Be honest. Be honest to yourselves. I spent the better part of my life turning away from the fact that I have depression along with other issues. It wasn't until the last eight years when I sort of realized that that's something that you have to deal with.
You deal with it in your everyday life. You can't expect other people to come and save you and you can't expect it to go away if you just ignore it. My advice for students would be try and find a routine that works for you. For me it's getting up in the morning it's getting dressed it's doing my hair, doing my make-up, and and then getting out. I would say that would be a big step.
First, you didn't, so if you have lectures in the morning or in the afternoon, just find a routine that works for you and then there's always something to focus on, there's some consistency in your life. Definitely speak about it - if you have anxiety or depression. A mental health difference or difficulty, be honest about it if you're comfortable with that and seek out other people and speak to them about what they're going through as well.
It usually makes you feel like 'Okay - I'm not the only one going through this' Other advice for students to help them look after their mental health. You know what works best for you. Don't compare yourself to others and their methods. Whether that is working through the night or getting up early to get it done; whether it's taking long baths or a walk. Trust what works for you. My best advice for students is to always make sure you make time for yourself. If there's activities you enjoy, make sure you're doing them, make sure you're being you.
If you're the kind of person that likes to time-table what you're doing, or if you're really tough on yourself when you've not done your essay, please make sure you take some time to literally do nothing. It's so important to just sit there watch Netflix, read a book.Make some time to just chill out and hangout because if you overwork yourself, you'll make yourself ill and no-one wants that. Make time fond yourself and things that you enjoy doing. My advice is to speak with friends, speak to family.
You need to speak with somebody when you feeling down. You are not alone, there are people who care about you. You need to tell them, you need to approach them. You also need to find ways to look after yourself. Like going to the gym, going for walks like I do or doing other activities in groups. So don't keep it to yourself, open up and you will see there is help out there. We've got some really useful links on our website helping you access advice and services such as Big White Wall, Mind Papyrus Hope Line and so many others.
Mental
health help-seeking - a path to behaviour change
If I were to ask you all to imagine that you have a chronic disease, this may not be a very comfortable thing to do,because no one wants to get sick, no one wants to have a condition that is persistent, long lasting, and has no cure, and that is associated with greater,mental health challenges. Yet that is what 11 million people in Australia a refaced with every day, managing a chronic disease.
That is close to half of the Australian population, and as we reach older adulthood, that is 65 years and over, and my population of interest, we have an even greater chance of being diagnosed with a chronic health problem. Yet many people with chronic disease are not accessing mental health services, and this has significant social, financial and individual consequences, and as we have an ageing population, this is a growing problem which will only compound, if we don't do anything now to improve engagement with mental health services.
In order to investigate why older adults with chronic disease are not accessing mental health services, I used a prominent and widely accepted theory in the social and behavioral sciences, the theory of planned behavior. This theory allows us to predict behavior and facilitate change in behavior. Consider for a moment how hard it is to change our behavior, to get up early in the morning and go to the gym, to eat less sugary foods, these aren't easy things to do and certainly for me they're not, but the theory of planned behavior has been successfully applied to promote behavior change in all of these areas, including seeking help.
I developed and pilot-tested a questionnaire based on this theory to investigate help seeking for mental health problems. I then spent the last year-and-a-half in the community, visiting older adults with chronic disease, and what this resulted in, was not only lengthy chats and lots of cups of tea,
I was also able to identify the strongest predictors of seeking mental health services, and the strongest most significant predictor of seeking mental health services are people's attitudes towards mental health treatment.
This is congruent with the theory of planned behavior. Currently I'm developing an intervention which I will later test that aims to increase the likelihood of people with chronic disease engaging with mental health services. Later I will be looking further field, to extend my research internationally, because as I'm sure wecan all appreciate, there is no health without mental health. Thank you.
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