MONDAY BLUES (27)

WORLD MENTAL HEALTH DAY

Today is World Mental Health Day. While we are busy focussing on our physical fitness, we conveniently ignore our mental health. We don’t want to admit that we are affected mentally by the adverse circumstances that we are experiencing. This is one of the reasons why we experience anxiety, stress, hypertension, and depression.

Symptoms of Depression:

Depression is identified by the following symptoms:

1. A wave of sadness, irritability, bad mood.

2. No interest in doing any kind of activity. The duration of depression varies between different individual. A relative of mine wouldn’t brush her teeth, take a bath, or have proper food.

3. Low self-esteem.

4. Excessive feeling of guilt.

5. Suicidal tendencies. As per the statistics revealed by The WHO ( World Health Organization) over 700 000 people die due to suicide every year.People who are depressed find difficulty in performing their daily routine like communicating with family, concentrating on studies, work, and even personal tasks.

I will share a detailed article on this sensitive issue, next Monday. Because I want to talk about my own experience. Yes, I admit that I had depression. Years of marital abuse made me feel worthless. I hated myself for being an incompetent nincompoop. The reason for this feeling was my parents-in-law and husband kept on taunting over my lack of cooking skills and household management.

Every day, my mother-in-law would point out that her son received better marriage proposals and missed out on a better daughter-in-law. It hurt me so much. I now sincerely wish he had rejected me. I would have been grateful to him for life. Just because I was a homemaker, I was considered useless, lazy, stupid. I tried working from home but mom-in-law dearest couldn’t see me working for more than 2 hours. She would disturb me on purpose to do household work.

Unable to bear the harsh words, every day humiliation from everyone in the family, I decided to end my life by consuming pills and I did. But I don’t know why I woke up my husband and told him I took pills. He called my Sister-in-law and she saved me.

Then, I remembered my mother telling about my father’s Schizophrenia. How she spent a day at the mental hospital with him, and noticed a Sri Lankan boy who was a drug addict lying in the adjacent bed! Oh my God! This incident changed my way of thinking. Mom had struggled a lot to raise me and my brother. My life is too precious to be wasted on useless people. From that moment onwards, the thought of suicide never crossed my mind, even though the domestic abuse continued until I fell sick.

Writing has helped me a lot in changing my outlook towards life. Especially, blogging, where I received constant love, support, encouragement and motivation from wonderful, inspiring, very talented, knowledgeable friends like all of you, boosted my confidence and inspired me to keep fighting against all odds. Your stories, articles, travel blogs have helped me so much to learn new things every day. Life is not over because I do feel like traveling around the world and meet you. I wish to thank all of you for your inspiring, interesting, informative and entertaining posts.

I feel much better now and I hope I won’t let the positive spirit within me to die because of negative comments or criticism.

I am deeply pained to see that there are worst cases affecting women who are forced to take this extreme step called suicide. Being a homemaker is even more difficult than working at a regular office. Housewives should not be insulted by anyone. They have sacrificed their dreams to fulfill their commitments towards their families. If you can’t appreciate her, at least don’t criticize her.

And the reasons for a man to end his life, are taking a huge amount of loan and failure to repay on time, a highly demanding or a nagging wife, failure to fulfill all the wishes of children, a feeling of inferiority complex, unable to meet the expectations of the parents and so on. Scolding the youngsters for scoring low marks, constant comparison with academically brilliant students, objecting to their choice of subjects, and love failure also lead to the suicide among teenagers and young adults.

Most of the problems could be solved, if we don’t discourage others simply because we couldn’t achieve our goals. The whole world is big enough for all to achieve something in their lives. Appreciation, motivation, cheering up people when they are feeling low, is the kind of mindset, we should adopt while dealing with depressed people.

According to an article published in https://www.healthline.com/health,
To overcome depression, we can :

1. Go for a walk.
2. Practise Meditation
3. Go for counseling.
4. Take up some extracurricular activity.
5. Getting adequate sleep.
6. Taking a proper diet.
7. Take a trip with your family or friends.
8. Volunteering at some NGOs.
9. Setting attainable goals and rewarding yourself after achieving every goal.
10. Try doing something unique.
11. Interacting with nature helps a lot. Visiting a hill station or a wildlife Sanctuary has a soothing effect on our nerves.
12. Reading lots of motivational books and videos also helps a lot. I also used to watch comedy shows which definitely helped me to overcome my bout of depression.

Most importantly, trying doing something you love as a passion or a hobby like painting, reading, writing, or music. I will continue to share my views on this topic next Monday.

Thank you so much for taking your precious time to visit my website. Hope you enjoyed reading my blogs. 😊😊