331- #ChildrensMentalHealthWeek

Trigger warnings - especially for the external links.

Grab a cuppa, after the mark it’ll be 1,535 words. 

As I'm middle-aged and chose not to have children, I hadn’t planed posting anything about this week’s awareness topic : #ChildrensMentalHealthWeek which is ran by UK-based charity, Place2Be. 

However, a tweet exchange with Andrea Wade changed my mind and inspired this present entry.

For 2018's edition, spanning Feb 5-11^th is about promoting children, young people and adults to celebrate their uniqueness - which I read between the lines as "despite mental health issues".  For this year's #BeingOurselves, I'd direct you to my post about embracing my uniqueness. 

This charity reminds us that when we have a positive view of ourselves, our uniqueness, we can cope with life's challenges recognizing and embracing other people's differences, which is a rather worthy goal to reach indeed. I mostly agree, and would extend the statement to specify that coping isn’t the sole result of positive views, but also a learned set of skills. Positive views alone can only help us want to fight for improvement, but won’t alter lack of self-understanding or coping skills that must be learned beforehand.

For this post, however, I want to discuss other aspects of children's mental health: that of my younger self's traumatic experiences, developing mental illnesses very early in my life, and how, where and when this occurred, no one ever noticed my growing struggles in coping with life's difficulties. 

In the second part, I'll discuss that topic chosen by the charity.

After this long intro, I want to assure you that I won't repeat all the details of previous posts, but I'll summarize and send you to read the rest in the appropriate entries. 

I was born into my father's religious cult. I grew up in it, surrounded by multiple sources of trauma (domesticviolence, political instability, compounded by earlier traumatic experiences).

Life in this cult was very isolating, and was very destabilizing: we moved homes and changes cities several times, before settling for our final address. 

These moves also meant changes in schools. There, I experienced bullying, as I was already different in many ways, which my classmates didn't accept. Indeed, I displayed (though I didn’t know the terms in those days) hyper-sensitivity, and non-binary qualities – having hobbies, mannerisms, and gait that society would call effeminate/feminine.

I was ahead in math levels than all my classmates.

For these reasons – and later when they noticed that I was infatuated with some of the girls from the other part of the school – they bullied me.

Repeated traumas, including the example of domestic violence at home and at school, I’d turned bully for a short time, before I realized how it was wrong and I stopped.

These fights and delays in my other school matters (outside of math, I was failing grades in most subjects), caused my teachers to punish me, either by making me stand facing the wall, or make me wait outside of class and miss many classes. They and the principal eventually called my father as I was deemed a disruptive element.

During these visits, he was cordial in front of them, but would severely punish me once back home for the humiliation I’d caused him, as well as taking him out of his precious holly studies…

In retrospect, I can see so many signs, attitudes and emotional outbursts that I was displaying, that it’s a wonder no one ever suspected that I was experiencing so much trauma at home. Nowadays, these signs would raise all kinds of red flags, red alerts, and get social services involved.

I’ve read about these signs before. I’ve seen them depicted in fiction, too. I displayed them. If anyone saw, and didn’t do anything, they totally failed me, but I think that the knowledge about mental illness, traumas, and impact on children, especially in a country where none of these topics had been known of, especially back in the 1980’s 90’s, was completely absent.

External links : 

Mental health in children on these selected websites:

Mayo's clinic ; psychologytoday ; NAMI ; Child mind Institute ; WebMD 

Domestic violence : 

Child witness to violence project  ; NCDSC (National Center for Domestic and sexual violence) is a 2-page long PDF listing symptoms and warning signs) ; Effects of DV on children, on wiki

Signs of possible trauma : 

Child mind institute ; NCTSN (National Child Traumatic Stress Network) ; Recognize trauma. 

Last that I'll discuss, is recognizing abused children:

Parents protect ; Stop It now ; WebMD ; NSPCC (national Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children). 

There are many other such websites for any of the above topics, and many other subjects. My goal isn't to be exhaustive, but to give you a few tools and you can use these ideas to expand.

I experienced multiple traumas, and developed generalized anxiety disorder, several phobias (emeto, blood, violence, the dark, claustrau, and a few others); I had mood swings and emotional outbursts; I excelled in one subject and had many difficulties at school.

On many occasions, I ran out of it whenever I could, ditching classes, spending time playing arcade games in the store above, or bird-watching, instead of attending classes.

The most likely scenario is that the school and everyone around me – classmates, teachers, the principal, but also other people I met outside of school, have all missed the signs that should’ve raised the alarm.

In a country where religion is an integral part of society and highly normalizing, robotizing people’s mindsets to specific ways of thinking and believing, the sheer differences of my wording and attitudes also should have raised suspicion as to why I was so different than the most present religion in the state. However, I believe they missed this precisely due to their religion, and expectations of messianic salvation – which obscured their sight from my alarming displayed differences.   

There are a few issues raised by this narrative of my youth and teen-experiences:

The lack of awareness about early, warning signs of difficulties a child is going through.

No intervention.

Suffering in silence, alone, unsupported, and unaware of my developing mental illnesses.

Once back in my native country, I had two psychotherapies. One for 12 years until my therapist retired. I was locked in a cycle, repeating my trauma and victimization stories. I received no diagnosis, no coping tools. Then, 6 years ago, I started my second therapy, with a younger therapist, who engaged in discussing my situation, offering advice, tools, and putting words in my mental illnesses-  though these were confirmations of my self-diagnosis, the fruits of my personal research prior to this therapy.

Now, I cannot know what alternate reality I’d be in if the alarm had been raised when I was young. There are multiple possible scenarios, from improvements, to further complications, if not ultimate disastrous results.

But, what I can say in the present, 2018, is that raising awareness to children’s mental states, either to maintain positive mental health, or helping and teaching them cope with mental illnesses, are all important.

From experience and observation, I can say that despite some evident cognitive differences between children, teens, and adults, the younger persons’ understanding is greater than that which adults imagine and want to admit. Therefore, although we’d have to adapt wording to suit each age’s levels of intellectual, and psycho-emotional understanding and maturity, we must address topics with an open mind and not to infantilize children who already feel so misunderstood and disconnected from adults, at times.

Dialogue must be created. Awareness must be raised. Children’s mental health must be preserved and they must be given tools to learn coping mechanisms for the future, as life is full of sources of stress and difficulties, and this reality cannot be avoided.

Another important aspect is to teach children they aren’t the center of the world. To teach empathy towards one another, through self-acceptance of their singularities, from qualities and interests, hobbies and personality traits, and thus help them see that differences in others can be sources of mutual enrichment and must be respected at all times. These in turn would abolish or reduce (I’m an idealist, though a pragmatist, too), bullying and thus help reducing sources of struggles, that are totally within human’s power to control in these cases.

Scientific research of children’s brains showed us, in the past 20 years, that trauma affects them greatly. This wasn’t known in the 1980’s & early 90’s, and this new knowledge is a positive tool, helping us understand and gage mental illnesses’ impacts on our younger generations – the ones who’ll replace us when we’re gone, and this is reason enough to do our best to help them.

I want to finish this entry by mentioning, very quickly, things that I am strongly passionate about for anyone, especially for children:

Additionally to helping them cope with life’s challenges, I believe that gender norms, equal rights, education, fostering curiosity, creativity, teaching them to love reading books and helping to embrace one’s uniqueness, whilst treating each child for their own personalities, instead of normalizing everything are keys for a better future society – as it’ll be made up of these children.

Thank you for having read this long post that I somehow managed to make shorter than the 2,000 words I thought it’d be!