Trigger Warning: this article deals with suicide. Please read at your own discretion. 

Having spent much of my recent work time dedicated to suicide awareness and suicide prevention in Sheffield, England I was privileged to be offered the opportunity to travel to Africa to share the skills I have learned and to learn more from our mental health care partners in Kampala and Gulu, Uganda. Sheffield Health & Social Care NHS Foundation Trust, through the Gulu Sheffield Mental Health Partnership (GSMHP) which has been working in Uganda since 2012. As well as working on the development of this newly funded suicide prevention project members of the visiting team were also focused on helping to re-certify hospital staff in RESPECT techniques as a part of a longer running Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET) funded project.

RESPECT is a non-confrontational, de-escalation based way of managing potential violence and aggression that minimizes the need for physical restraint and restrictive practice by positively harnessing an individual’s unique personal strengths in managing difficult situations. RESPECT training techniques have been shared with key staff at the Gulu Regional Referral Hospital since 2012 and the results of this partnership work have been a phenomenal success in both Sheffield and Gulu. As a junior nurse, I remember attending 5-day courses on Preventing and Managing Violence and Aggression (PMVA) where they were essentially teaching me how to restrain people with holds akin to those used by the police to restrain violent criminals. Thankfully in Sheffield and in Gulu, the use of those techniques is well and truly a thing of the past and the experiences of the service users now play a key part in understanding how to manage potentially difficult and confrontational situations.

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We all hear that our childhood experiences impact our lives as adults — to varying degrees based on who you speak to and what you believe. But wherever you fall on the “nature vs. nurture” spectrum, one thing is undeniable: we all have childhood experiences that creep into our memories as adults, whether good or bad.

If you grew up with a physically abusive or emotionally abusive parent, for example, that tends to stick with you into your adult years and affect your mental health. That’s not to say that people who were abused as children can’t or don’t grow up to be perfectly functioning human beings — they do. It just means that they may have different baggage than other people. Let’s face it, we all carry around baggage of some sort. What it looks like and how heavy it is will change, that’s all. Regardless, no matter what the circumstances of your upbringing were, you were affected.

So what do you do about it?

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The worst things are the best things. I believe that with every fiber of my being. When my mom had a mental health crisis, I had to make the difficult decision to force her to get help.  I felt so guilty. I cried when we left her at the hospital. But she’s better now. It was the right move to make. Later on, she encouraged me to get help when I struggled with anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Again, it was the right move to make. This all came about after open-heart surgery, at the age of 24, that I never thought I would need to have. The surprise surgery was terrifying, but it wasn’t the hardest part. The emotional recovery was.

No surgeon, nurse, or other medical professional warned me of the post-surgery emotional impact that is so common for so many after invasive surgery. These experiences—the mental health crises—among the accumulation of many, many smaller ones, led me down a path to become a lifelong mental health advocate.  I feel it’s my calling. I know it is.

It’s why I went back to graduate school to become a social worker. And it’s why I launched an ambitious mental health project three weeks ago. I just launched a daily email newsletter called The Mental Health Update. It’s a concise update sent in the morning and packed with timeless wisdom from a mental health perspective. It’s all about helping people start their day in a thoughtful way.

Why did I do it? Because I wanted to. But, really, there were reasons.

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If you aren’t happy in your personal life, you aren’t alone. According to the 2019 World Happiness Report, the United States is ranked 19th in happiness. This is a decline compared to previous years. While you can’t control the world around you, you can control how it affects you. Certain bad habits may be negatively impacting your emotional well-being, without you even realizing it. Read on to learn how to rid yourself of bad habits to improve your personal life.

Stop negative self-talk

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“Awesome,” the social worker for Clermont Mercy’s Behavioral Health Institute said after sitting in on my National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) talk at the Clermont Mercy Hospital in Batavia, Ohio. Internally, I sighed with relief. I had just completed my first Friday NAMI talk at the Behavioral Health Unit at Clermont Mercy in months.

My name is Danei Edelen. I am the founder and president of the NAMI Brown County Ohio affiliate established in Brown County Ohio in June of 2018. We have been offering NAMI’s support groups in Brown County for over a year. Since July of 2018, I have routinely given a “talk” every other Friday about who NAMI is, what are the NAMI programs that can help, and shared my personal struggle at Clermont Mercy Hospital’s Behavioral Health Institute.

Where I’ve been

You probably haven’t heard from me in a while. For the last seven months, I’ve been out of commission, dealing with my own struggles. As can happen to anyone that lives with a mental illness, my mental illness unexpectedly struck in the form of a sodium deficiency that landed me in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for five days because my blood sodium level mysteriously dropped to 114. A normal blood sodium level is between 135 and 145 milliequivalents per liter (mEq/L). Hyponatremia occurs when the sodium in your blood falls below 135 mEq/L. 

First, I landed in ICU due to sodium deficiency, then I missed my son’s high school graduation due to a visit to the University of Cincinnati Psychiatry because of psychosis. With mental illness, there are no guarantees. You can be “on top of the world” and then your body will betray you.

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These days, there is always a new digital tool to master, a recently developed approach to try out, or the latest news to keep up with — and employees are expected to constantly adapt in order to thrive. In fact, Forbes reports that no matter what industry you’re in, it is essential for you as an employee to continuously learn to improve your knowledge and develop your skill set to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving world of work.

This environment encourages us to take charge of our personal development and try to maximize the countless learning opportunities available online and offline. But all this effort doesn’t come without a cost.

On the importance of mental wellness

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