An Invisible Wound

How often do we hear or use the term “Stress”? I guess every time, everywhere and from everyone. A couple of decades ago, we used the term stress only in Physics textbooks just to solve the problems pertaining to the subject Physics. But now the scenario has been completely changed. The word stress has invaded our lives with our full subconscious consent. I’m deliberately using the word subconscious just to make you realise that we have made stress an indispensable part of life, without which our day is incomplete.

Now let us go back to our school days where we had defined stress as the force applied per unit area. 

Analogous to our lives, the force is the external circumstances which emerge in our day-to-day life which the mind needs to remain conscious about. Unfortunately, we know everything still unable to shun off the term stress and eventually end up considering it as a normal way of living. Force is directly proportional to pressure, so we can say that the denominator is increasing everyday whenever there is an external turbulence, and we have become absolutely ignorant to reduce its effect on our minds. A simple ten minutes meditation twice a day can help resolve our issue to a large extent. But we have become accustomed to using the word “I’m busy”. We can use ten minutes for generating the toxic thoughts, but we cannot devote those ten minutes for generating the pure thoughts to calm our minds.

This inflicts more damage to our minds when we ignore to take care of it.

The pressure has kept increasing in our lives and resilience is constantly dwindling due to which there is a surge in numerous cases of mental disorders and increasing anxiety among people including the teenagers whose life has just started.

Depression stands out as a very unique and usual mental disorder. Yes it is a “disorder” accept it because anything which is detrimental to your life, impacting the regular pattern of life such as losing interest in life, erratic sleeping habits, and if not diagnosed at the right time, may lead to dreadful experience of, hallucinations and delusion the ultimate state of schizophrenia.

The blunder that we commit is that we accept depression as a normal phenomenon, since it has become a trend among people to live with it comfortably without finding the panacea.

The one who is living alone is depressed and also the one who is living with people around him is going through the same. Person sitting next to us in the office is under depression and a person standing next to us in a queue is also depressed. Depression has engrossed in our lives to such an extent that our abnormal mood has become a normal mood for us to live with. Why ? Because anything which is common is normal no matter how venomous it is.

Few days back I was talking to one of my very close friends, she is a very social woman who loves to hang out with people frequently but ever since the lockdown has come into play due to the COVID-19 pandemic, her social life has come to a standstill. And I could figure out a drastic effect of it on her mental stability. Although she tells me every single story of her life, yet when it came to her mental health she chose to remain mum. She didn’t feel like uttering about the state of her mind. And after talking to her constantly for some days, I discerned that she had plunged herself into depression. One day I gathered all my courage and decided to confront her with the veracity of her life therefore I called her up and said “listen you are in depression”. Astonishingly, the reply from her side was “yes, I know” !  

I took the onus on me to fix her state of mind, proper counselling as a friend could help her for sometime only. I was stunned to see that despite knowing her state of mind she kept plunging herself into the same. 

The most surprising reality is that we keep ourselves aware of every single thing happening around us, we definitely forward the optimistic quotes to our loved ones, yet fail to implement them in our daily lives.

Seeking someone’s help should not be a taboo. Ask anyone whom you find is going through any mild symptoms of mental disorder, he or she would avoid or disregard your advice. People keep eluding the visits to a consultant. 

Have we ever ignored our physical health? Even for a mild cough or cold we get affected so much that we inevitably go to a doctor to get the prescribed medicines then what is wrong in visiting a psychiatrist when your crucial part of the body without which life is almost impossible to live peacefully, is disquiet !

Merely because the wound is invisible, doesn’t mean there isn’t any wound. Similarly, things will remain complicated unless we put an effort to unravel the complexities arisen due to our erroneous way of living and to be specific, way of “thinking”!

I hope collectively we can help each other to remove the stigma attached to mental health and discuss it with our friends and family more often.

And at an individual level, give yourself more time for introspection, talk to yourself, observe what and where the things are going wrong. 

Meditate for sometime and connect to your real self.