Mental Health is a serious issue affecting our society today.
In an effort to get rid of the negativity and the stigma against mental issues, these brave people have chosen to share their stories with you.
Be nice, read, reflect and respond reasonably.
Mental Health Mondays has NOT died, it is ongoing, but it needs you to be brave by sending in your stories, in order to continue.
If you would like to express yourself and share your story on Mental Health Mondays, please feel free to email me at bewilderedbug(at)gmail(dot)com or tweet me at @bewilderedbug
Let’s continue to spread mental health awareness together
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Please welcome another guest poster who was kind enough to volunteer a post while I’m out of the country and away from my blog. His name is Stephen Gallup and he blogs at What about the Boy?. He is also the author of the book “What about the Boy? A Father’s Pledge to His Disabled Son”.
Here he tells a little bit of his story of his struggle to cope with his son’s mental disability.
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Everyone knows that stress affects both mental and physical health. As our stress level goes up, our resilience goes down. If we can decrease the stress, there’s a good chance of also decreasing whatever symptoms are plaguing us.
Years ago, that was part of the argument I made for seeking an effective response to my little boy’s significant developmental problems. As an infant, he cried all the time, he threw up daily, and as the months passed he began missing the usual developmental milestones, such as learning to crawl. His mother and I were frantic with worry. His doctors told us to be patient. They had no diagnosis for him, and no treatment. But they seemed to think the problem might somehow get resolved on its own.
A year later, the problem had not gotten resolved. My wife Judy and I had attained a high level of chronic stress, and our son was obviously miserable.
Even aside from his suffering, the professionals’ failure to take his problem seriously also affected the adults in our household. Little Joseph was our responsibility. He had no choice but to rely on us for help. We wanted to help! We didn’t know how. For the first year and a half, we went around and around on that, getting nowhere.
I didn’t blame the doctors for what they didn’t know. But their refusal to try anything suggested to me that someone else would have to do the trying for them.
We located alternative providers who offered hope, and that gave us a reprieve from the stress. Over the next four years, Joseph’s options improved dramatically. Judy and I found balance again and enjoyed a healthy, optimistic outlook.
Still, it was slow going, and very difficult for all of us. Judy and I managed his round-the-clock home therapy program, with direction from an unconventional clinic that we visited twice a year, and with frequent trips to a maverick local doctor. That doctor and the clinic regarded each other with suspicion, and mainstream providers had a low opinion of both. So when the going became tough for us, there was no one to offer objective advice other than to quit, to give up, and to return to the passive anxiety we’d known previously.
We couldn’t just give up. Even after we did finally part company from that clinic, we continued to pursue the total wellness for our son that we believed to be his birthright.
However, without a rational game plan for that pursuit, we became reacquainted with runaway stress.
OK, what can chronic stress do to you? Here’s what it did to Judy. First, she gained a lot of weight. Then she developed a lump in her breast, which she ignored until the cancer had metastasized to other parts of her body. Maybe the stress did not actually cause the cancer, but there are studies supporting the conclusion that it did*. At one point during her illness (probably due to the meds she was taking), Judy lost touch with reality to the point of phoning local TV stations to announce that our disabled son had been miraculously cured. She invited them to come see for themselves.
Recently, I heard a speaker suggest that, rather than looking for deliverance from a stressful situation, we should consider what we can learn from it. That prompted me to ask what I had learned from my family’s lengthy campaign, with all its setbacks.
You have to do what you think is right. Joseph is now 27 years old, a disabled adult, but his quality of life is far better than it would have been without our intervention. So I still think it’s right to take a stand for an important cause. Plus, doing that just feels good.
But there are limits to what we can accomplish. Sometimes we don’t know where those limits are, until we try to push beyond them. Pushing is a good thing—but acknowledging reality is also important. Sometimes that does seem to mean acceptance and patience. For me, and for Joseph, achieving that will always be a work in progress.
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References:
* Antoni MH, Lutgendorf SK, Cole SW, et al. The influence of bio-behavioural factors on tumour biology: Pathways and mechanisms. Nature Reviews Cancer 2006; 6(3):240–248.
Reiche EM, Nunes SO, Morimoto HK. Stress, depression, the immune system, and cancer. The Lancet Oncology 2004; 5(10):617–625.
