WHY THERE IS NO PLACE FOR EXCUSES IN MENTAL HEALTH

ex·cuse

[excuse]

VERB

·         attempt to lessen the blame attaching to (a fault or offense); seek to defend or justify.

synonyms:

justify · defend · make excuses for · make a case for · explain (away) · rationalize · condone · vindicate · warrant · mitigate · palliate · apologize for · forgive · overlook · disregard · ignore · pass over · turn a blind eye to

·         forgive (someone) for a fault or offense.

"you must excuse my sister" · "he could be excused for feeling that he was born at the wrong time"

·         overlook or forgive (a fault or offense)

So, I was watching Pretty Little Liars on Netflix and one of the characters said, “don’t make excuses for her; it’s demeaning.” And it led me to thinking a lot about instances where excuses have come up in mental health – in my mental health. I think that people in general are pretty much notorious for forever providing excuses for their behaviours, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings; no matter what they are. Positive or negative. ‘Right’ or ‘wrong.’ No matter what the situation.

FIVE LESSONS MY MENTAL HEALTH RELAPSE HAS TAUGHT ME

1.     To ‘self-soothe’ more

      Self-soothe is probably one of my favourite – and most used – Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) skill. For so many years I was hard on myself and blamed myself for everything that went wrong in my life. Even the abuse. I thought that I was a bad person and had deserved all of these bad things in my life; the abuse, the bullying, the self-harm, the hallucinations… everything! For a while, I believed that I didn’t even deserve to be alive. So – perhaps – understandably, self-soothing was a particularly difficult skill for me to put into practice and even harder to eventually master. But being nice to myself felt so good that I fought the voices in my head that were trying to convince me that I should be hurting myself and not helping myself. I told them that I’d punished myself enough and that after all these years of self-harming and attempting suicide, I deserved to enjoy simple things. And that’s what my self-soothe techniques are; simple things. Like, lighting a candle, having a shower, doing my makeup or my hair, playing with my pets, spending time on The Sims, writing, reading, watching America’s Got Talent on Netflix… little things like that can sometimes make all the difference when I’m struggling with voices telling me that I’m useless and worthless and deserve to die.

2.     The importance of medication

The catalyst for this relapse has been that I stopped taking the medication I’m on for my mental health (Mirtazapine, Lamotrigine,

MISCOMMUNICATION IN MENTAL HEALTH

My motivation for this post came after my article with Metro went live… a Twitter conversation was started in which various people were talking about how I was lucky in having a positive experience of a psychiatric hospital admission. They talked about the fact that I had all of my possessions around me; a suitcase full of clothes and technology. They didn’t know that I’d been sectioned whilst on an overnight trip which meant that I had everything with me anyway! They didn’t know that the point of the article was to use my experience as evidence that psychiatric hospitals aren’t the stigmatised assumptions of it – it isn’t all padded walls and mattresses on floors. They weren’t saying that hospitals had improved or that they were all like the one I’d been in