Personal Responsibility and Mental Health

I harp on about mental health so often that I think most people assume that my mental health is always good, but that’s not always the case. Maybe some even think I’m a hypocrite at times because I don’t always practice what I preach. Working on your mental health isn’t easy though, and even though we may know the correct action to take, it’s not always doable. These posts are more so advice to myself as I work through something than they are me trying to tell people how to live. If some people can take something away from what I write then obviously that’s great, but this website is also me thinking out loud about what I may be experiencing and trying to make sense of it. (Sometimes I go off the walls entirely and talk about other stuff though lol.)

Being aware of mental health doesn’t make you immune to mental health issues. It definitely helps to combat them but it doesn’t give you a get out of jail card. Sometimes the way I behave doesn’t align with what I know to be the ‘correct’ way to act and that affects my mental health. When we’re out of sync with who we think ourselves to be, it causes us to question our identities, and that in turn can cause us to overthink, become anxious, and even sometimes depressed. When you know the right way to act and still act differently, that will always have an adverse effect.

I think in general, a lot of us aren’t willing to take personal responsibility for our mental health. We let our mental landscapes deteriorate and then point the finger at someone else when it comes to deciding what caused the issue. The harsh reality is, we are the root of the problem most of time because we allowed ourselves to slip and lose discipline over how we think and behave.

 It is not social media’s fault that we feel under pressure in social circles to be seen and to have followers. It is not the world’s fault that you keep victimising yourself. It might not be something you wish to hear, but when things go wrong for us, more often than not it is because of the decisions we have made ourselves. Nobody has forced us to become chained to how others view us, but many of us act out our lives in order to gain the validation of other people, and I think that is where we find the root of most of our daily mental health problems.

Social media isn’t the problem; how you use social media is. The world isn’t the problem; how we interact with it is. We struggle mentally because we fall into bad patterns of thought and fail to recognize it. We fail to be responsible for our mental health and get to a point where we can’t even acknowledge that the fault lies with ourselves.

Today, we are all very happy to point out the flaws of others. We’ll ridicule, moan, shout, and cancel anyone we deem to have flaws. Yet we fail to call ourselves out for our own shortcomings.

Let he without sin cast the first stone. Now, I’m not a religious man, but that seems like some fucking good advice. Make sure you have your own house in order before you start telling other’s what is wrong with theirs.