Welcome back to the third part of my short-series about emotion. If you have not read the the previous parts, I recommend you to read it first:  

Part I : Introduction
Part II : The Evolution of Our Survival Instinct
Part III : Making Sense of Ourselves

You could still understand this post well without reading all three parts, but I suggest to do for the sake of a better reading experience.

 First of all I want to say thank you very much to everyone who has read my blog. It doesn’t matter if this is your first time or you were already here in the beginning, thank you for sharing this ride together with me. Last week we hit 1000 reads, and I promise I will try my best to keep sharing my thoughts here and trying new things, which will come next week, which is…

A conversation!

As you know, not 100% of my writings are descendent of my thoughts. I talk with a lot of people about certain topic, some of them give me suggestions, some give me advices, some even give me new resources and knowledges. However, I only take notes and incorporate their words in my style of writing, which this time it will be different. I recorded a full conversation, that I will transcript it into words, with the same exact structure as the conversation itself. I am honestly still experimenting with this type. This time I did the conversation privately, but if you may be interested in the conversation, maybe I could consider to upload the whole record or maybe do it live. Just write me messages about what do you think about this.

Okay, back to the topic. We have reached (almost) the final part of this short series, and I feel that it will be a shame if we do not discuss about the more specific issues in our modern society: mental health problems. Without my prior knowledge, the week I am gonna post this is actually the #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek, so it would be the best moment to write about this.

The Current Situation of Mental Health Care


If you are not living under the rock, you know that mental health education and awareness is one among the most-discussed topic in the last decade, but why is it so? There are definitely a lot of things we could extract from this topic, but let us first examine the current situation of mental health awareness.

If you go to any kindergarten or elementary school, how many of them actually teach about mental health? You may be able to count them by fingers. Mental health education level is surprisingly low, which may contributes to young adults that still struggle to understand themselves. However, what does it mean by understanding ourselves?

In my last posts, I wrote emotion as an upgraded self-defence mechanism. Having a highly-evolved and complex emotion actually enables us to make decisions better, with one condition: only if we are able to manage them. Having more tools means having more responsibilities and task to master. A part of being a mature human being is actually also being able to hold control over emotion, and this is one if not the hardest thing to learn. 

Understanding our emotion means knowing what we feel, being honest with our feelings. This may sound simple, but in the reality a lot of people do not understand it. Some times, feelings do not work in the same direction as the reality, and this challenges us to control ourselves. A pretty popular example is rejection. We all have experienced it. We may have been rejected by the society, by a particular person, by our goal, anything. Let’s say that we just find out that our crush is dating someone else; of course we will be totally sad and hopeless, since the reality does not work as we want. At this point, there are a lot of people that decided to live in denial, pretending that maybe they might still get the opportunity to be with their crush (which is not impossible), but being true and honest is more important in this situation. 

Being able to recognise what we feel is a skill, we are not born with it, nevertheless control what we do next with those feelings. People who cannot cope with the reality and cope with themselves may experience horrible things, depressions, and could lead to suicide. If there is one thing we have to realised from our life : the reality work most of the time differently than our dreams. Life just does not work according to our plans, and making decision is an important skill to master, which involves understanding our emotion.

Why Psychologists Are Essential


Some people may already become mature emotionally in a young age, some of them need more time, but it does not mean that we do not need professional helps during our lifetime. We learned to walk in the first two years of our life, but if accident happens and we get injured, we still need medical attentions to be able to walk again. Same thing with mental health: we may think that we are already mature and able to control ourselves, but life is not that simple. Things happen that could bring damages to ourselves, and we may need professional helps.


Credit: huffingtonpost.in


It is upsetting that a lot of people do not have access to professionals when they encounter mental health problems. But what makes psychologists actually special, compared to any other medical professionals?

Think about the last time you were sick. Did you go to the doctor? From your last 10 sickness, maybe only one time you actually need medical helps. Maybe we just got cold or flu, so we could just easily take some paracetamols, have some rests, then we will be good in the next couple of days. Our understanding our physical health is amazing, compared to hundred years ago. When we already 100% healthy, it literally means that we have fully recovered from our sickness. Of course there are a lot of diseases that cause permanent damage to our body, but I am talking about cold or normal flu.

This is where mental health have the differences. First, we may think that we don’t need helps when we encounter problems. Maybe we meditate or take some vacations, and feel that we are actually good to go. However, is it always the case? Mental problems are among the most difficult thing to observe, it requires a special skill to know the particular mental condition of someone. There is no pill of happiness. When we are sad, we cannot just take a pill and be happy again (apart from drugs, which actually does not solve the problem eternally, only for short time).  Psychologists are trained for this. They have a lot of knowledges and skills to analyse our mental condition, and giving suggestions how we could make it better.

Secondly, when we think we actually recovered from our mental problems, it may not be the actual case. We just dump it into the back of our head, and it stays there for a long time. When we encountered another problem, it fuels our old problems back alive and making it worse. There is no absolute 100% mental condition, but keeping it in a good shape is essential. You may still could recall the most depressing thing happen to you, even it happened 10 years ago. Your body may have already forgotten the worst cold you had, but your brain don’t and can’t forget memorable experiences, especially the bad ones.

The Significance of Our Brain


Have you ever thought, why the movement to aware the society about mental health  only emerges in the last decade? Why not hundred years ago? There could be actually an evolutionary reason for this. Humans have lived for around 200 thousand years, and during that time we evolved. However, one of the biggest evolution is the shift from physical strength to cognitive skills. Until thousand years ago, the situation is literally the survival of the fittest. Everyone who were strong could overcome problems in their life, and the weaks die. Brute force is the most important skill for a long long time, until we live as a global society.

Connected to everyone else around the globe means increasing the effectiveness of our effort to sustain life, and also means we are more dependant to everyone else, more than ever. As I have said in my previous post, the amount of trust we put on the society right now is insane. We trust strangers to manage things we wear, we eat, we consume. But, living in the society also means another task: keeping our values.

With the high standard of the society, we have to constantly prove ourselves that we are worth to be a part of it. This also means that we have to understand each other in any situation. Understand others is as essential as understanding ourselves, and that skills are not built in us. 

It is something we have to learn: emotional intelligence is important in our era of living, and that’s why the task to read other people is not only the professionals’. We have reached this point in terms of our physical health: we learn to manage and treat ourselves when we are sick, and also take care of others when they need, as long it is not a serious sickness. Now it is the time to apply it also in terms of mental health. We need to be able to understand ourselves, and also care for each other. 

Someone’s ability to sense other people feeling’s may be different for each person, but it is not something we could learn. We are not just living for ourselves; even if you think so, we still need other people to sustain our life. 

#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek


With the theme #KindnessMatters, I personally think there is no better way to express the need to care for each other, especially during current pandemic situation. This article is just another way to remind us, that in the era where our dependance to others can’t be greater, each one of us has a role in the society. Health workers, teachers, grocery shop staff, the list goes on forever. 

Without you, we may not survive. We need you to play your part heartfully, take care of yourselves and others. And when you have problems, remember that we are here for you, especially the professionals will help you happily and get you back to our beautiful community. 

Acknowledgements


This is the end of the short-series “Emotion”. We have come so far, from discussing how emotion emerges in ourselves to the society we are currently living in. Our emotion is always evolving, and this article is just a short reflection from our past, reminder of our current situation, and quick view to the future. 

I could not have completed this series without my friends who have taken part directly and indirectly: Arista, Ersintya, Etna, Wiranjaya, Fadlilah, Nicole, Diva, Dhea, William and Aditra (!!spoiler alert!!!), and maybe everyone else who I forgot to write in this post. Also to everyone who has read and keeps giving me feedback, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

There will be one last post coming next week, “A Conversation About Us”, featuring my two of my friends I mentioned above, and I can assure you, it is totally interesting to see this topic, especially from a psychology major. Stay tune!