Category Archives: Mental Health

Don’t Say You’re Fine If You’re Not: Mental Health Week 2020

Mental Health, Mental Illness, ,

“How are you?”

How often do you answer honestly?

And when you do answer honestly, how often does the other person stop and have a full conversation about (your) feelings?

“How are you?”

“Not great!”

“Awesome! I’m great too!”

That’s literally happened to me before. They don’t pay attention to my answer, grin, say they’re great and hurry off down the hallway.

Maybe our collective mental health would be a touch better if we spent a few more minutes actually listening to one another.

I’m not a huge proponent of mental health events run by big businesses to “raise awareness”– they get people talking about the words “mental health” for two seconds and then forget about people in crisis, kids who need help, intersectional issues, and the most vulnerable among us, all the while lining the pockets of enormous corporations, without actually helping people with mental illnesses (*ahem* Bell Let’s Talk).

But CMHA Mental Health Week, let’s talk. 

2020 is the 69th year the Canadian Mental Health Association is observing Mental Health Week, this year from May 4-10. (CMHA itself has been around for 100 years). They champion workplace and campus mental health and have resources for, yes, raising awareness about various mental health issues. 

This Covid-19 page is especially relevant.

As someone with multiple mental illnesses and who’s passionate about mental health, I don’t just want awareness raised. I want resources, I want support (emotional and financial). I want access. 

But actual awareness is a good place to start.

Will you join me on May 4th?

SAD: Winter Blues, Times a Thousand

Mental Health, Mental Illness,

Every year, as soon as Halloween has come and gone, an icy sense of impending dread fills me. Winter is coming, and I have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). What am I going to do?!

Seasonal Affective Disorder is a form of clinical depression which is affected by seasons’ change and lack of sunlight. The disorder causes low serotonin levels, thereby causing low moods, too. Think of SAD as a bad case of the winter blues, times a thousand.

As a spoonie, I often have days when I question how capable I am of functioning like a healthy person. In winter, when SAD is the ringmaster, I feel like an elephant trying to balance on a tightrope; I’m clumsy and unsure of myself and I know I’m going to fall into a deep pit of depression. It’s just a matter of time. SAD and all my year-round symptoms together? That’s almost too much to bear.

Thanks to my disability worsening in the past year, I’m under-employed. So I don’t have the funds to escape to a warmer climate or to hire someone to help me with my business and around the house. I know that going out and catching some rays helps a lot, but when I can’t leave the house at the best of times, what am I to do in winter?

I’ve had SAD almost all my life, and have been a spoonie (though I didn’t know it until I was 21) since my late teenage years, and I always manage to survive winter. I’m definitely more resilient than I give myself credit for. But when winter creeps closer and closer, I panic. Every single year.

Do you have SAD? How do you cope?

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