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*part of this post is in collaboration with New Look*
I’ve now
spent almost two months planning I’m NOT Disordered’s content for Mental Health
Awareness Week (MHAW) and with the Week still over a fortnight away, I thought
it a good time to write this piece on my advice and thoughts for anyone else preparing
for it…
TO GET INVOLVED OR NOT TO GET INVOLVED
I think that the first, most obvious step for this, is making the
decision on whether or not you want to play any role in MHAW. Whether you’re a
blogger considering producing content for it, or a social media fanatic debating
hash-tagging things, or a mental health professional trying to think up some
activities for service users, it’s an important decision.
Since doing Dialectical
Behaviour Therapy (DBT) for two and a half years, I’ve found making
decisions a whole lot easier when using the Distress Tolerance
module’s skill of ‘pros
and cons.’ I think that it’s one of the many skills I learnt where
afterwards I thought: ‘how did I not do this sooner?!’ I mean, ‘self-soothe’
and ‘distract’
(also from the Distress Tolerance module) are my two most useful coping skills
when I’m struggling and they’re both things which might be seen as being
obviously helpful by others. But, for me, I was so lost in the hallucinations
and the thoughts and feelings around suicide and self-harm, that I couldn’t
think clearly or rationally. I was so focused on hurting myself, that I didn’t
have the time or energy to consider ways that would protect me and keep me safe
from myself.
So, when making decisions – particularly around my blog – I use the pros and cons method to ensure that I’ve really carefully considered both the possible benefits and the chance of negative responses before making the final decision. For me, even if I agreed that I had made the ‘wrong’ decision, I would only be annoyed if I’d done so without putting any real thought into it. I think it’s because for so long, I did things on a whim and completely impulsively. I didn’t consider the consequences for any of my decisions and actions. And – in all honesty – I didn’t care about them either because I would always excuse myself from being responsible.
