. It’s awful.

This next one was part of two but I’m going to make it its own thing, I’m going to make it number three.

A lot of the feelings you might be going through lately are powerful and unusual and you might think, yeah, this is craziness. This must be what it feels like to go crazy, the world is not like this.

It’s not. And look, I don’t know your precise mental state. But please consider that perhaps you are not fucked up but you are having a logical response to a fucked up world. I know that swearing isn’t always the right thing in every situation, I get that, but I am choosing these words carefully and after a lot of consideration: shit is fucked up. All this fucking shit is fucking fucked up bullshit. Fuck.

We’ve been in a pandemic for a long time. Over 700,000 dead Americans. 5.8 million worldwide projected by the end of the year. Those numbers are impossible to grasp but horrifying. And the deaths were experienced in a world where things need to happen atypically - on iPads in many cases. And the grieving is different. And the preventability is maddening because fuckers won’t get vaccinated so yet more scores of people die. And we’re still in the middle of it, we can’t even inspect the car for damage after the crash because we’re still in the crash, we’re still spinning out on the highway. I started four sentences just now with the word And because that’s what a pile up of horror this whole thing has been. And I could do more. But! I won’t.

Your mind is a toilet. And it might be a perfectly functional toilet but when you load it up with sponges and tennis balls and road tar, it won’t flush. That’s not the toilet’s fault. I’m sorry to call your mind a toilet but I quite like the analogy but I am quite fond of the analogy and I will return to it in the future, I’m sorry. 

When you have an interesting mind, it’s the easiest thing in the world to think that whatever awful things are happening are your fault. That you did something wrong. Because that adheres to your unfortunate worldview. Please consider that something is happening TO you.

Also, the reason you might be tired all the time? Because this world right now is exhausting.

So to recap. One, you’re okay. Two, it’s not your fault if you don’t FEEL okay. Three, shit’s fucked up.

Thing four is kind of a cousin of number three. And that is: you’re being lied to. Yeah, depression lies. Perhaps you’ve heard this before. People say it a lot but it needs to be said even more because I can sit here and say that depression lies and then after I’m gone a little voice in your head will say, “No it doesn’t. Depression is the truth.” And you know who that is? Depression! 

There’s a voice that you will hear - not an actual voice, probably, but a thought projection that comes to your brain - and it feels like it’s you doing the talking. Like maybe it’s your wisdom talking. Your accumulated set of life lessons speaking a kind of well-researched truth to you. 

But it says stuff that is, pardon the terminology, crazy. Bonkers. Cuckoo. Ding-dongs.

That voice deals in what are called cognitive distortions. Thought patterns that guide you to negative and self-destructive thinking. Why?! I DON”T KNOW. What evolutionary purpose does it serve? You got me.

So let me try to clear things up that will contradict some of what that voice says:

Yes, you deserve treatment.

No, you are not fundamentally worse or weirder or dumber or uglier than other people.

Yes, you are capable of achieving things. 

No, those achievements won’t make a mental disorder go away.

Yes. all sorts of people you know deal with mental health issues all the time.

No, you won’t be a pariah in society if someone finds out that you do as well.

Yes, you can get better.

No, not everything you ever try will end in a complete disaster.

Try this when you have a thought about yourself vis a vis mental health: say it out loud. If it sounds fundamentally wrong, that’s your depresh being an asshole.

Number five is a short one. Don’t get hung up on terms.

A mental disorder is any mental condition that makes the day to day operations of your life harder to perform. That’s it. 

But you don’t need to worry about whether you have an anxiety disorder or you just have more anxiety in your life than you’d like to have. 

The use of titled disorders is a really handy thing for insurance. It means an insurance company will help pay for a treatment with a provider instead of you doing it all. Insurance can cover an anxiety disorder but not the feeling of anxiety. So it’s a semantic waltz we all do. 

If you’re not where you want to be mentally, get some help. 

Number six. Hope takes work. The state of mental health in the world today is completely terrible. Brutally, cruelly, unimaginably bad. I have never been more full of hope in my life. These notions exist at the same time and do so quite neatly.

There’s something that I learned. Now, for me, the worst part of depression - and depression has a lot of bad parts - is despair. Where something in my world is bad and therefore everything turns bad and I cannot imagine any circumstances by which it could even improve, let alone get back to fine. It’s irrational. I know from experience that things get better, that there is movement on that curve, happens all the time, eventually you learn enough to keep those dips from going too deep and lasting too long. 

But depression blocks that. It blocks hope. And it’s awful. It’s just awful.

The way I used to handle this was to try to convince myself that hope would arrive. 

Which is a bit like pizza delivery. If you never actually order the pizza, if you don’t do anything but sit around the house and wait, you... you don’t get any pizza. 

Like a lot of things having to do with managing mental health, finding hope is an active and conscious effort. It’s work. And it’s really really hard work. Right now, you got your climate change, you got your asinine politics which is just a pie in the windowsill for your cynicism hobo. I’m not going to explain that one. You got your covid pandemic and the aforementioned fuckers who won’t get vaccinated even though it will save the lives of others. Who flout the concept of the social contract. 

Get to the part where you have all the hope, John. Okay, thank you, I will.

It’s this. It’s the present moment. Literally. When you chose to listen to a recording of me. Look at the clock. It’s that time, that moment that I’m talking about. Hey look we’re doing interactive podcasting kind of.

I can make a podcast about mental health problems. One of the biggest taboo, don’t-talk-about-that topics around. And then Maximum Fun says, people want to hear this, we’ll put it out there. And people do. A LOT of people. You do. That’s the really amazing and inspirational part in all this They are taking a look at this scary topic and saying, Okay, yeah, I’ll fight that. I’ll step into the ring. I’ll engage in fisticuffs. I’ll kickbox that. I’ll unclog that toilet. 

I find some hope in a place I didn’t expect and I’m glad I looked. I found it because I looked. I looked in Facebook. I think Facebook as a company is, I guess not so much unethical as nonethical. Not so much doing bad as not really worrying about what the right thing to do is. Not so much immoral as amoral. Does that make sense? 

I don’t feel good about what they do with personal information. And I don’t like how someone I barely knew when I was 14 can show up and just be horrible. That’s no good. But in this garbage pasture, our show, Depresh Mode, has a Facebook group called Preshies that inspires me all the time. It’s people talking about their experiences with mental health and providing one another with support, encouragement, new ideas. Sometimes they talk about the show. Not much, though. So in the midst of these horrible times and in this hellscape of a platform, they are there for each other. You gotta find the hope. You gotta be on Facebook, gross enough, and you gotta join that group but then there’s hope. If you look. Only IF you look.

Okay. Thing 1: you’re okay. Thing 2: not you’re fault. Thing 3: shit’s fucked up. Thing 4. Depression lies. Thing 5: don’t get hung up on terms. Thing 6: actively seek hope. 

Those are the things. 

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Tune in tomorrow to hear the show!