Experiencing mental health difficulties is a very individual, subjective experience. While there may be common symptoms or particular mental illness, or common causes of mental health struggles, everyone can still experience mental health struggles in a very different way to everyone else. This is because everyone has different experiences, and perspectives in life. And while that’s perfectly ok, and part of just being human, it does mean that getting help for your mental health can be a similarly individual journey.
There are lots of different types of help for mental health, from self-help, to medication, to therapy, to life changes, to hospitalisation. Some people will go to their GP, have a medication prescribed, and within a short enough time, be feeling back to their regular selves. For others, they feel they might as well take a smartie for all the help a medication does for them. One person might go to a particular therapist and find the experience life-changing. Another person might find it a waste of time.
The most important thing to remember is that a type of help not feeling helpful is no reflection on you. It does not mean you are broken, or unfixable, or even that that type of help is bad.
These experiences don’t mean that a particular type of help doesn’t work. It just means that that particular type of that help wasn’t the right fit for what you need. Perhaps a different medication would work better for you, or maybe medication isn’t the right avenue. Maybe you and that particular therapist just weren’t a good fit on an interpersonal level, or the type of therapy that they practice wasn’t quite what you needed.
One of the hardest things about having a mental health struggle is that it can deplete your energy and ability to do things like make decisions or evaluate things. So it can feel really tough to go through different forms of help, evaluate how helpful they are, and decide whether to keep with this type, or try another. Sometimes this can mean going back to someone like a GP and having to advocate for yourself, and sometimes our particular mental health struggle can mean we don’t feel like we’re worth advocating for. It’s really important to remember that this isn’t true – you are important, there is a right type of help out there for you, and you’re worth advocating and trying and pushing until you find it.
There’s a cliché saying that goes ‘it’s ok to be not ok, and it’s ok to ask for help’. That saying is a cliché for a reason – it’s true. However, there’s more truth to an extended version – it’s ok to be not ok, but its not ok to keep being not ok on your own. It’s ok to ask for help, but it’s important to keep asking for help until that help is helpful.
It’s important as well to give a particular type of help a fair shot – for example, it can take several weeks for a medication to start to take effect sometimes. Or sometimes a first appointment with a new therapist or practitioner can involve more of an assessment, which might not feel helpful to you, but allows the person create a plan to help you in future sessions. Sometimes even helpful help can be really hard, because it can involve doing hard things, feeling deep emotions or facing difficult thing. That doesn’t mean it won’t be worth it, or that it isn’t working.
Lots of things can impact someone’s experience of getting help for their mental health. Some of them are important, like cost, or accessibility. Some are less important, such as whether it worked for some other person. The key things to consider when accessing mental health help should include:
- Do I feel respected/listened to/heard?
- Is it accessible (physically, timewise, financially, etc)
- Do I feel this could start to help me in time, or is currently helping me?
If you are struggling with your mental health, you can always seek out your student union welfare officer who can help talk you through the types of help that are available on and off campus. You can also access free counselling through your on-campus counselling services, and you can find more information about that on your college website. There are also lots of sources of help listed on this webpage too.
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