Post by Admin on Jun 23, 2015 18:08:11 GMT
In one of his lectures, psychologist Dr. Stephen Ilardi recounts a story he’d heard from a patient about one of the patients' friends who had had to battle both depression and cancer at different times in life. This man, who in order to win his battle with cancer had had to undergo chemotherapy, estimated that for him an episode of depression was about ten times worse than getting cancer. Yet while his friends, loved ones, and even more distant acquaintances rallied around him with enthusiasm when he was fighting cancer, nobody rallied around him when he was battling depression. Instead, his friends and loved ones recommended that he "snap out of it” (and other such stupidities).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HDFEbsGRlA&t=35m0s
Personally I feel very fortunate in that I have not had to deal with much blatant ignorance like being told to "snap out of it", and would also say that I've been lucky enough to have some pretty supportive individuals in my life. And yet, it has been a common enough experience to run into people--sometimes even sympathetic people--who seem to understand depression as being some kind of awkward psychological cold. The impact of this has been sufficient to make me feel palpably ashamed for even including this as one of my points, and I can only imagine the amount of inertia such widespread minimization is generating at a systems-level.
Getting someone who has never been depressed to truly understand what it feels like to be severely depressed is probably impossible. Still, I think it could be a tremendously positive thing to introduce students to experience-based education on depression and other mental health issues. Whether its done through readings, video, guest speakers, or traditional lessons, it seems important that at some point students be exposed to mental health issues as they are described in the words of people who struggle with them. I would add that I think it would also be important to share the accounts of people who overcame or learned to successfully manage their mental health issues, as well as to communicate that different people can have very different experiences with these issues, even within the same diagnosis.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HDFEbsGRlA&t=35m0s
Personally I feel very fortunate in that I have not had to deal with much blatant ignorance like being told to "snap out of it", and would also say that I've been lucky enough to have some pretty supportive individuals in my life. And yet, it has been a common enough experience to run into people--sometimes even sympathetic people--who seem to understand depression as being some kind of awkward psychological cold. The impact of this has been sufficient to make me feel palpably ashamed for even including this as one of my points, and I can only imagine the amount of inertia such widespread minimization is generating at a systems-level.
Getting someone who has never been depressed to truly understand what it feels like to be severely depressed is probably impossible. Still, I think it could be a tremendously positive thing to introduce students to experience-based education on depression and other mental health issues. Whether its done through readings, video, guest speakers, or traditional lessons, it seems important that at some point students be exposed to mental health issues as they are described in the words of people who struggle with them. I would add that I think it would also be important to share the accounts of people who overcame or learned to successfully manage their mental health issues, as well as to communicate that different people can have very different experiences with these issues, even within the same diagnosis.