How To Celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month

It’s mental health awareness month.

It’s amazing that we are talking about mental health and normalizing experiences. But, I have to ask, are we missing the bigger picture?

Talking about diagnoses instead of root causes

It really seems like we’re raising awareness for diagnoses and labels. We’re saying “it’s ok to have anxiety” and “depression is real.” We’re talking about how many people are impacted by mental illness in the world. This is great. But what about the root cause of all these issues?

Are we helping to maintain some of these conditions through the systems we’ve set up?

Are we avoiding looking at the role we play in maintaining illness?

We can’t be mental health advocates without looking at all of these causes.

Raising awareness about mental health means taking a really hard look at our

  • food

  • healthcare system

  • the environment

  • how we treat employees in the workplace

  • homelessness

  • joblessness

  • poverty

…and so much more

I hope that as we raise awareness, we can stay away from raising awareness about diagnostic labels and focus on how we can change the root causes of these symptoms.

This Mental Health Awareness month, I urge you to think about

  • what you put in your body every day

  • the air you breathe

  • your work environment

  • the systems you interact with

  • how much you sleep

  • who you connect with

  • what you spend most of your time doing

  • how you talk to yourself

  • how you can be of service to others

Let’s raise awareness about what’s really going on, not just diagnostic labels.

Whitney Goodman