How Mental Illness Sabotages Physical Health
To truly foster wellness, we must adopt a holistic perspective
According to WebMD, “holistic medicine is a form of healing that considers the whole person — body, mind, spirit, and emotions — in the quest for optimal health and wellness.”
Simply put, an individual is made up of several interdependent components that all collectively promote wellness. When all the pieces of the puzzle fit together snugly, optimum wellbeing is achieved. Wellness.
When one, or several, of the puzzle pieces are incongruent with the whole, whether due to snagged edges or a missing piece entirely, then wellness suffers. Think of wellness as a metaphorical building. A building cannot stand strong if the bricks in its foundation are crumbling.
Holistic wellness, as it is eloquently dubbed, is an all-encompassing summation of the various components within, which all complement each other artfully to promote a state of wellbeing in an individual.
An individual such as Lydia, a successful financial advisor and mother of two boys, 8 and 4. She leads a busy life, but has a solid career that she genuinely enjoys. Occupational health — check. As the sole breadwinner of her family, she maintains ample financial security and prides herself on this fact. Financial health — check.
With generous insurance coverage, she attends her annual physical exams devotedly, takes a multivitamin, and even flosses every day. Physical health — check.
On the surface, Lydia seems to embody the ideal healthy lifestyle. But underneath it, she struggles with manic depression. During her depressive episodes, she faces intense, unpredictable mood swings, overwhelming lethargy, and a heavy sadness that she can’t shake.
In her mind, she is an utter failure to her family, even though they get along very well. No amount of positive, uplifting words can convince her.
As a result, Lydia’s emotional health suffers greatly. She feels lonely, sad, and hopeless. Despite her loneliness, she resists the urge to reach out to friends for emotional support; she doesn’t want to be a burden. She understands the extreme nature of her mood swings and depressive lows, and knows it would be unfair to expect someone to play therapist.
In turn, due to her reluctance to connect with friends, her social health also suffers. During these periods, she frequently declines invitations to social gatherings, using her parental responsibilities as a fall-back excuse.
Despite her regular annual physicals and religious flossing practices, Lydia has gained 20 pounds and now has high blood pressure, an unfortunate side effect of her depression.
Even though she constantly strives to maintain her physical health, her emotional state is working radically against her. Despite the shopping cart full of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables, and her commitment to working out 5 days a week, her physical health declines sharply as her depression worsens.
You see, that motivation for exercising and maintaining a healthy figure, the motivation that brought Lydia to the gym to sign up for a membership, the same motivation that makes her jump out of bed on good days… That motivation is gone.
Such is the paradox of mental illness. When we desperately need intervention, is precisely the point at which we are least likely to pursue it. Our unstable minds chemically starved for serotonin and dopamine, our hearts aching, we have lost the will to take action and effect positive change.
For some, even climbing out of bed in the morning is nearly impossible. The impending doom of the dreadful day ahead, the anxiety and misery that it holds, weighs us down like dead weight.
Sure, exercise naturally boosts serotonin and might make you feel better. But at the moment when you need it most, you are overcome with a complete sense of lethargy and frailness. Motivation? Strength? Willpower? All nowhere to be found.
So you forgo exercise another day. Further exacerbating your depressed mood, your sense of worthlessness and self-hatred. You are angry at yourself, but today… you simply can’t. You don’t have the energy, the desire, the self-worth. You feel helpless, useless.
Tomorrow, you wake up and do it all over again. Except tomorrow, it might be worse. Each day, it becomes increasingly hard to drag yourself through the day.
Each day is a struggle.
Your failure to exercise leads to diminished physical health. Your social life suffers. Your relationship suffers. And above all, your relationship with yourself has been tainted. You don’t know where to go, or what to do.
Such is the constant struggle of so many individuals who suffer from mental illness, not only clinical depression but a myriad of anxiety, mood, and personality disorders.
Emotional health is critical to a healthy lifestyle. Mental health contributes to wellbeing in the same way that proper nutrition and regular physical exercise do.
Which is why it is impossible to evaluate wellbeing without the inclusion of all these vital components. And equally impossible to treat physical illness without considering mental health.
Health is a measure of one’s entire holistic wellbeing. To isolate the components results in ineffective treatments and band-aid cover-ups. A disservice to patients and doctors alike.
It’s time we define health as what it is — an all-encompassing summation of one’s existence, physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, social, financial, occupational, and even environmental.
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