Mind MovesI had missed my bus and idly put in time standing in a bus shelter. My awareness shifted between the frenzy of commuters rushing by, leaves brushing over my feet, memory fragments from times past, and work priorities that came sharply into focus and jolted me into the present. Welcome to the merry-go-round of adult consciousness, writes Tony Bates
I turned around, only to find a face on a poster looking directly at me inviting me to "look after your mental health".
What ever became of Lyon's Tea, Pretty Polly tights or Joe Walsh Tours? Times have certainly changed. The ad's full-length colour photo is part of a campaign to make me pause and think about a very personal aspect of my life.
Like a sore tooth, we only notice our mental health when it hurts. And when it does, pain takes over and shapes how we feel, react and behave to everything in the world.
Dublin in the rare ole times didn't concern itself too much with mental health matters. Sex, politics and religion were the stuff of conversations. The very word "mental" made us uneasy.
It conjured up images of people who - we wanted to believe - were not like us. People who spent years in places we didn't talk about, with problems we feared and could not begin to understand.
Easily forgotten people, because they didn't have a voice to tell us how they felt and what they needed.
We exiled them behind high walls and we told ourselves it was for their own good. In truth, our actions had much more to do with our need to maintain an apparently sane "healthy" society.
What we missed completely was the fact that by locking people away for years, we were also locking pieces of our own hearts and minds away.
By depriving them of the support they needed to fashion a life in the community for themselves, we became alienated from aspects of our own personal development that remained "work in progress".
Feelings that went bump in the night, images and memories we wished we could forget, became very uneasy companions.
We learned to fear ourselves, to push away our vulnerabilities in case we might end up like "them".
Mental health is something we experience in our own unique way, but it is not an individual or entirely subjective matter. It is critically affected by how we deal with one another.
If someone close becomes emotionally "stuck" in some way, you can also become stuck. And if you lock someone into a label or a story that is narrow and out-dated, you deprive them of the room they need to heal and grow.
I would like to think we've come a long way from "the good old days" when we feared mental health and deprived people with mental health problems of their basic human rights.
Our mental health services are challenged now to engage with people in a humane and respectful way.
Service users are speaking out for themselves and demanding that they be given a role in planning their care and recovery. A very active Inspectorate for Mental Health, advocates who speak and act for people detained without consent, and our new Mental Health Treatment Act are evidence of a society that is trying to affirm and protect the dignity of its more vulnerable citizens.
But my optimism was severely shaken when I read Olivia Kelly's report of the National Disability Authority survey at the end of September.
I was stunned to read that one-third of those surveyed "believed that people with mental health difficulties should not be allowed to have children", "fewer than one in five people thought that those with mental health difficulties should have sexual relationships" and a high percentage also thought they - the "mentally ill" - should not be allowed to attend mainstream schools.
These findings suggest a willingness on the part of a sizeable portion of our society to write off people who struggle with mental illness.
There was a time we considered cancer as something fatal. Now if we fail to diagnose and ensure treatment for even one individual with breast cancer, there is a public outcry, and rightly so.
But if a person in mental torment is unable to access the help they need to get their lives back on track, if they are sent home until they become overwhelmed and completely debilitated by depression and despair, no one seems to care.
Mental difficulties are part of the human condition. We are all prone to black moods, irrational ideas and a million insecurities. And some of us get to feel this way more than others, and need a lot of patience and care. Problems can be resolved, people can recover.
We do our own mental health a big favour when we help someone get back on their feet. And as a society we become a lot healthier when we demand that those who experience severe and enduring distress get the kind of help that we now know works.
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong - The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (www.headstrong.ie).