by Alexandria Pizziola
The task of creating a life for oneself is hard work, and it’s a task that I and people my age are faced with on a daily basis as we move to make the world view us as adults. The stress and pressure that accompany this act of finding our footing are large and unrelenting factors, and when I get together with or phone my friends, a variation of the following is nearly always uttered:
Why do I feel this way? This isn’t how I should feel; my life is great! Maybe I just need to try to be happier. I must be doing something wrong.
People my age have a tendency to turn to Google as soon as we feel physically ill. When it comes to declining mental health, however, a quick Google search is proof enough that there is still so much that we do not know. Surely we know about risk factors – the things that put individuals at risk of developing a mental health issue – but when it comes to causes, we are a bit more in the dark.
If we peruse websites dedicated to understanding mental illnesses like Mental Health America, the International OCD Foundation, and Mind.org, we find that causes of various mental illness come in all shapes, sizes, and types. Mostly we find that there is still much research to be done, integral puzzle pieces still untouched.
Last year, I spent ten months digging into mental health and how society perceives it by certifying individuals in Mental Health First Aid: an eight-hour course designed to increase mental health literacy and decrease the stigma surrounding struggles throughout communities across the globe. During each set of eight hours that I spent breaking down mental illness in front of a room full of curious individuals, a question or opinion pertaining to who was at “fault” for mental illness would nearly always arise:
Our students have ADHD because they’re not disciplined enough. She’s employing self injury because her parents don’t pay attention to her. What am I doing wrong?
As humans, we naturally tend toward placing blame. Doing so allows us to keep moments and experiences categorized and ordered neatly in our minds. We’re cause-and-effect-minded, and things that we can’t control require an explanation. With no explanation, we blame others or we blame ourselves.
Though seemingly innate and innocuous, this fault-finding may do more harm than good when it comes to understanding mental illness and its impact on the lives of those we love. The more we take or place the blame, the less we are open to seeing how vast mental illness is.
During tax season this year, I took a tough financial hit. While on the phone with my parents, I began to feel unsteady. This was a lot to process. I’m prone to anxiety and have experience with panic attacks, and a great personal victory has been learning to work with these things over the years. Knowing myself, I noted that I was feeling panicked and that I needed to take a break from the conversation.
When I spoke later with my mother, she asked if there was a way to explain anxiety to my dad. It seemed that he had wondered aloud if they were at fault.
Though this took me by surprise – I’m regularly grateful for the gifts my parents gave me by raising me the way they did – this experience fits into the context of these other moments.
These three scenes from my life and countless others all have one thing in common: blame.
Contrary to what we think, blame is not useful here. Mental illness, at any level, is not your fault. It’s not my fault. It isn’t our parents’ faults or our teachers’ faults or our best friends’ faults. The spectrum that our mental health can glide along is something that we don’t have a complete say over. Experiencing a mental illness, or even a period of lower mental health, is not a choice that we make.
To actively ignore other potential factors simply to organize the world in a way that makes sense, we miss the mark and the opportunity to meet one another where we are at. Dark moments, tense moments, moments that don’t resolve themselves as conventional happiness – those are the times during which we are most open, most ready to learn.
There is much that we still don’t know. What we do know is this: it’s not our fault.
Alexandria Pizzola is a certified Mental Health First Aid Instructor currently working in student affairs in Albany, NY. A two-time AmeriCorps Alum devoted to breaking down mental health stigma, she is currently working on connecting individuals to resources and leading tough conversations in her community.