Beyond warning signs
Mental Health Awareness Month continues this October. Most activities and programs are geared toward detecting warning signs of mental health issues, particularly suicide and depression. In fact, for more than a decade now, we have been training as many health workers, frontliners, counselors, teachers, and parents as we can. I have wondered if this has made any dent in the mental health crisis. I also wonder if there’s more we can do.
As much as we need to learn the warning signs, it is also important that we understand what contributes to true prevention. By the time we notice warning signs, it means that we should already be in response mode. It means we need to act urgently. At this point, the priority is to stabilize and reduce any life-threatening risks.
Preventing mental health risks requires a thorough understanding of what contributes to and hinders good mental health. It requires us to know what facilitates growth and resilience. If we somehow manage to do prevention well, then there would be no warning signs to begin with, and there would be less need for emergency response. We wouldn’t need so many mental health frontliners because we would have made our social and cultural systems more promotive of mental health. This is the call of public mental health—fortifying our health systems and communities that encourage quality, enjoyable lives.
To make the most impact in preventing mental health concerns, we need to consider transdiagnostic factors. These factors cut across various psychiatric conditions and diagnoses. Targeting each diagnosis or symptom is not optimal and is only focused on the illness end of the mental health spectrum. Adopting a transdiagnostic approach helps us recognize factors that impact both good mental health as well as those that exacerbate clinical conditions.
Tolerance of uncertainty is quickly emerging as an important factor in determining a person’s resilience and coping skills. The ability to face uncertainty allows us to brave challenges and go outside of our comfort zone. Our rapidly changing world requires this capacity, which probably explains why it seems that younger generations struggle more than their older counterparts. They are not weaker; they are simply faced with much more uncertainty than previous generations. Before, a college education guaranteed a stable life. Having Latin honors and graduating from top schools secured a good job. This is no longer the case. During my parents’ generation, securing a scholarship for graduate programs abroad seemed to be a given, allowing for upward social mobility. In an increasingly competitive world, even the brightest of minds have trouble obtaining quality education if they don’t have personal financial resources.
People who do not incorporate the possibility of detours in their plans will be ill-equipped to deal with life’s twists and turns. Those who insist they must have all the answers before they can solve a problem will fear making mistakes and risk feeling stuck or paralyzed. It is a counterintuitive suggestion that accepting uncertainty will allow us to see more solutions.
Perfectionism is a trait we are carefully monitoring when it comes to student mental health. We see how clinical perfectionism—unrelenting, rigid standards—gets in the way of flexibility and adaptability, key factors to resilience. High standards by themselves are not unhealthy; it is setting unrealistic standards that doom us to failure. Perfectionism makes us feel we are never good enough. Rigid, inflexible standards refuse to accommodate reality, akin to an unreasonable boss who insists on an output without regard for time and resource constraints. Perfection is not a virtue; it’s a delusion. The biggest illusion is that perfectionism helps you to achieve more. In truth, it gets in the way of success—and a quality life.
Emotion regulation is another key transdiagnostic concern. It underlies disorders such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and personality disorders. Poor emotion regulation also explains many societal concerns, such as family and relationship strain, conflicts like road rage and other impulse-driven behaviors. It is not about suppressing emotions. It is about a healthy relationship with our emotions. We need to listen and respect our emotions as they are our body’s way of telling us what we need. Emotions, however, shouldn’t control our behaviors, as we may be driven to short-term impulses that may not serve our long-term goals. Notice how unbridled emotions tend to make arguments worse, and we fail to get our message across. Emotion regulation helps us see the situation clearly, and we can use emotions to craft solutions.
Mental health programs need not focus on illness or risk-specific concerns. By targeting transdiagnostic factors, such as tolerance to uncertainty, perfectionism, and emotion regulation, we can do much more in improving people’s capacity to live a quality life.
aatuazon@up.edu.ph
