Mental Health Awareness - REALLY?

I don’t often rant – and certainly not in public, but some things give you some cause…!
I saw this on a friends Facebook page recently – and I’ve seen it many times over the past few years, a few words might be different, but the basic content and the message is the same. Anyway, read this first and then I’ll comment!

Now maybe the first guy that wrote this meant what he said and was trying to raise awareness, but the reality it, does it do the job? Does it really make you aware of anything? Or does it try and shame you into sharing, copying, this so it goes viral. I suspect the motives behind this post are less than genuine, and it might make us feel good to re-post, but in terms of real usefulness and awareness, I question it…. And the typical comment responses are ‘Well said…”, “Nicely put…” etc, and quite often the re-poster does not even acknowledge it’s been copied and pasted… If we are reading for the first time, we often believe the post we’ve just read is from our friend…

At the end of the day it’s no big deal if this goes viral – it’s not dangerous in many ways. But it is like all the other posts that tug at the heartstrings to get you to post on. In reality they are just giving a high to whichever guy posted it in the first place as he knows millions have seen and posted it on…

My message is this – don’t just re-post – consider what you are doing. I have seen friends post on ‘helpful advice’ posts like the heart attack one, where coughing may save a life – it was a scam/fake news… If in doubt don’t re-post crap like this, it fills Facebook and there is enough crap on it already. To me this post is in the same league as the silly posts that say along the lines of ‘you won’t post this and therefore won’t show support to our armed forces’ or ‘post this if you love your daughter’. I would agree some posts are helpful or funny, and maybe I am cynical about this post in particular, but it is empty of content, plays on our sense of being helpful, and offers no information about anything to do with mental awareness, other than be aware of it…!

Before everyone rants back and says anything talking about mental illness is better than nothing, I might agree, but there is plenty of info out there about it too… including this selection below… I see no problem in people sharing info off of these respected organisations, that will help awareness, rather than re-post empty content.

https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk
Mental Health Foundation website – this can give you many insights into mental health issues and dealing with them. Much awareness can be gleaned reading some of their information.

They also have a find your own mental health score >>> https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/your-mental-health/good-mental-health-survey