Rethinking mental health labels
Are you currently, or have you recently experienced anxiety?
My guess is yes.
According to medical and prevalence reports the number of people experiencing anxiety is on the rise. Several studies have charted the rise of mental health issues in the West. For instance, a meta-analysis published in 2010 took data from studies that included over 77,000 young people; the scientists found generational increases in mental health issues. Outside of the U.S., the U.K. Council for Psychotherapy published a report in 2017 that assessed the mental health of full- and part-time employees. Their figures show that “workers reporting anxiety and depression have risen by nearly a third in the last 4 years.”
We’re worried, stressed-out, overwhelmed, and overcome by the feeling that we aren’t coping, all at perhaps at a greater degree and in larger numbers than ever before.
We’re turning to doctors asking for drugs. It’s a quick-fix culture that we live in and pharmaceuticals offer pretty rapid treatment for symptoms—and perhaps that’s exactly what some people require, symptom management. But the drugs are taking the edge off a problem that is much deeper, and providing a band-aid solution at best; the questions begged to be ask for how long will the pseudo-tranquillity last and at what cost?
I am not here to discount drugs, diagnoses, or doctors in this blog post nor offer a value judgement on those that rely on them, but rather to offer an alternative viewpoint to what our experience of anxiety may actually be, and within this view, what we may be able to do to support ourselves.
What is anxiety?
The prevailing bible of mental health is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5 is relied on by psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors to diagnose and suggest appropriate treatment interventions for people suffering from mental illness.
The DSM-5 defines Generalised Anxiety Disorder as:
A. Excessive anxiety and worry (apprehensive expectation), occurring more days than not for at least 6 months, about a number of events or activities (such as work or school performance).
B. The person finds it difficult to control the worry.
C. The anxiety and worry are associated with three or more of the following six symptoms (with at least some symptoms present for more days than not for the past 6 months).
Restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge
Being easily fatigued
Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank
Irritability
Muscle tension
Sleep disturbance (difficulty falling or staying asleep, or restless unsatisfying sleep)
In a world where we are overtasked, overstimulated, overwhelmed and stressed-out as a chronic mode of living we may even ask, who hasn’t experienced this?
And then the subsequent questions arise - is it modern life? Is life more stressful than it used to be? What exactly is to blame? Is it the profuse use of chemicals & toxins, social media & screens which create imbalance and inflammation in our systems, is it the tendency towards solitary living and isolation, is it the material preoccupation i.e the ever-faster spinning hamster wheel where money and things are markers of self-worth, or is the West’s focus on the individual over the soul and the truant ego at play?
Perhaps.
Perhaps we are collectively more anxious than before?
Or perhaps we’re more inclined to label it and seek a fix?
Rethinking mental health
It calls to question the whole belief system on what anxiety (and a wide array of other disorders) actually is.
Rethinking Mental Illness: De-bunking the DSM-5
One of my specific concerns with the reliance of the DSM-5 is this: it medicalises the human condition, and in doing so further perpetuates the disconnect we are experiencing from ourselves.
The DSM-5 is relied upon to describe and categorise not only mental disorders but also normal human experiences such as sadness, anxiety, and fear as biomedical concerns. That is, there is something wrong with you. Once diagnoses are medicalised, they can then be medicated. This a) establishes an inherently disempowering and disillusioned approach to life and healing, and b) enables liberal dispensation of expensive psychotropic drugs, guaranteeing vast profits to the drug industry.
A simple google research will demonstrate the widespread and deep links between the big pharma companies and the DSM. In your research may also see that in the last few years one of the main backers of the DSM, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have completely pulled out, as did the DSM’s Chief Editor on the basis that there is virtually no scientific evidence for the DSM’s diagnostic classification system. We’re talking here about the holy bible on which all mental health concerns are diagnosed.
Rethinking Mental Illness: Modern Day Life.
We live a very different world to the one we originally evolved into.
We are stressed out, the demands are high. The workloads in both the office, and the home, are high. We bear the weight of enormous, and complex things on our shoulders that all seemingly need to be done now and to exacting standards. The pressure to perform is huge and this is perceived by our system as a low-level threat, which continues to compound day by day and creates a physiological stress response in our system - if we reach 75% we’re experiencing anxiety symptoms, if we reach 100% maxed out stress we have a panic attack, which is essentially a full moment of a fight/flight response.
On top of this our days are light, bright and busy. We are over-stimulated and overwhelmed with constant reels of information, light and noise due to the incredible amount of time we spend in front of the screen and surrounded by them. We are always on the go, rushing everywhere, and when we stop to chill-out and connect with loved ones it often happens in front of a screen. This creates a tension, a tightness and squeezing that pulls our finite amount of energy out of our lower bodies and up into the head. So we find we’re largely numb waist down, and our bodies are contracted and armoured by habitual tension patterns creating another physiological effect in our body that is not conducive to natural stress release.
Our very lifestyle triggers a consistent sense of alarm in our nervous system, and once aroused this activates our survival response and we respond as though we are under threat, although nowadays there are no sabretooth tigers about to attack us.
Rethinking Mental Illness: Trauma.
And then we have trauma.
All of us have had traumatic experiences, be it big T trauma or little t trauma. We’ve all experienced pain, grief and sadness, or a lack of care (if not worse) in our childhood that may seem insignificant now but was big for you at the time. When we feel threat our nervous system kicks in with one of the survival responses, fight, flight, or freeze (& offshoots fuck and fawn). If this response is adequately ‘completed’ then your system dumps the adrenalin and goes back to homeostasis and you won’t hold trauma.
But for a few different reasons, we’ve ‘forgotten’ how to complete our stress responses, and when they aren’t complete they get stuck - and this is trauma.
A stuck stress response can occur because we’ve unconsciously tried to shut it down or avoid it, perhaps due to conditioning that says “don’t be a big sook, suck it up” or that informs us showing anger and aggression is inappropriate. Sometimes it’s because we simply can’t handle the bigness of the feelings and sensations, so we shut it down rather than ride it out. And often it’s because our bodies defaulted to the freeze response, because as kids we weren’t big or fast enough to do anything but fold and freeze. And the freeze response by it’s nature is more difficult to complete.
Trauma is these incomplete stress responses that is ticking unknowingly in the background and is kicked into gear with each trigger and perceived threat in life. Your nervous system keeps preparing your body to respond to the threat it perceives to be there. Perceived is a critical component, because this behaviour is learned and your body is reacting to something that baby you learned was threatening, not what the more cognitively developed adult you ‘knows’ is a threat or not. The trauma response is a somatic, nervous system response and not something that listens to our newer developed neo-cortex.
A triggered flight-fight response will look like elevated blood pressure, surges of adrenalin, a racing heart, sweaty palms, a flushed face, flittering attention, restlessness, muscle contraction and tension. Which, yup you’ve guessed it, is also symptomatic of anxiety.
Mastin Kipp a functional life coach trailblazing America has come out with the polarising viewpoint that it’s not only anxiety, but essentially every single disorder in the DSM-5 can be explained by one thing, unresolved emotional trauma.
He demonstrates that the long list of symptoms that are grouped (and shuffled, and reshuffled) to collectively inform the majority of the mental illnesses listed in the DSM, from depression to PTSD to Multiple Personality Disorder to ADHD and so on, can be collectively, and readily linked and explained by unresolved emotional trauma.
This begs a critical shift in the way we think about mental health, and also profound new ways for healing.
Critically, it begs the primary realisation that you aren’t broken, you aren’t going crazy. Rather, quite the opposite. Your body is very intelligently trying to keep you safe from the perceived threat.
Anxiety and Disembodiment
It is interesting to take a look at anxiety in the light of the current epidemic of disconnect and disembodiment. What I see is a growing inability to feel and connect with the primal responses within our bodies, and coupled with this, a growing intolerance to feel the discomforts of life. Which means that we are no longer well skilled and equipped to respond to stress, nor complete unresolved stress and trauma responses.
The signals from our body have been long overridden. Our work and lifestyles demand that we spend much of our time up in our heads, while the body is undervalued and forgotten.
Our lifestyle alone puts a constant demand on our nervous system, not to mention earlier traumas, or things we’ve carried from in-utero and passed down through our genes. Once the stress in our system becomes chronic we acclimate to it, and our ability to hear the messages from the body is lessened, and we don’t notice the stress, and so we don’t do anything about it because we don’t even realise how wound up we are.
When we get overwhelmed, humans have a very natural tendency to avoid discomfort. So we head to whatever we can to ‘cope’ and manage the overwhelm, from food, alcohol, exercise, coffee, our phones, or drugs, drama, delinquency – which might have varying moral codes attached but are essential degrees of the same thing a coping mechanism (or what I would prefer to call an adaptive management technique). All these behaviours have the same result, to not feel the thing we don’t want to feel - to disconnect, and we do this through whatever is quick, available and habitual.
The more we numb out the less we hear the subtle. The more we are exposed to overstimulation the greater our tolerance for it and the more we become desensitised, and thus disconnected. The more we disown and disconnect from our feminine, our emotional, and feeling self - our girl cell as Even Esler puts it, the less we can feel, and listen, and know. When we are not in touch with our bodies we lose our capacity to honour our bodies intrinsic drive to self-regulation and self-healing.
And the thing is, just because we can’t hear, or we purposely ignore the messages from our bodies doesn’t mean they don’t go away. Rather the louder and the louder the signs and messages will become until we are forced to do something about it. Either through circumstance, for life has a funny way of re-creating experiences for us to complete what needs to be completed, or through physical and emotional pain. But by this time it’s become so distanced from what is going on that we turn up at the doctors with rashes, and insomnia, fibromyalgia and autoimmune diseases and everyone is completely befuddled by what is going on.
The body knows what to do
What we need to do is learn to re-inhabit our bodies to support ourselves - including our mental health. This requires us to return to our bodies, and to relearn our bodies natural capacity to complete and self-heal.
The body knows what to do, it is up to us to tune in, discern, and allow what needs to unfold to complete.
“The body always leads us home, if we can simply learn to trust sensation and stay with it long enough for it to reveal appropriate action, movement, insight, or feeling. ”
We learnt to distrust the body, now we are learning to trust it again
For eons the body has had a ‘bad’ reputation. The denigration is reflected in Greek philosophy which conveys the ideas that a more pure and powerful intelligence lives “up there” beyond the impermanent and fragile physical bodies. Christianity and the Patriarchy contributed to this narrative, creating a culture where we came to believe that the body cannot be trusted, that it is a dirty instrument of sin and requires purification. This has been continued by philosophical writings of people such as Descartes who stated Cogito, ergo sum” which translates to “I think, therefore I am.” And today the heavy cognitive stance of psychology, and the favouring of the brain as the super control centre by Western Medicine. This prioritisation of the mind and of higher consciousness is also prevalent within the new age spirituality, personal growth and wellness spaces where the focus in on changing your mindset and transcending the body to the spiritual plane in search of enlightenment.
Yet before this, in the ancient pre-patriarchal times the body was celebrated and the belly was considered the centre of thinking.
There is a shift happening today, which involves a greater respect and reverence for ancient and traditional healing techniques from shamanism, Ayurveda, Yoga and Traditional Chinese Medicine to name a few which consider the body an essential part of the mind-body-spirit triad.
Science today now is beginning to recognises the gut-brain connection and the ‘second brain’ in the gut. Neuroscience also discovered that our intelligence lies not just in the brain, but in the whole body. It travels into the spinal cord and to the extremities of the body through the central and autonomic nervous systems. Further, despite our preconceptions the majority of the information is not directed by the brain but received and relayed from the body towards the brain (80% of information relayed through the vagal nerve is afferent versus efferent; Porges, 1994). Additionally the heart has its nervous system and makes decisions independently from the brain (See the Strozzi Institute).
So What Now?
Unresolved trauma, excessive levels of overstimulation, stress, and overwhelm (our very lifestyles) have a direct and compounding impact on your Nervous System, one that activates our stress response and looks and sounds very much like anxiety.
Which to me, is good news.
Because we can work with it all of these things, and it doesn’t mean that you are broken nor incapacitated but rather opens you to exploring your own route to (mental) health, one that is radically self-led, and self-healing.
The new approach to mental health
Is one that may consider a mental health diagnosis (or self-diagnosis) not as a disorder, or an indication that something is wrong with you, but as something that has at a certain time(s) in your life been ultimately functional.
This begs an invitation to look deeper to see what needs to be resolved. And to look at the root causes, and addresses any unresolved trauma through somatic, embodied approaches. And recognises that our nervous system, our brains and our bodies are intelligent and doing the best they can from what they learned.
What Can I do?
Become more embodied. And, no, I’m not being facetious.
To develop greater embodied awareness, and to learn to listen with discernment and to work with your body is the counter to stress, overload, disconnect, and unresolved trauma.
If we are to learn how to process stress responses and complete unresolved trauma, we need to learn to re-inhabit the body. If we desire to engage in life rather than check-out, we need to expand our capacity to feel and process what’s going on inside. If we desire to befriend our nervous system, and to traverse the cascade of stress responses naturally, without fear, and with the skill to reorganise, and integrate and reach dynamic homeostasis then we need to attune back to our bodies.
And this is what embodiment offers you.
befriend the nervous system
smooth out kinks in the nervous system and learn to regulate
greater attunement to your internal and somatic world so you can make adjustments to your life to support yourself sooner
develop greater capacity to move into the extremes of emotion and sensation
How can I develop greater embodied awareness right now?
Some quick tips to apply right now:
Reduce external stimuli, screens, noise, blue-light which interfere with your sensitivity and where you energy is directed.
Reduce workloads and the amount of daily stress (I realise this is challenging but it’s time we were all honest, and boundaried with what is feasible for us, and that we opened up to receive support more) so that you become less contracted, and more open to feeling
Develop greater embodied awareness by
Noticing which of the 5 senses are most, and least developed for you, and paying special attention to amplify this
Paying attention to your internal world, and tracking your felt senses along with emotional states (find dedicated classes such as Embodied Alchemy).
Move your body to bring your energy down back into your body and allowing what is there to be felt and expressed, and supporting you to regulate your nervous system. Any movement helps, but of course some movement is more sensitising than others, again try non-linear, non-habitual movement such as in Embodied Alchemy.
Seeing a professionally trained practitioner who works with the body such as a Feminine Embodiment Coach, Somatic Practitioner, etc if you have experienced trauma, or if you feel particularly stuck, or if you desire greater support.
If this is speaking to you and you’d like somewhere to start I have free Embodied Self-Care Guide available for you. It provides beautiful starting points to reconnect you with your body.
“If you want to give birth to your true self, you are going to have to dig deep down into that body of yours and let your soul howl. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and trust that if you turn off your head, your feet will take you where you need to go. ”
A final note
The purpose of this blog, and my work is not to relegate the mind and it’s disciples to the sock drawer, but rather, to invite in with equal measure the importance of the primal body, and our nervous system. For too long mental health has been considered the realm of the brain, but we need to expand our view if we truly want to support ourselves and others not only for better health, but to live in the fullest expression of themselves.
Further, these are my opinions at time of writing, and you may not agree with any of it. That’s fine. Take what you want from this and leave what you do not.
If you’re intrigued and want to know more, I’m a feminine embodiment coach who works specifically with the sensations of the body. Head over here to find out more. I’d love to hear from you.
And if you haven’t already, don’t forget to grab your free Embodied Self Care Guide!