Mental Health Week: Creating a Victim Mentality
This week is Mental Health Week in Victoria, Australia cullminating in World Mental Health Day on October 10th. The theme for Mental Health Week 2008 in Victoria is “Mental Health: What Do You Know?”, asking each of us to expand our awareness and knowledge of mental health.
Gaining awareness of and knowledge of mental health conditions can make things worse. Like someone researching disease symptoms on the internet, you might find you have some of the indicators of a condition. So suddenly, your understandable anxiety about the economy, becomes full blown General Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Now, you’re not only anxious about the enconomy but even more anxious because you think you have GAD.
And, once you have this awareness, then what? I looked through a lot of the events for Mental Health Week and found that only a small number were about fixing the problem. What’s the point of educating you about something but not empowering you to do something about it? If you can’t do anything about it then you feel helpless and abdicate any responsibility for your part in healing yourself. This creates a victim mentality. “I’m a victim of this condition so there’s nothing I can do.” Top psychologists have admitted that this a significant flaw in the current mental health system.
I’ve written before about 6 Human Needs Psychology and why some people don’t tap even when they know EFT can help them. The six human needs are: Certainty, Variety, Significance, Love/Connection, Growth, and Contribution. We all find ways to meet these needs but some ways are empowering and improve our life while others are disempowering and hurt us or make things worse.
Let’s take someone who is labelled as having General Anxiety Disorder:
| Certainty: | They know for certain why they feel this way. It’s this GAD that makes them feel anxious not anything they can do about that. They’re now certain they’re going to feel anxious every day. |
| Variety: | They get to go to different support groups and different specialists and try different treatments without really having to take responsibilty for their part, or having any real expectation this condition is only temporary. After all they’ve been labelled with this condition and there’s nothing they can do about it. |
| Significance: | I have this GAD which sounds very important. I can use this an excuse anytime I don’t want to take responsibility for myself. |
| Love/Connection: | This is a big one. I can feel sorry for myself because of this GAD. I can connect with all the other people with GAD in online forums and support groups. I can get sympathy (a low quality version of love/connection) from all my friends and family because of this GAD. If I didn’t have this GAD who would I connect with? |
So being made aware of this condition without being able to do something about it actually reinforces the victim mentality.
By the way, if this article is pressing any of your buttons and bringing up issues for you, wouldn’t that be some great tapping material?
I’m not suggesting that these conditions don’t exist and that they don’t have severe consequences in a person’s life. I am saying that giving people an awareness of a condition without giving them tools to help themselves is a problem.
At least some of the Mental Health week events talk about coping strategies. Something is better than nothing, but most of these are band-aid treatments which don’t address the underlying cause of the problem and create lasting change in a person’s life.
Thankfully, many people who come into the practice have had enough of being told there’s nothing they can do and they just have to accept their condition. They’re not accepting the verdict that their only option is to take drugs or just cope with the condition for the rest of their lives. These clients don’t accept that they are a victim of their condition. They question “the experts” and do their own reserach, and make up their own minds about what is and isn’t possible for them. Chances are if you’re reading this, I’m preaching to the converted.
When you accept responsibility for helping yourself you continue to educate yourself about the many alternatives, such as EFT, but also diet, exercise, hypnotherapy, meditation, and so on. Accepting responsibility for your part in the healing process, rather than the learned helplessness of a victim, is the first step to true healing.
Related Posts:
- Why some clients do not tap even when they know EFT will help them
- Using EFT with a Doctor’s Diagnosis
- Don’t Watch the News
- Identity Statements and EFT
- More Stress Relief with EFT
Tags: 6 human needs, anxiety, mental health
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October 8th, 2008 at 11:10 am
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October 8th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Hi Rod,
Another great post. To me the only value of knowing what the medical classification is of a problem is then for that information to help toward a solution.
Too often this isn’t the case. Many people I know of have been given a diagnosis and then asked “so what now?” Often the answer is nothing, nothing can be done from a conventional medicine point of view.
I know of a mother who was asked to bring her child in for further tests to diagnose what the true cause of his problems were. The mother asked, “so how will that help my son?” The doctor said it wouldn’t but that they (the medical services) would have a label to put on the problem. She refused to let the doctors label him and instead sought a solution herself.
I also totally agree that for some having a diagnosis can lead to the person just staying put with their problem and not seeking any further solution. Some however as you say, refuse to take the diagnosis.
I had a client who was diagnosed with GAD and told that it would be there for the rest of her life and she should just get used to it. We worked on it about a week after the diagnosis and in one EFT session she had improved so dramatically that the GAD symptoms had gone. If she had have accepted the doctors diagnosis, her issues would have indeed been there for life. There are so many EFT stories like this out there.
I do think that we need to take responsibility for our own health, as you say.
All the best,
Tania
October 9th, 2008 at 7:31 am
I completely agree with what you say regarding victim mentality and believe that the healing of a person comes with self responsibility. I wrote about it here from a homeopathic perspective
http://www.thehomeopathiccoach.com/g/30489/are-you-a-good-homeopathic-patient.html
Once the patient has given themselves up to psycotropic drugs, the dependency on the drugs for their improvement (which is often not forthcoming) , means it is even harder fro them to feel empowered around their own health issue.
At the same time, it’s really diificult for a patient suffering mental health issue to feel anything but ‘disabled’ due to the lack of information available around alternative options like EFt and Homeopathy.
Great post Rod. Thanks for sharing
Sam