By Sharon Gordon
When I hear about mental health, I’m torn between it’s important and suck it up.
I’m of that generation where mental health wasn’t discussed and definitely wasn’t on
anyone’s agenda. You just sucked it up and got on with life.
Looking back, I now realise that my father suffered from depression for most of his life. My mother didn’t and was very much part of the suck it up movement. I’m not sure about my siblings but I have had my own challenges over the years.
Sometimes I have taken medication, sometimes exercise, sometimes therapy and more often than not – you guessed it – suck it up.
My mental health has very often affected my physical wellbeing. One of those being my anxiety and sexuality. Depression and anxiety have a profound effect on your libido and relationships. It can destroy them if they are not managed, and your partner is not in on the game. Here’s that word again – communication.
Now if you’re from the suck it up fraternity, admitting that you are having a problem is highly unlikely, but I urge you to spill the beans. It’s the first step to healing.
When depressed, we’re unlikely to want sex. It feels like one more thing to cope with.
The same with anxiety. It’s not something you can switch off. To have great sex you need to be fully present and trying to keep the demons in the cupboard is very distracting. It’s some of the worst sex you’ll ever have.
The kicker here is that having sex will actually reduce anxiety and depression, so as my mother always said (in a completely different context) – force yourself!
Research shows that women experience depression more than men. I don’t know about that, because men still don’t admit that they can have mental health issues. They also lie about how many women they’ve had sex with. We do too, so who knows. I do know that depression can make us less confident.
Having great sex needs us to have some self-esteem. We need to feel worthy of pleasure and intimacy. This is very hard to achieve if you are covered with the smothering damp blanket of depression.
Men suffering from depression are more likely to lose interest in any form of activity. This almost always includes having sex. We take this on as our fault. A woman’s go to is that he is no longer into me! It’s a silly thing to do, but we do it anyway. If only our intimacy levels were so strong that we could share this information and believe it.
Society believes, incorrectly, that men are more sexual than women. That at a drop of a hat, men are willing and able to have sex. When they don’t then back to our default setting. It’s me, he is no longer into me! For heaven’s sake start talking!
As we celebrate Mental Health Day, let’s be reminded that mental health includes embracing pleasure as an integral part of self-care. That mental health is woven into our desires, connections and intimacy.
Nurture yourself, including your sensual self. The mind and body are one. If you hate your body your mind has a powerful way of reinforcing all that negativity. We need to start loving all the bits of being human, including what it means to be a dysfunctional sensual and sexual being. Being depressed or suffering from anxiety seems to be a pandemic. It might be that we’re just talking about it more. It’s not something we used to admit to. Now it seems to be hip and happening.
I think we talk about it like a fashion statement, and it detracts from how serious mental dis-ease can be.
I recently read a blog post about something completely unrelated, and what the writer said hit home. “It is not enough just to be aware, you need to understand”.
Let me end this week by saying that if you are suffering from depression, it’s time to come clean with your partner, especially if you desire intimacy.
We think intimacy is about sex and it can be.
Someone called Taylor Jenkins Reid said, “Intimacy is about truth. When you realise you can tell someone the truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’. That’s intimacy”.
Don’t just be aware of mental health, try to understand. And then for those like me – suck it up! Only kidding, get help.
Saturday Star