The “Whys” of Mental Illness

“You have survived everything you have been through, and you will survive this too. Stay for the person you will become. You are more than a bad day, or week, or month, or year, or even a decade. You are a future of multifarious possibility. You are another self at a point in future time looking back in gratitude that this lost and former you held on. Stay.”
~ Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

Even though this quote doesn’t relate directly to the blog topic, it speaks to the underlying message of hope that fuels this blog post. To explore the causes of mental illness, the “whys,” sets a path for recovery, regardless of how ill a person has been. While medications can be crucial for crisis and stabilization of mental health symptoms, knowing what is contributing to your mental illness, can help lasting recovery. I believe this because it has been my personal experience.

I started writing this post as I had laid out in my introductory post and I ended up with 3500 words about anxiety – yikes lol😊 It was a long, dense read. I pivoted and decided to explore in separate blog posts the “whys” of mental illness; do a deep dive into political and global factors that impact mental health; summarize tools and wisdom for working with mental health symptoms; and create a conclusion and transition post. Sometimes we write and then need to change our direction based on what emerges. I think this could also be a metaphor for mental health recovery too. Mental health recovery is dynamic: it changes as you grow.

I believe there are common causes for all mental illness. We have gone so far beyond mental illness being simply a genetic illness. This contains the deepest part of hope for me in terms of recovery. If we can find our individual contributors to mental illness, then we can use this as a compass for recovery. The “whys” lead us to finding the right tools that help with recovery.