I always like to counter "somebody is poorer than you so you should be happy" with "does that mean I should be unhappy because there are people richer than me?".
But, as somebody living in 2nd world I do get what the person you're replying to said, our countries and poverty often gets ignored (or worse, exploited) by westerners.
Do you know that a person can commit suicide due to mental health[1]? That sounds pretty serious if you ask me.
I do understand what you're trying to say. But sometimes the threat is imminent but you cannot see it, and many people will not talk openly about this to others. Somebody being dismissive of your problems can be exactly like person pushing you off a cliff.
>Do you know that a person can commit suicide due to mental health[1]? That sounds pretty serious if you ask me.
I do, thanks for reminding me! I guess this comic is a portraying someone who has attempted suicide or is crying for help via suicide then? It would be nice to have that clarification.
I think it's disingenuous to equate death with people who aren't facing a life or death situation, like suicide.
I can tell you with certainty, many people, at least people close to me didn't have good intentions when giving advice. Or even if they did have good intentions, they told me the completely wrong things. When somebody tells you things like this, you feel like that person didn't take time to understand how you are feeling, they didn't consider what to tell you to actually help. This can amplify your feeling of loneliness and helplessness. It was very hard for me to accept that I cannot count on anyone in my life to help me and that the only person I can rely on in my life is me.
These situations are very, very hard to navigate if you didn't go through these issues yourself, so better just not give any advice and just try to listen.
I even had people tell me outright dangerous things, like telling me to stop taking medication. People who never had depression, had no contact with psychology except in high school told me this kind of advice. Even though I am certain some of the people who told me this wanted the best of me, quitting meds can have a wide array of unexpected effects, and even if the meds are not effective, this is still definitely a bad advice. Not to mention that meds actually helped me a lot.
It is not the point of this. The point of this comic is to try to make people who never had mental health issues understand how it feels from our point of view when you give your clueless and tone deaf advice.
Would you not be at least a bit annoyed if somebody told you to "just think positively" when you are drowning? To you it might sound ridiculous to make this analogy, as you don't see a person literally drowning when you see a depressed person. But to us it can feel exactly like this.
> Sometimes people engage in these situations for multiple reasons. They're looking for their anxiety to be validated
In these situations I do everything to not validate the anxiety, but still be understanding of their feelings.
As somebody who had OCD, and sometimes sought out validations from others, I know it is was not beneficial for me to have somebody validate it. For example you wouldn't tell me it is valid that I cannot sleep because I didn't close the door just right (and yes, OCD anxieties are this frivolous); you would tell me I'm wasting my time and energy thinking about that (and yes, that is the advice that worked for me).
My solution to anxiety is to throw the anxious thought out. Like meditation techniques where you try to ignore all your thoughts, here you would just ignore the anxiety inducing ones. You just set your mind on more productive thoughts.
Do you have any example of the advice they gave you that you "benefited immensely from?". Because I got this kind of advice a million times and it only made me feel worse.
Also, when this kind of advice came from my family, they were trying to minimize my problems (so they wouldn't have to do anything to seriously help), not help me.
Yes. A coworker once told me I talk too fast on the phone. After getting angry for a moment that someone would think they can tell me how to speak, I realized they were right and that other people were having trouble hearing me and following what I was saying. I worked on it, and now people compliment me on my phone skills. For the past 5 years I've worked from home and am on hours of calls a day. Immense benefit, and I will always be grateful they said something.
One really interesting aspect of empathy is that it seems to have evolved as a pain avoidance tool - you see someone else burn their hand, see them react by saying "Ouch!", and you feel a shadow of the pain they're in, and don't make the same mistake. When we feel too much empathy for people - e.g. someone we're close to is in pain - often people give advice that is selfish - you're in pain, and it's hurting me, so while I want to help, what I'm really doing is trying to minimize my own suffering by (often inadvertently) minimizing yours. Helping other people is hard, both because we often don't know what to do, and because even our best intentions can get distorted by our ape brains.
And to be clear, the advice in the comic is bad advice when it's given in those contexts. For good advice that's shaped kind of the same way, I'd suggest reading "Peace is Every Step" by Thich Naht Hanh - lmk and I can send you a copy (It's on libgen). Alternatively, reading the stoics (as someone else suggested in this thread) would be a good place to start.
People should avoid giving advice to others suffering from mental health issues. It's reasonable to point that out and refer to a professional. That said,
Be more than words. If I am telling someone to seek professional advice, I would help them with the task in a meaningful way such as contributing financially, finding information for them, being their speaker or support for coming out to others. Ask them what they would need help with instead of guessing or provide options when they can't come up with something.
If you are close or live nearby, you can help with chores and food. Good food helps and it's easy to end up eating garbage when you are down.
This is exactly what I do, now that I've climbed out of the hole, I extend my hand to help others come out.
I'm very open about things that I went through, and it validates people's feelings, and hopefully gives them some optimism when they see it's possible to overcome this.
I've got a few of my friends to actually seek professional help (and it helped all of them, at least a bit). And the way I go about this is first telling of the issues I had, and then saying that every single person (even the most normal person) would have a lot to benefit from occasionally going to a therapist. I also compliment my friends when I notice change in their behaviour.
I'd love to be able to help them financially as well, but as a student that is not an option.
Yoga was the one that resonated with me. The best piece of advice I ever got (though not explicitly criticised here, but along the same vein) was to take deep breaths to control my emotions. Most of the time my mental health problems were not physical, but stemmed from my own emotions, so these exercises were very effective. Unsolicited mental health advice drove a lot of my mental and emotional development as a child. Maybe I'm an anomaly, but I suspect others shared my experience.
Hey, yoga is actually awesome, I have to agree there. But I always ignored that advice until I came up with going to yoga class on my own.
I think this is important in understanding the issue here. It's not that the advice is bad, it's that it is usually tone deaf and timed wrongly, making it hard to be received.
