Approximately 850 words (2-4 min read)
May was Mental Health Awareness Month in the United States. Although it seems to have been overshadowed by reopening from Covid-19, this was a good reminder to take stock of the human cost of mental health challenges.
And these are huge challenges, a true tsunami. According to the National Council for Mental Wellbeing (www.thenationalcouncil.org):
1 in 5 U.S. adults experience mental illness each year.
1 in 20 U.S. adults experience serious mental illness year year.
1 in 6 U.S. youth aged 6-17 experience a mental health disorder earch year.
50% of all lifetime mental illness begins by age 14, and 75% by age 24.
Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among people aged 10-34.
It can be incredibly hard for driven, high-achieving people to reckon with the possibility of becoming part of these statistics, especially if it starts young. A close second in difficulty is making allowances for others in our circle who have these illnesses.
Therapist Martha Manning is such a driven high-achiever. She had a beautiful meditation published Sunday on Medium, talking about her experience dealing with mental illness as both a therapist and a patient. I found I related to quite a bit of her experience.
That one can be depressed and continue to not just function but also achieve is past debating. But whether it is fear of stigma or something internalized, it can be incredibly hard to embrace the reality of illness:
I spent my early years trying to push the depression away, to cover it over, with the goal of never letting it contaminate my world. I assumed that if depression invaded my professional life, that it would be a terrible thing that would invalidate my capacity to help my patients.
I can relate. The problem, of course, is the terrible toll that takes.
Manning eventually came to see her illness as, if not a gift, then an unexpected source of connection and empathy with her patients:
The “magic” between us was born of sorrow and powerless. Of fears for the future and anger at the present. We came from different places but intersected at the same point. And it made all the difference.
But this was neither an easy process nor a sure thing. It required accepting where she was.
Her turning point was a stint in in-patient care, where she realized she’d “moved from ‘us’ to ‘them’”--from care-giver to patient. Her fellow patients left a strong impression:
[T]hey were were my companions and my teachers, imprinting me with a permanent brand of newfound humility. I learned about a different hope from them--not about believing that everything was going to be all better, but about prevailing when it wasn’t.
In the end, Manning came to realize that not every problem can be fixed. “There is the hunger for relief from painful ‘symptoms,’” she writes, “but the larger question [is] how to live with them.” When there is no ‘off’ button for our problems we may come to realize that “there really isn’t anything better in this life than to prevail.”
The “huger for relief” can be the temptation to feel we must be perfect, to not show the cracks or strains or pain. Equally, we may feel an overwhelming urge to collapse and find relief in surrender. To prevail means we chart a different course.
Manning writes of the humility she found in her journey through illness, the “long-haul agony, the fragility of hope, and the disconnection to the normal world.”
Her experience was extreme, but thankfully we do not have to walk the same road to understand why being humble can be a helpful thing for all us to cultivate.
Sometimes it may be humility in the face of our own struggles--finding the courage to acknowledge them and seek help, rather than the veiled and subtle arrogance of shutting away our problems and feelings and insisting we have it covered when we don’t. (I re-read this after writing it and think, this. So much of my life in one sentence. )
Or it could be humility in the face of others’ struggles. It might be the wisdom to insist someone you work with or know or love get help, stopping well short of thinking we know what’s happening to or for them, or the well-intended arrogance of insisting we or anyone else can fix them.
Neither of these is always, or even necessarily ever, going to be easy or natural to do. We want ourselves to be strong and right and whole, often with every fiber of our being. Seeing reminders in ourselves or others of how we aren’t those things can be awful.
But our role may not be to triumph, any more than it’s ordained that we will be victims.
Sometimes the best we can do is help ourselves and those we care for make through each patch as it comes. Even--especially--when we know there is more to come and we don’t want it.
That doesn’t mean giving up on achieving or being our best. It does mean acknowledging where and who we are. If we do that, then like Manning -- we can prevail.