FSome of us would question the need to break the silence around mental illness. Countless campaigns have taught us that such silence is harmful and we must try to break it wherever we find it.
Britain Get Talking One such campaign is this. It started with a splash a few years ago on Britain’s Got Talent when hosts Ant and Des paused the show for a minute to allow viewers to talk to each other about their mental health. When the minute ended, the ant announced: “Look, it wasn’t hard, was it?”
Undoubtedly, campaigns like this have helped many people to open up about their mental health problems, especially those who have been kept silent due to prejudice and stigma.
However, they can also feed misconceptions about silence in mental illness. He implies that silence in and around mental illness is always bad, rooted in fear and stigma, and that any effort to break it is good.
Indeed, in mental illness the silence comes in many forms,
Some types of silence are part of mood disorders such as depression. People who have written about their experiences of depression often describe losing the ability to think and feeling unable to speak.
For example, the author Andrew Solomon recalls that he “couldn’t manage to say much”. In detail, he writes, “Words, with which I have always been intimate, suddenly seemed to be very elaborate, difficult metaphors, the use of which took far more energy than I ever thought possible.”
This aspect of depression is well known in mental health care. Thinking less and speaking less are actually considered two different symptoms of depression. some Research Even suggest that silence is such a reliable symptom that it may be possible to develop automated tools that diagnose depression based on a person’s speech patterns.
If you’re experiencing this type of “sad silence,” campaigns are afoot and people are urging you to speak up, regardless of their good intentions. After all, the problem is not that others do not accept your point of view or that they may react poorly to it. It’s that you have nothing to say.
Other types of silence can be empowering. Some people with mental illness fearlessly remain silent because those around them ask unwanted questions or give them unhelpful input. They may choose wisely to save the difficult conversations for their therapists.
Such a choice is not necessarily rooted in stigma. Just because someone is well-intentioned and knows some facts about mental health, doesn’t mean they are the right person to talk to about mental illness.
Even silence can feel good in mental illness. While some people have difficulty thinking and speaking, others have a lot of thinking and speaking difficulty.
For example, this may be the case for someone with bipolar disorder, who experiences episodes of depression as well as mania, often involving racing thoughts and a compulsion to speak. For such people, moments of peaceful silence can be a hard-won feat, and sometimes they pay a tragically high price for it.
We rarely hear about these other sides of the silence in mental illness. But clinicians have recognized the role of silence in supporting mental health, at least since Donald Winnicott published his seminal paper ability to live alone, And silence in one form or another is a key element of meditation, which studies Has shown that recurrence of depression can be prevented.
right conditions
The silences I have described should perhaps be broken under the right circumstances. Since sad silence seems to be part of depressive illness, it may be something the patient needs to overcome with the help of a mental health care professional. Similarly, someone in therapy may benefit from breaking their peaceful silence, even when the silence feels good.
For whatever reason, many people won’t find those situations with their family, friends or co-workers, despite encouragement from a celebrity on TV. The truth is that talking about mental health problems is very difficult, even with people who love and support us. Sometimes this is due to stigma, but sometimes it is not.
Of course, we must continue to strive to make it easier for people to talk openly about their mental health problems in the right settings. But we need to get rid of the rhetoric that pressures people to break their silence regardless of why they are silent or if speaking up would benefit them.
Dan Degerman, Research Fellow, University of Bristol
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