When you get sick or scrape your knee, the immediate reaction is to take medicine or grab a bandage. But what about when you are having a mental health day; when your anxiety or depression is making you feel worse than a cold or a scraped knee could? Our immediate reaction is to push our feelings down and not talk about it. But this backwards way of thinking is exactly why mental health needs to be talked about now more than ever, and why the stigmatization of asking for help or taking medicine needs to be disrupted.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted our lives more than any other time in history. Quarantine became the new norm and, for months on end, our mental health has paid the price. A study by the U.S. Census Bureau showed that more than 42 percent of people showed symptoms of anxiety and depression in December 2020, an increase from 11 percent in December 2019. With the increase in uncertainty of what the future of the pandemic holds, there exists an even bigger increase in mental illnesses across the world: something that I feel people are not talking about as much as they should.
Not being able to see people, leave our homes, or return to our daily lives has proven to be more consequential than anyone could have imagined. With lives full of chaos, all of a sudden, the mental health stigma has seemed to only increase.
Arham Hashmi ’23, a member of the Peer Health Education’s Mental Health Committee, mentioned that much of the stigma surrounding mental health that exists today “results from a lot of gaslighting where individuals with negatively affected mental health are termed ‘dramatic’ or ‘over- emotional.’” When people with negative mental health are brushed off as not having an illness, the stigma increases. Mental health is just as important as physical health and should be regarded in similar ways.
Despite all this stigma that has existed for centuries, there are efforts helping to improve the conversation around mental health. Dorothy Lowenstein ’21 is doing just this. Her two brands, Always Tired Clothing and Simply Say Hey, are working toward furthering the conversation on destigmatizing mental health.
Always Tired Clothing started out of an assignment for an Entrepreneurial Artist Class that Lowenstein took during her Sophomore year. The goal was to get the conversation started on mental health, but the class project soon turned into something much more. To open the conversation on mental illness and get discussions going, this brand has become a small step into solving this larger issue.
She has since transformed Always Tired Clothing into a new platform, Simply Say Hey, an “event-based community that provides a lot of programming to hopefully inspire people to make saying hey and reaching out like a common practice.” To provide an accessible platform for people to connect with others easily (similar to a dating app) and make friends in new places when interaction in times like these is so rare, Simply Say Hey is picking up where Always Tired Clothing left off; transforming how we talk about mental illness.
Living in pandemic times like these is hard enough as it is, but doing it while at school, attending classes, and doing copious amounts of work day after day is an even bigger challenge. Taking care of yourself, reaching out for help, and keeping your own routine is extremely important and can make these troubling times a little better.
Small-scale steps like these are what will create a bigger conversation in how mental health is regarded.- Normalizing telling someone about a therapy session or talking about how you are feeling is what a lot of people, especially students, need right now, and the conversation cannot get started without small, personal actions, like what Lowenstein is doing. That, and destigmatizing how we discuss mental illness and interact with people with mental illnesses, as Hashmi noted, are the most crucial steps in helping change and popularize the mental health movement.
If you need help or want to talk to someone, reach out to the Counseling Center at 518-580-5555
Peer Health Education also has one-on-one sessions through the office of Health Promotions. Visit the link in the @skidphes Instagram bio for more information.
Visit @simplysayhey on Instagram to learn more about Dorothy Lowenstein’s brand.