Beating anxiety and depression – With an increasing amount of unhelpful information on mental health available on social media and beyond, it’s easy to form ideas about issues such as anxiety, depression or phobias that aren’t based on facts or evidence.
This is especially true if you’re suffering from poor mental health yourself, because you’re likely to be looking for an explanation or reason behind your condition – and, some of these explanations you believe to be true, might not be.
A concept particularly relevant to this discussion is something called Intellectual Honesty. Despite the high-brow tag, this isn’t a complicated theory that’s only relevant to academic study or philosophy – rather, it’s the idea of examining your beliefs and behaviours in a way that eliminates unhelpful influences on your thinking or position on a particular subject.
Intellectual honesty is described by Harvard ethics researcher Louis M. Guenin as “a virtuous disposition to eschew deception when given an incentive for deception…” In short, it compels you to ask yourself: do the beliefs I have stand up to rational scrutiny?
Obviously, we’re not suggesting that lots of people with a mental health issue are engaging in outright public deception, but it’s often the case that the beliefs and behaviours we have around mental health are influenced heavily by lots of external factors that may not be rooted in fact and evidence. And when we misunderstand the root cause of something like an anxiety disorder, it’s even harder to overcome it.
For example, with the progression of the nature vs nurture debate in the latter part of the last century, many people who formed their beliefs around mental health at this time will tell you that depression is all in the genes or due to a chemical imbalance in the brain. A common belief is that you’re stuck with this condition for life and the best you can hope for is to cope with the symptoms, usually with medication.
This could be considered to be an intellectually dishonest position because there is a lot of evidence to suggest that most cases of anxiety or depression have little to do with genetics and that people with even severe, long-term mental ill health can make a full recovery. Couple this with lots of studies that show, at best, questionable results for medication-based treatment, and the danger of rigidly sticking to a belief system around your mental health is obvious.
But it can be tricky to question your own beliefs, especially when you consider that you may have a strong confirmation bias towards a particular belief about mental health.
There are lots of mental health ‘campaigners’ on social media who subscribe to unhelpful and misplaced ideas about being stuck with mental health disorders for life. They often seem helpless or resigned to suffering, and seeing content – videos, memes etc – furthering this idea can cement someone into the same cycle without taking a broader view on if this is helpful and accurate information.
The information fits your beliefs around the subject and thus you consider it accurate – this is confirmation bias in action. But unless you understand how this might work so you’re aware of the pitfalls of this type of thinking – particularly in relation to mental health – it’s very easy to just accept certain viewpoints or other people’s judgements as factual information.
Here are some more common positions on mental health that could also be considered inaccurate:
Mental health is happening to you, like a magical external force. Not true. But, given the lack of public knowledge about how mental health works and the failure of the medical profession to address some really big issues and thus help lots of people achieve mental wellness, it’s not surprising many people blame poor mental health solely on external factors.
In reality, research shows us that people who view their mental health as the product of their attitudes, beliefs and behaviours and who exhibit an internal locus of control, enjoy better mental health. And they enjoy better mental health because their understanding of how it works allows them to overcome issues such as depression and anxiety for good.
So, an intellectually honest position would be that we are in charge of our mental health – good and bad – and that there is no magical force influencing this aspect of our lives.
Winter and shorter daylight hours cause depression. Not true. If you listen to the language people use around this subject (“This weather / darkness / rain is SO depressing…”) then it’s not surprising that many people associate winter or bad weather with poor mental health. This is mainly due to the fact that the language we use and the influences we listen to are often the driving factors behind poor mental health. It’s even spawned its own disorder – Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), easily the most unhelpfully-named mental health issue ever.
The trouble is, there is very little evidence for the existence of this disorder, especially taking the form of a chemical imbalance caused by a lack of daylight. The real explanation behind most seasonal depression that exists is social and societal, not biological.
Thus, an intellectually honest position would be that someone’s propensity to suffer from depression isn’t down to the season or weather, but by the way that individual is responding behaviourally and emotionally to events in their lives. In short, rain and darkness do NOT make you depressed.
Now, examine your beliefs around mental health and, if you’re struggling with one particular aspect such as anxiety or a phobia, really think carefully about your belief systems around this. Are they helping you move forward in a positive, sustainable way, or are they holding you back from being mentally healthy?
If you’re interested in learning more about changing your beliefs around mental health so you can overcome anxiety, depression, disorders, phobias or just general poor mental health, book an initial consultation or full course with one of our Thrive Programme Coaches or buy a copy of The Thrive Programme training manual.
Courses for teenagers, adults, couples, families, businesses and community organisations are available and all involve non-medicalised training, resulting in the individual being in control of their mental health and wellbeing. Beating anxiety and depression
