Minding the Gap
Ways to bridge the gap to good mental health.
One of the greatest threats to our mental health comes from the gap between how we imagine the world should be and how it actually is.
We expect that it should be a certain way, that relationships should proceed as they do in films, that by a certain age we should have achieved a particular thing, that our friends should treat us better, that things aren’t fair... and on and on. We invest huge amounts of energy both in the expectation and the post-disappointment dissection of what went wrong and why. We gnaw away at ‘them’, and we doubt ourselves. We rail against the world. We can end up sad, disappointed, dejected, rejected, angry, bitter, low, inward looking, outward blaming and inert and then we can seek solace in the wrong places.
What would happen if there was no gap? Or if we accepted the way things were and are? That’s not to say that everything suddenly became as we wanted it to be but rather that we accepted the limits of our agency without giving up.
At Useful and Kind we know that the world is unequal, that there is injustice and that power is often abused. But we passionately believe that through a process of self-awareness, understanding of and compassion for the other, we can be jet fuelled to make things better for the world, for others and for ourselves. Can we do it on our own? No. Will it be enough in our life time? No. But in the very act of doing it we know that we have been fully who we can be, we have found a purpose, we have made a difference and the world is better for our having been in it.
What has this to do with mental health?
We are told that one of the unseen and ill prepared for outcomes of the pandemic will be a tsunami of mental health issues. The pandemic has been totally outwith our control. It has brought with it many of the conditions we know can have a negative impact on our wellbeing: isolation, lack of touch, absent friends and family and many lost opportunities.
Over recent decades our awareness of mental health (which has often been used as shorthand for mental ill- health) has increased enormously and its terminology has been absorbed, often incorrectly, into common use. ‘Oh that’s because I’m a bit OCD’, or ‘he’s a narcissist’, ‘I think it’s PTSD’. Enormously problematic as the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual) is, for many reasons, it gives indications of how frequently various behaviours and feelings should be experienced in order to qualify for such definitions.
We are all on a spectrum of mental health. Many of us experience the vissitudes of life, the highs and lows of everyday living. The pain, grief and sadness of loss. The loneliness of absent friends and we have different resources at different times in our lives to cope. This is called being human. Grief is not pathology. Being anxious about an exam is not clinical. But the pandemic has brought a collective consciousness of the existential crises we all face - the uncertainty of life and death: when and how.
We now understand so much more about anxiety, depression, and the impacts of our Attachment styles from early years and in recent years we know so much more about what can contribute to our mental, emotional and psychological wellbeing.
We know that one of the greatest contributors to mental health is a good long-lasting, meaningful, loving relationship (1), greater than genetic inheritance or financial reward and yet these have been so difficult in lockdown or on zoom.
At Useful and Kind we have a toolkit which aims to give you some important ways to understand yourself better and to maintain your own mental health and wellbeing. These are all available to Schools who are progressing towards the U&K Schools’ Mark and form an integral part of our Summer School. They are proven to work for individuals, groups, teams and organisations.
We have selected 3 of them to share with you below.
Duncan Fraser
If you are ever in need of help, please reach out. Here are some useful links to organisations that can offer the help you need.