Mental Health
Successful business man crumples – did I ever think it was going to happen to me ? Not in a million years. So what’s my story – to summarise. I was a high flyer in an investment bank and a very well respected and loved by family and friends.
Then I had a knock back the company had a reshuffle something that I was used to and survived many times before. However, this time was different I ended up in a position where I had no team and was more of a stand alone expert. Some would say a trouble shooter, come expert, other’s would say I was being earmarked for redundancy.
Over the next few months I soon found that the job was indeed needed and important. So one would think everything in the garden was rosy, this was not the case I slowly started to forget things, lose interest in my hobbies and became very withdrawn. I finally went to the doctors who put me on antidepressants.
I wasn’t happy with her diagnoses so asked for a second opinion and ended up on a psychiatrist couch, well it was a chair, but the point was I thought I was losing my mind. I had lost all interest in life and my confidence just didn’t exist, I was like a shy little mouse, scared, lost and totally confused.
Your health when we are firing on all pistons is taken for granted until something goes wrong. The same can be said for our mental health. However, the diagnoses can be a little tricky it’s easy to diagnose a cold or a broken ankle, but how do you diagnose something that makes you feel happiness or disappointment.
The broken ankle will receive treatments that take into considerations all the advancements in technology, but this isn’t so true for mental health ones. In fact treatment for mental health requires a lot more patience and emotion to reach a satisfactory cure. Mental heath signs and symptoms can easily be misinterpreted.
The only way is to seek a evaluation and the best way to do this is to ensure that your physical self is in order, so the first step will include a physical examination even if you think that your physical state is OK. If you get the OK then you will start to question your actions, feelings, communication with others, learning behaviour, thoughts and self-esteem especially if you can recognise that you are under stress.
For me it took a lot of time before I acknowledged that I was in fact having some kind of mental breakdown, now that sounds quite drastic, when comparing it to a torn ligament, but in fact it’s not. Our mind although not fully understood is just another part of our body its just the understanding part that makes us feel that it’s a bigger problem than something that is easily and physically identifiable.
Like me a lot of people will wait and suffer before they ask for help. I was at work when I came to the conclusion I wasn’t well, all of a sudden I realised that I had been sat at my desk for most of the day and hadn’t really contributed to anything it was this that made me realise that I needed help.
As I said before diagnosing a mental illness can take some time, for me it took months, but I am happy to say that once the diagnosis was made I was on my way to getting back to my old self. I always remember my doctor telling me that mental health problems and disorders are health conditions that change the way we think, feel or act. And about one in four people will experience mental health problems at some point in their lives.
So don’t worry about talking about your mental health problems with your doctor, because your symptoms are more than likely very smiler to most other people. I know I am repeating myself , but I will say it again our minds are not separate entities from the rest of us.
I hope your find the articles on this site useful and stay positive like I did and I am now fully recovered.
