In today’s landscape, mental health treatment is hindered by two major causes. Stigmatization and access. As we’ve discussed, stigmatization is both an external and internal phenomenon. We’re often influenced by the fear of our piers or our own negative stereotypes of mental health we have, inadvertently, been taught over the years. Luckily, we’ve made great strides in de-stigmatizing mental health conversations, awareness, and the pursuit of treatment.
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Access is much trickier as we mentioned how the mental health treatment community is seemingly stressed for resources. This logistical taxation has caused problems in the past with over-prescription of drug treatments that cause problems of their own.
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Two Primary Components of Mental Health Treatment
Mental health treatment requires both extreme nuance and unwavering consistency. Not every person has the same problem, or processes and treats said problems the same. Mental health treatment should hope to mimic both a therapist and a personal trainer.
One component entails an introspective process of understanding the root of our greatest emotional challenges and how they manifest negatively in our daily lives. After such, we must work tirelessly to change our habits, routines, and behavior to feed positive changes to our quality of life.
Deep Nuanced Introspection
Everyone has different issues derived from different causes, that manifests differently in each of our lives. One size does not fit all and to truly seek to treat mental health challenges, we must master this introspective process with the help of a therapist (or a similar figure).
Re-training The Way We Process Our Mental Health
Simple awareness is valuable but alone does us very little good. The root item we seek to solve involves a solution to something that is negatively affecting our quality of life. That could be our career trajectory, our relationship with our children, our issues coping with anger, or even our physical appearance.
Making these improvements come down to establishing strong habits and hard-coding behavior change. This is where the ‘trainer’ role of mental health treatment comes into play. Like building a new muscle, our mental health improves over time with consistent work daily.
The pursuit of a better life entails ups and downs but a steady positive trajectory over months (or years) of work. Ideally, our ‘trainer’ is there with us every step of the way to reinforce our goals, and track our progress.
The problem remains access
Access to mental health treatment remains the primary obstacle. There are not enough therapists to help us through the introspective process that lays our foundation for growth and said therapists do not have the time to be there with us every step of the way.
There are also the financial and logistical components of access which inevitably affect some groups of people over others. Finding the right access is crucial to creating more effective and equitable mental health care in the future. But how do we create accessible, affordable, and effective tools to drive better mental outcomes? Is technology a viable avenue to pursue? Let me know in the comments!
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