The 13 to 19 May is Mental Health
Awareness Week - highlighting the impact of mental health on wellbeing.
It is wonderful to see these really important
issues being raised on the BBC News channel and the radio, especially with so
many people suffering from depression and anxiety related disorders. I expect most people know of someone amongst
friends and family that have suffered from either depression or anxiety, or
even both at some time in their life.
It highlights on the Mental Health
Foundation website
that isolation and loneliness can cause as big a health risk as smoking – which
is quite startling. With our ever growing
aging population, it is a concern that increasing numbers of the elder
generation will be impacted by depression and anxiety related issues at some
point in their lives. Many of us have
older family members and have experience of how so often they can become more
anxious, more sensitive to daily happenings that we take for granted and how
they become less able to cope with issues and decisions that they found easy to
adapt to when they were much younger.
There are many anxiety related problems,
a familiar one being agoraphobia. A
person can feel as if they are trapped in their own home, because they are
terrified of going out and being in a variety of situations such as wide open spaces, crowds of people and even of
bumping into people they know, feeling they must stop for a chat, but very
frightened as it feels like a situation with no escape. Imagine this applied to
you. It can totally take over your life, spoil your social life and all the
things you wanted to do in retirement, and can feel like it will last forever.
The treatment of
agoraphobia is very possible. Using both
cognitive behaviour therapy via self-help resources such as books, and
specialist support from professional therapists can help overcome this very common
phobia.
You can begin to
understand what’s happening when you have a panic attack, and how the fear of
going anywhere where you might experience this can be enough to make you want
to stay well away from such places. But the more you stay away, the less
opportunity you have to learn that perhaps you can cope with panic and manage
it, and it need not rule your life. It is important to realise that help is
available, and the problem for most people can be overcome.
I was quite surprised to hear Rebecca
Adlington admit live on the BBC One Show that she did not like swimming in the
sea. What a revelation for a fantastic
award winning Olympic swimmer. This just
goes to show that practically everyone, even celebrities, can have a fear of
something.