Raising Your Own Mental Health Quotient

Being aware of your personal well being is tricky.  Without advanced education and professional experience, it can be difficult to grasp all of the dimensions of mental health.  However, you can educate yourself and pay more attention to the cues going on within your own physical and emotional body, your relationships, and your activities to have a handle on “knowing yourself”– the latin meaning of “Nosce Te Ipsum.”  

In our previous post, we gave a list of 11 Questions by which you can begin to assess and track your own mental well-being, however, we also realize it goes much deeper than that.  Much of our Western-American mindset revolves around playing through the pain and going on with business as usual, all the while accepting that pain is just part of everyday life.  Whether it’s physical, emotional, relational, or even spiritual pain, it’s important to acknowledge and seek out the source of that pain to see whether or not it’s something that can be remedied.

Combating Mental Health Stigma

Part of the stigma that surrounds mental illness comes from this mindset of pain and “weakness leaving the body” because we’re so darn tough.  The reality is that we don’t have to be tough and that we can work smarter rather than harder when it comes to our own well-being, which includes mental health.  It’s not always a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of thing.  However, in many cases, combining different forms of therapy, which can include counseling as well as medication, can help give someone the positive momentum and ability to make changes that will benefit their overall well-being.

Just because someone begins treatment for mental illness doesn’t mean there’s anything “wrong with them,” nor does it necessarily mean that they will be in life-long treatment.  In some cases, for severe mental illness such as bipolar disorder, major depression, or schizophrenia and other related disorders, lifelong medication of some kind is part of an ongoing treatment plan because such diseases do not have a cure.

Anyone and everyone is prone to experience a decline, whether short or long term, in their own mental well-being, just as anyone can suffer from a decline in physical well-being.  The sooner that you seek out treatment, typically the quicker and less costly the recovery process is.  It doesn’t hurt to get a mental health check-up along with your next physical.  If your doctor doesn’t ask you about your mental health in any way, ask them to include that as part of your interview about your well-being.  If you have concerns about your mental health, or perhaps you might get a recommendation from your doctor, you can also give us a call for a mental health screening and assessment.

As our community and our entire nation becomes more aware of mental illness and the stigma associated with it, more and more physicians will be including mental health as part of their routine check-ups and interaction with their patients.  At the PTI, we have offices at Covington and Baton Rouge that offer mental health services and we strive to be the most up to date and the best mental health care and treatment center.  Our “secrete sauce” is simply treating people right no matter who they are, which, unfortunately, isn’t a given these days.  We strive to only accept people as part of our team who believe what we believe and are dedicated to living it out everyday with every patient.  By no means are we perfect; we want to trust the same process of change for ourselves that we believe in for our patients.  Positive change will happen if we dedicate ourselves to it and even more so if we have a great team surrounding us helping to make it happen.  That’s the PTI difference and it’s helped us to be successful in doing the work that we do.  If you or a loved one is considering or in need of continuing mental health treatment, please don’t hesitate to give us a call today, we’re standing by and ready to be on your team.