Even if you are at risk for mental illness, you can maintain your social and emotional well-being by learning and practicing mental health skills.
At the 2022 Mental Health America conference last week, “Forward Together – Recovery, Healing, Hope,” Kristen Harootunian, a young adult from Minding Your Mind, told a powerful and hopeful “story” titled, “Changing Minds: Stories Over Stigma.” Kristen related her experience with health, mental illness, substance abuse, and her subsequent recovery.
Mental Health Toolbox
- First, young people should connect with 1-3 trusted adults. They could be parents, teachers, counselors, clergy, family members, or friends.
- “Letting people in and meeting help halfway”: Kristen talked about how she thought she had to do things on her own and was alone in her struggles. When she opened up to her friends, she wasn’t expecting their support. Instead, they listened and gave her love and compassion. In therapy, Kristen found she wasn’t alone – that many young people deal with struggles similar to hers. Getting help with her emotional health or “letting people in” was what she needed to survive.
Five positive coping skills
- Kristen’s five positive coping skills:
- Exercise,
- Walking,
- Reading,
- Connecting with family and friends
- Journaling: When asked how she was doing, Kristen usually responded with, “I’m fine.” But actually, she was hiding or masking her true feelings. Writing or journaling helped her express her feelings, including guilt (of her mother’s death), shame, substance abuse, pressure, isolation, emptiness, trauma, anxiety, sadness, guardedness, grief, and tiredness. Getting these feelings down on paper helped her work through them and, for the most part, out of them.
How about you?
Creating a toolbox of mental health skills isn’t difficult. It’s easy and can be a fun use of time. How about you? Do you have a toolbox of skills to help you maintain your mental health? Are they like the tools in Kristen’s box, or are they different? I would love to hear about what’s in your toolbox in the Comments section below!
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“Square breathing or box breathing,” a technique to help calm our bodies and brains down when starting to feel anxious: 4 beats inhale, 4 beats hold, 4 beats exhale, 4 beats hold, and repeat.
Kristen says these tools help her maintain her recovery, but, as she alludes in her presentation, they would have been helpful to know at an early age to provide strategies to protect against mental illness.