During this, our 50th anniversary year, we’re sharing 50 reasons to celebrate Center for Neighborhoods — roughly one reason each week. The posts come from different stakeholders in the organization, representing our past, present, and future.
This week’s post is written by Johnique Ison, Senior Neighborhood Liaison
What is mental health? Your mental health is your emotional, psychological, and social well-being. Your mental health is just as important, if not more important, than your physical health. Struggles with mental health are actually directly correlated with regular health issues. Your mental health starts being altered, whether good or bad, when you are first born and remains important throughout your life. Childhood, environment, trauma, and other life factors contribute to your mental health’s functionality. I always suggest a person really dig into their life and what happened to really understand their own mental health. Mental health issues can lead to psychological disorders like depression, anxiety, and many more. Here are some signs you should watch for:
- Eating and sleeping a lot
- Avoiding usual activities and persons
- Lack of energy
- Lack of interest
- Physical sickness that you can’t pinpoint
- Mood swings
- Picking up unhealthy addictions
If you are experiencing any of these, you should see a psychiatrist or doctor.
A lot of people struggle with anxiety. It is one of the leading mental health disorders. It can affect you randomly, and anywhere. It comes and goes very easily and can alter your day in a matter of seconds. Grounding methods are used to bring you back to when anxiety takes over. Check out some ways you can ground yourself here:
https://www.healthline.com/health/grounding-techniques.
Center for Neighborhoods has always cared about the community and has always acknowledged people and their mental health. The work CFN does wouldn’t work without people, so a major part is to ensure the people are in a space where they feel healthy and whole. Over the last few years, CFN has focused more on mental health and what that looks like for our work in collaboration with neighbors. We have focused on bringing in trauma-informed training and wanting to educate our staff on trauma. We plan to continue to be intentional about caring for our neighbors’ mental health and growing as an organization to make sure we are providing the understanding needed.
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