To hate the "Mental Health" brigade.

[IAKnowyou]

It is becoming increasingly clear that many people do not know how to articulate a sentence. Especially on social media.
I am seeing - more and more, people claiming they "suffer from mental health".
Of course you bloody do. Everybody has "mental health"!! What you mean is that you have BAD mental health! That you are struggling WITH your mental health.
Some of the common phrases I DESPISE are as follows :
"I have/ I've got mental health"
"If you suffer from mental health..."
"He/She/They have got mental health"
"Mental Health can happen to anyone"
"I have severe mental health"
Just add a little something to the end such as "issues, problems, struggles" and you'll be good. But PLEASE for the love of god, learn to speak properly !!

I think it means we all have anxiety. I have it. I don’t suffer with it though because it doesn’t have a massive effect on my life.

But we don't all have anxiety. We all get anxious at times. That's not the same as having anxiety.

We don't all have an anxiety disorder. We experience the state of anxiety.

I fucking hate people who pick at others, especially those not having a great time, for small and trivial mistakes.

This thread is shitty.

Course it is. Anxiety is a human trait that everyone will have. Some people handle themselves differently with it.

Agree. English isn't my first language and it took me AGES to figure out this is actually an (erroneous) expression used by quite few people. It's very odd. In my experience so far it's usually certain demographics that use it - older people, and those with lower educational attainment. I think it's partly because of the decades of taboos around talking about mental health problems.

You’re absolutely right. I think my concern is that there is a growing number of people who feel that it is a permanent diagnosis and cannot be managed. And it can. And even when we are struggling with anxiety, we can get reprieve from it (unlike a physical illness). It’s horrific and debilitating and people should absolutely talk about their own mental health in their own way.

There is also a growing number of people, due to social media, that diagnose themselves with mental health difficulties when actually what they’re experiencing are normal emotions. We ALL feel anxious, we all have situations that create feelings of anxiety. It’s normal and necessary (keeps us safe). But, worryingly, people think it is wrong - or there is something wrong with them - when they feel the emotion. Therefore they avoid the situation because “they have anxiety” and then that actually fuels anxiety because their brain is creating neural pathways that say the situation is dangerous and must be avoided.

im not talking about people suffering from chronic anxiety here, which is just awful. I’m talking about people who have been fed misinformation, which is compounded by the language that is used around mental health and, as a result, have created difficulties for themselves. It worries me. I see it a lot. Social media has a lot to answer for!

Language around mental health IS important. That is not me being a pedantic dickhead.

Ironically I’m not explaining my point very well though as am shattered and should be asleep so probably not using the best language either!

It grates with me too OP, even though it's mostly well intended. It's like saying he/she has blood pressure. Well lots hope he/she does.

Tbh the thing I hate most is people who use the word 'brigade' to take the piss out of people who are by definition struggling.

Always punch up, OP.

Believe me, no mental health professional I know would ever say or feel that you’re talking about your own experiences wrong. You are the biggest expert on how you’re feeling. You can and must articulate it however you need to 💐you should be taken seriously

We all know what people mean when they say 'I've got blood pressure'. It is only pedantic prats who give it a second thought in informal speech or writing.

There is a care group, local to me, that are setting up an assisted living unit not far from where I live. I was looking through their website earlier and noticed they state they cater for those with ‘mental and physical disabilities, learning disabilities and mental health’. I wondered if it has become accepted terminology, considering they have been in business for thirty years?

I feel like they are ashamed to say they have mental illness. I see it mainly on TikTok; most people streaming on TikTok have an IQ at least 15 points below average

Why is "have" permanent? Is it wrong to say I have a broken leg? Or I have a cat?

Maybe some people see the word 'mental' as a descriptive adjective like the words - crazy, bad, uncontrolled and angry.
He went mental at his barking dog for example.
Years ago that was an acceptable use of the word mental.

I have mental health might refer to them having crazy health.

What annoys me about the constant online posting about mental health or the constant chatter about it at work is how it is assumed that if you aren’t airing your mental health struggles to the world then you obviously don’t have any.

I had a line manager who went on and on about her struggles with depression even when totally inappropriate including a chat to check up on my wellbeing (after being off with a physical illness). Even telling me how I ‘obviously’ wouldn’t understand. I had to interrupt and tell her about my own struggles with PND and diagnoses of OCD, which I never mention in work because it’s no one’s business and doesn’t affect my work at all but she just assumed because I never felt the need to shoehorn it into every conversation that I had never suffered from poor mental health myself.

Have to confess I’m one of those pedantic prats! For good reasons. First of all, we all have blood pressure unless we’re dead. That’s obvious .
But what kind of blood pressure do you have? High?Low?Normal? All can be very relevant. If you collapse and have low or normal blood pressure lying down and lifting your legs might be beneficial. But if your blood pressure is high, do you want all that blood rushing to your heart and brain? Could be dangerous, depending on how high your blood pressure is. So it’s not “just” blood pressure. Having “Blood pressure” is not a diagnosis.

Personally I don't think that experiencing the state of anxiety is the same as having anxiety.
I've experienced both and they are very very different. In the same way that feeling sad/down when something bad happens isn't the same as having depression.

Some people say it to destigmatise it because some people think that "having mental health" isn't a difficulty, a disorder, or something you suffer from, but that it's just part of who you are (I don't feel this way personally but live and let live). IDK where this came from but as a sufferer of a severe and permanent MH diagnosis and an LD, I don't think it's fair to be shitty to people who are struggling, it's kicking them when they're down which is not cool.

I feel the same, not just with this. Poor grammar and punctuation everywhere, to the point that some paragraphs do not even make sense until you've read them twice. Ok, get the abuse going...

Also, I think society's narrative needs to shift to what we can do to help people with depression and anxiety rather than what can we do to stigmatise them and make them feel shittier. Certainly when I trained as a CBT practitioner, the main thing a lot of people on the course struggled with was learning to neither invalidate nor reinforce faulty thoughts for people who actually just needed help and needed to reach that themselves and learn to help themselves.

Welcome to Mumsnet, where no issue too big to not to be grammatically corrected!

Of course it's not a diagnosis.

But when chatting, it's fine.

It’s a shift in language since ‘mentally ill’ came to be less acceptable, probably due to the general, and real, stigma around mental illness. I’d just stick with ‘poor mental health’ etc.

YANBU, it’s annoying