No Health Without Mental Health

When students have fever in school, they care of them, delicately, bring them to clinic and give some dose of medicine or send them home. What if a student is in the middle of a mental breakdown, what would the teacher or classmates do? If a person is injured, we either wait for medical assistance and apply first aid. We don’t let the person to be injured more so we are cautious on applying first aid and assistance. Same applies on mental breakdowns, don’t tell a student having anxiety to “calm your thoughts”, “ you’re just being overactive”, don’t tell a depressed student “it’s just all in your mind”, just no. Those are the reasons they hate sharing how they feel, because of statements that you think helps, but in reality they don't. Telling them those won’t help, it’s like telling a blind person to see, a deaf person to hear, and a person with Alzheimer's to stop forgetting memories. Meaning, they just can’t snap out of it.

“Mental health is as important as physical health, as a juveniles once said “mens sana in corpore sano” meaning, a healthy mind in a healthy body. It’s great to see schools posting tarpaulins telling students about how to take care of themselves, letting them know the different physical disease. Haven’t you notice, no one posts tarpaulins about mental health awareness to students. Just because something isn’t visible in our naked eyes, does not mean it doesn’t exist.

Schools must start implementing mental health education because of increasing rate of suicide among students. By that, I mean teaching students how to deal with anxiety attacks, or what are the right approach when they meet someone with mental illness. They all have to realize that our health doesn’t end in physical aspects. After all our mind is our command center, without properly taking care of it, what would happen to our everyday functioning? That’s why we crucially need to take care of it, because Both mental health disorders and chronic diseases are common and disabling.