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 !!

What's worst is that in my experience, most of the people claiming to "have anxiety" as in an actual anxiety disorder, wouldn't know what it was if it smacked them in the face. They're just experiencing normal, human emotions.

Imagine someone talking or posting online about their struggles, possibly worrying about opening up, but you lot aren’t happy because they’ve made spelling and grammatical mistakes.

Honestly, when someone is discussing their personal problems and being vulnerable, it takes a special kind of person to only see flaws in what they’ve said or typed. Nice to find out that on top of the stigma of actually having a mental health issue, now there is also the stigma of trying to get your grammar correct when mentioning it.

This thread - and this attitude - is toxic.

It's not just you. Although I know what they mean, it's hard to understand why some people are so ignorant.

Do we? If I said "I don't feel well, I have blood pressure" I'd need something different to if DS said the same thing.

I hate the "I have mental health" too.

What do you have?
Mental health - well, we all have that
Good mental health - well, good for you
Poor mental health?
ill mental health?
Do you suffer from your mental health?
Are you ill through your mental health?

Just saying 'mental health' doesn't mean anything as a stand alone description. Somehow though this seems to have crept into the terminology most used to describe someone suffering from a mental health condition. It's not right though.

What's become wrong about saying "my mental health is poor at the moment" or "I suffer from mental ill health"?

I have an acquaintance whose father sadly killed himself last year. She explained to me that they "lost him to mental health" . I can understand not wanting to say suicide, but it was quite an odd turn of phrase.

It's...just not that deep? Like, who cares?

I'm a mental health nurse. I've got better things to do than police how people want to describe their lived experience. It's not my place, and I actually find this thread very condescending and unpleasant. No one would ever dream of policing how a cancer patient describes their own illness.

Also, show some empathy. Not everyone has the same privileges in life. Mental illness intersects with things like disability and poor socioeconomic background.

Patients know themselves the best. My notes are full of 'Patient X stated they feel dead inside' because it's frankly more meaningful to the patient than me writing things like 'patient presented with blunted affect and prolonged latency of speech'. I can save that for the MDT. If my patients ever request their notes, I want it to feel accurate for them. Obviously sometimes you need to make observations where professional view doesn't match subjective experience, but leave that for people working the job.

Lay people have no business telling others their grammar sucks or how to describe how they feel.

Haha you work in mental health and can't comprehend that someone can't be in a constant state of anxiety...

Im a fucking fruit loop but i dont go about or tell people about it.

Half of the people i have seen that say they have some sort of MH i think really do you really.

Mostly every parent i come across now starts with oh my child has SEN sorry MN but not all kids have it just stop using it for an excuse.

That’s worrying that you work in mental health and someone describing themselves as having anxiety annoys you? It’s a noun - they can therefore ‘have’ it- doesn’t mean it’s forever. In that moment they don’t know how long it will last, so they can’t exactly say “I will have anxiety for the next 2 months”. Also hasn’t the language moved on a bit from “suffering from”? People with or experiencing anxiety maybe?

It drives me mad too!

Do you honestly think if someone collapses and tells a paramedic/first aider "I have blood pressure", they wouldn't think to ask if it's high or low? 😳

It used to be mental illness. But that became unfashionable a few decades ago.

Sorry, if it's a derail but I think it is in the spirit - sometimes you see bits from academic papers referenced online that are like this e.g. "Examining causes of obesity and overweight...'
I always find that jarring, I mean I could really do with going back to primary school and getting the SPaG teaching of today as I'm pretty clueless, but should it not be: ...obesity and 'being' overweight? or I don't know, ...obesity and 'overweightedness'?
Sorry, it's very late!

Yes I agree.

My DD is 11 and says she’s sick of everyone bagging on about it at school. And she can’t have a CBA day or a day where she’s not feeling it without someone proving about her mental health

We had this exact same thread last week.

I have never heard anyone say that, but if I did it would set my teeth on edge

Of course she can, what she is saying is while someone might be suffering from constant anxiety now, that can change.

Whereas if someone has a diagnoses of autism, that cannot change.

I think the use of ‘mental health’ as a shorthand to mean mental health problems/issues has increased because it has emerged as a less stigmatising term than ‘mental illness’. You hear about the mental health crisis in the young, for example, rather than the mental illness crisis.

I was just going to comment about this,

Apparently the average UK reading age is 10 years, according to another thread🙄

I just hate the way every scumbag criminal blames mental health it seems just a cop out for evil failure or incompetent loser

It’s mental health, innit

...and it's accompanied by a "cardiac heart", "gastric stomach" and the ubiquitous "blood pressure"...