Who is the Usain Bolt of Mental Health?

Why is it that when we think about physical health we naturally picture a very positive image of somebody like Usain Bolt but when we visualise mental health we picture somebody looking pained with their head in their hands? You can put it to the test by typing physical health and mental health into google images to see the huge contrast in the images displayed.

Everybody has physical health and at some stage every year could be physically healthier. In exactly the same way, everybody has mental health and at times will experience periods when emotionally you are feeling low or drained. So why do we regard one as a positive statement and the other so negative? This in many ways highlights the huge journey that we have to go on to change the stigma associated with mental health.

Ask yourself who is the Usain Bolt of mental health and you will struggle to conjure up an image???

This strengthens my case to normalise mental health and why I only use the statistic that 1 in 1 of us will experience some degree of poor mental health every year. Only, when we accept that we all experience mental fatigue will it become easier to talk about how we are really feeling emotionally. Let’s stop using statistics like 1 in 4 because it only stigmatises sufferers even more by inferring that 3 out of 4 of us are lucky and that sadly one of us is not normal.

We ALL have physical health and we ALL have mental health


This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2018 at 10:09 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.