Are you healthy... mentally?

A newspaper article (Jawa Pos, page 1, April 28, 2009) just stroke me today: 1-3% of Indonesian are mentally ill. It means approx. 5 million people in Indonesia are either depressed or CRAZY!!!

Reasons behind this shocking prevalence are high demand of consumerism that is not supported with strong mentality, weak family or social support, also low spirituality. These are issues that I reckon should be taken care by mature adults and parents. Apparently, yesterday issue of Kompas also stated that children mental health is dependent on good relationship quality in the family. It means that parents have high responsibility to provide basic needs of their children, including love and respect.

The problem is many parents themselves are not mentally healthy, or handicapped parents. Maybe they are not ready to be parents, they are shocked with massive responsibilities as parents, or maybe have the thought that giving materials to the family is more than enough. Moreover the moms, who often bear huge shocks to always have to take care of the kids and missed all their 'me' times. Every time the baby cries, trigger her brain to silently shout her depressed feeling. Baby blues syndrome often is not well handled by the mom, and her husband who never realized there is such syndrome.

Hey, sounds like mental health is very complex, right! Surprisingly, limited budget is disbursed to public health programs to prevent and control mental health problems. Social stigma is also a big issue why mental health is never brought up in prevention level. Who want to be tagged as a crazy patient?

So let's take this to the ground. Start from ourselves. Are we mentally healthy? I think we should see some indicators, for instance can we laugh at our difficulties in life?, can we calmly handle baby cry in the middle of night?, can we talk heart to heart with our significant other and deal with our problems?, do we sweat on small stuffs and treat them as if third world war will occur?, etc.

Every human deal with difficulties and problems in life. Because that is life all about. Even a baby enters the world with a cry, not with a laughter...because the baby knows living in this world is not easy!

Deal with our problem, not cry with them. Bright up our mind. Be healthy in our deep spirit. It will be a huge capital toward a better life.