Mental Health Awareness Month: How to Talk About Mental Health
Mental Health Awareness Month
May is Mental Health Awareness Month! At CCCRD, we want to do our part when it comes to educating the public on psychology and emotional health. Each week, we’ll take a look at common mental health concerns and how to manage them. We’ve looked at anxiety, depression, and self-harm. This final week, we’ll discuss how to talk about mental health with family and friends around us.
Even if we know a lot about mental health, it can be hard to bring it up with a friend or loved one who we are concerned about. But it is possible! Let’s look at three essentials of having effective conversations about mental health: developing relational safety, valuing presence over problem-solving, and asking curious questions.
Developing Relational Safety
What is relational safety?
A major part of healthy relationships is relational safety. In short, safety in relationships exhibits:
openness
honesty
largely unfiltered expression
sharing authentic experience
problems are not perceived as threats
The interaction between the various parties is safe enough to take on complex, negative, and difficult emotions.
When you feel a strong emotion (eg. anger, sadness, or fear), can you share this with the person without them taking it personally, feeling overwhelmed, or making you feel bad for burdening them? If so, you likely have relational safety.
Ways to develop relational safety
Here are just a few:
Try to understand a person’s experience—what it’s like to be them.
Be aware of your own response. What’s coming up in you as a person shares about their life? What might be helpful or hurtful to share at that moment in return?
Acknowledge complexity. People have thoughts and reactions internally that even they might dislike or not know what to do with. Recognizing that people are complicated helps us be non-judgmental.
Spend time together. Safety generally takes time, consistency, and patience. Do things together that you both enjoy, even if it’s not “that deep.”
Show trustworthiness. People generally want to see you can be trusted before they are fully vulnerable. Exhibit that you can be trusted to hold lower levels of conflict, strong emotions, or disagreement and they’ll be more likely to engage deeper things.
Presence Over Problem-Solving
When people we care about come to us with distress (mental, emotional, or physical), our first response is often to go into problem-solving mode. That makes sense—we see a problem (the person’s distress) and we want to solve it (take the distress away).
While active problem-solving can be appropriate, often emotions and mental health can’t be “solved.” There are no quick fixes, and unpleasant experiences have a way of sticking around. For these reasons, it’s important to relational health to value presence over problem-solving.
What is presence?
Presence is the degree to which a person is in tune with the moment they are in. A present person is aware of where they are, what they are doing, and actively engaged with the person/people around them.
You’ve probably experienced this: you’re physically at work, but your mind is on the golf course. You’re driving your normal route, but you’re thinking about your summer plans. You’re sitting in the DMV, but you’re pondering the meaning of life. These things are all very different than when you sit at dinner with a loved one in a free-flowing back-and-forth conversation—that’s presence.
Why value presence over problem-solving?
When we go straight to solving problems without really connecting with someone, they’ll likely feel like another thing on the to-do list. They’ve also probably already tried to think of ways to solve their problems, and they really just want someone to see them as they are.
When we are present with someone in distress or suffering, we are entering into their experience to the extent that we can. This helps us and the other feel seen, understood, cared for, and not alone.
Next time you find yourself trying to solve someone’s problems or give them advice they’re not asking for, consider whether intentional presence with the person might be your best course of action.
Asking Curious Questions
Asking good questions about someone’s experience is therapeutic in itself. There’s something about having someone curious about what it’s like to be in our heads that makes distress easier to hold. Over time, this also makes us feel safe in relationships.
What are curious questions?
Curious questions have several characteristics:
They open conversation rather than close it
They don’t assume a specific answer
They convey intrigue or a desire to understand the person more
They are as much for the recipient to engage their own experience as for the inquirer to get information
They show a lack of judgment
Examples of curious questions:
What aspects of your day were life-giving? Which were difficult?
What emotions did you feel throughout the day?
In what way did today go differently than you expected? Similarly?
How did that person’s words/actions make you feel?
Why do you think you felt (insert emotion) in that situation?
What new understanding about yourself/others can you gain from this?
You’ll notice these questions cannot be answered with “yes” or “no”—that would make them “closed questions” and likely bring conversation to an end. Instead, these questions open up a conversation into new possibilities.
Think about some curious questions that you might ask a friend, partner, or loved one around you!
