4 Reasons Why I Can’t Stop Talking about Mental health

It has been almost a year and a half since I started advocating for mental health and trying my best to fight the stigma surrounding it.

Recently, many of my friends on social media were telling me to stop spending a fair amount of time using my Facebook or Instagram to post mental health stuff. For a while, that was the only topic I was posting about hoping to get people’s attention.

Many reasons motivate me to keep writing prolifically about this topic; below are the main ones:

1. I am a victim of mental illness myself

I struggled with depression since my teenage years, before I was officially diagnosed with clinical depression in December 2018. I honestly felt relieved to know that what I experienced had a name, yet I felt hopeless for wasting all my teenage years battling this insidious disease. Depression for me was like a monster who was growing up at the same time as me without me noticing. When I discovered that monster, it was a bit late because it was already strong enough to fight.

Here is a video I made to tell my story with depression in-depth and send a message to everyone fighting depression or other mental health issues.

2. I come from the MENA region

I am Arab myself, and from where I come, mental health is still a taboo. People wouldn’t believe you if you miss a meeting with them due to having a severe panic attack. Mental illness is invisible, and it is hard to explain it to people in general, and those living in the Arab world tend to stigmatize mental illness harshly. I often used to hear people asking me to stop complaining and take the time to pray, as for them, what I was feeling was just a phase that can be overcome by prayers, or that it was only something happening in my brain and my imagination. The Arab region constitutes 5·54% of the global population. It faces a higher burden of mental disorders than the global population. Hence, I feel the need to educate other people in the Arab region to understand how serious mental illness can be and that it is as vital as physical diseases.

3. I am a man

The notion of toxic masculinity still exists in the world, and many think that men can’t show their feelings or cry, so imagine how hard it can be for a man with clinical depression to express the way he feels. As a man, I was hurt several times due to my mental illness, and I used to hear the following words:

• Boys don’t cry!
• Man up!
• Be a man — get over it!

According to research, men are less likely to seek mental health services than their female counterparts because they simply feel misunderstood. They often think that it is a sign of weakness to seek support because of mental illness. This idea that men should be strong all the time should change, so I need to make my voice heard and contribute to changing this way of thinking because men can cry, men can break down, and every man has the right to feel powerless from time to time.

4. I am a member of the LGBTQ community

LGBT people are prone to mental health problems because, whatever the straight world may claim about tolerance and equality, the world still seems “set up straight” to many LGBT people. It’s always a struggle to be who you are and be reasonably open and honest about it. There’s still a lot of prejudice. Besides, many LGBTQ people spend a fair amount of their life hiding their sexual orientation or gender identity from their friends or family. They are scared to be disowned by their family, left alone by their friends, and even disowned by their parents, and all this stress and anxiety create serious mental health issues.

Mental illness has dramatically changed the way I see life. It has been a painful experience. I want to do my best to share my journey with people going through the same struggle, and to let them know that they are not alone in this. So yes, there is absolutely no way for me to stop talking about mental health, and if we all stand together, we can fight the stigma surrounding it and make other people’s lives much better.