I first realized how many adults struggle with ongoing mental illness when I was about to graduate college. My wife and I were just married, and I was looking for a reasonable place to live we could afford. The apartment I chose happen to be within walking distance from a local community mental health center. At the time I didn’t pay much attention to the location but quickly learned that many of the residents that were my neighbors utilized its services. The first week living there we heard screaming outside our window followed by banging on the door. Terrified we leapt from bed to see what was happening. After a few minutes the police were outside trying to calm someone down. Later I found out a neighbor of mine struggled with schizophrenia. Over the time I lived there we befriended each other, and I found out that many of the residents also accessed the local health center for services. While I didn’t fully understand at the time what my friend struggled with, I could appreciate the effort and support required to maintain stability in their life.
Stability can be hard for many people that deal with mental illness. Often with family support and services many people become stable and can maintain jobs and families but what happens when someone doesn’t have family support nor access to services. Some people become overwhelmed by their stressors and their mental health takes a negative turn. Then often people may turn to substance abuse leading to unpredictability with their family and job status. People may often have estranged relationships with parents and siblings also making them more high risk for poor outcomes.
The confluence of these problems make them high risk to be homeless. Based on my time working with homeless people and studying mental health policy many homeless people struggle with mental illness and substance abuse. I did an internship one summer in college and one of my jobs was to check on some of our homeless friends to see if they had simple things like blankets or maybe a sack lunch to get through the day. One important thing I learned is many of us are closer to the street than we realize. I met several people that had been gainfully employed working professional jobs and suffered a family loss or a divorce sending them reeling. They confessed to not coping well with the loss that caused them to go into a depression. They followed up their poor coping with abusing substances resulting in a variety of cascading negative outcomes including a lost job, foreclosure of a home, fractured family relationships eventually landing them on the street. Our mental health can deteriorate and tilt the wrong direction as life piles the stressors on. How do you protect yourself?
Try these tips to work on your mental health so it can be strong and stay strong:
1. Be self-aware enough to know you do need to protect yourself.
2. If you tend to isolate and cut people off, then don’t!
3. If you tend to abuse substances during stress, get some accountability and tell someone your typical response to stress and get support to choose something better.
4. Recognize that tough times are exactly that, but they don’t last forever. Learning to accept the tough can help you cope better in the moment and appreciate when times are good again.
5. Recognize everyone has problems and don't suffer alone. Reach out and get help and make it a priority to get better.