Mental Health Knows No Second Chances

I am not an expert on mental health, but I know enough to stick with one important principle. A principle not entirely true, only possibly so.

Still, I try my best to avoid putting it to test. Here is the principle again.

Mental health knows no second chances.

Generally, I view my life in low and high phases. I have also witnessed downward spirals and upward spirals, but these are different animals.

Down/up phases are our momentary perceptions of how well our life is going. How we view each phase depends on our feeling of well-being.

If we are an ungrateful piece of organic waste (for example) these low phases tend to last longer when they shouldn’t.

Circumstances and life quality

Circumstances and life quality have an influence over our feeling of well-being.

• Circumstance — e.g. Your dog died and you suffered an injury.
• Life quality — e.g You have a job but you grew tired of it. Still, you have food on your plate every day.

Well-being on the opposite represents how happy you are about your circumstances and life quality.

Your well-being is under an impact of both life quality and circumstances. However, well-being doesn’t depend only on those two. In fact, it can stay intact regardless of death, and injuries.

Or it can as well crumble.

Low and high life phases

Let’s say for this instance your dog indeed died, you broke your leg coming home from the grocery store, and you still work the same nine-to-five for over a decade. Only now you have zero clue how you’ll manage work and recovery.

Morbid I know, but worse things happen in life.

Your well-being, due to death and injury, was interupted. It usually becomes what experts refer to as not-so-well-thanks-for-asking-being…

These are most often short low phases. When your circumstances and life quality get a small edge over your well-being.

However, you could raise up and feel OK after a couple of months. Maybe sooner, because often well being goes up faster than your physical abilities.

In both cases, if you are mentally healthy, you’ll experience eventual improvement of well-being. The better times lie ahead…

Downward spirals

Now, let’s say you’re in for the worse treat. Your dog passed away, you broke your leg, you work at the same old facility longer than you can remember.

As a bonus, your boss is sucking the life out of you, you just got divorced recently, and you are threatened to get fired if you don’t finish important projects.

Obviously, your morale and well-being would abruptly go down in this situation. Left to your own devices it could easily be the fall into a downward infinite slope.

And how did you decide to deal with it?

You experienced immense pressure, didn’t seek any health advice, let your boss blame everything on you, and had desperately asked “why me of all people?”.

Well, it’s you. Only it’s not just you.

This is the usual and classic example of the beginning phase of a downward spiral. Uncontrollable destruction of well-being that takes a lot of time to get out of. It takes even longer to get back to well being you once had. And that is only if you ever gt the second chance.

What could have been a phone call or therapy, ended up a tragedy?

Mental health knows no second chances.

I am not an expert on mental health, but I know enough to stick to this one important principle. A principle not entirely true, only possibly so.

Still, I try my best to avoid putting it to test.

Everyone should do the same.