Why you must go for depression diagnosis?
According to internal health charity Mind, one in four people witnesses an internal health problem of some kind each year in England, with one in six people reporting feelings of anxiety and depression in any given week.
The stigma around depression diagnosis is frequently that it is opprobrious, the commodity to be kept secret and shy away from talking about. Still, Omisade Burney-Scott does not see it that way. She was diagnosed with depression in the year 2016 when she was forty-nine years old and she firmly believes that it saved her life.
Sharing her psychological health journey as part of the What is Under Defying Ageism series by Instagram platform StyleLikeU, Burney-Scott admitted that she does not look at her depression diagnosis as a bad thing at all. Rather, she says it was her body trying to save her life, an invitation she accepted.
“When I got my initial diagnosis, it came on the tail end of a very challenging time in my life,” the social justice advocate and creator of The Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause tells Stylist.
“I used to be feeling extreme fatigue, melancholy and lost an extreme amount of weight during a short space of your time, all while within the last stages of my menopausal journey. I thought I used to be physically ill because I used to be just dwindling .”
After a doctor cleared her of any physical health problems, Burney-Scott was diagnosed with depressive disorder. “ It was like my body had been trying to tell me what was going on. I was doing a job that needed a lot of psychological work, so I put the stress and the constant brain fog down to that. But actually, it was my body trying to say this is further than just sadness’. So once I got the diagnosis, it had been sort of a lightbulb went off.”
But rather than hide her diagnosis, as so numerous do, Burney-Scott says that she is always framed having depression as a positive thing and in no way a negative.
“ I felt it had been a call for participation to settle on myself, to like myself. It allowed me to develop a special, more positive relationship with myself.
“ The diagnosis saved my life and gave me the chance to ascertain myself as further human. It also deepened my understanding of who I am, which allows me to be more compassionate. As a Black, cis, hetero woman, we navigate a lot of challenges on a day-to-day basis, so having this support around my internal health is what makes me feel safe in places I do not always feel.”
Burney-Scott says she was inspired to share her story due to the stereotypes surrounding depression. “ So much of what we understand of it is based on these ideas, but it can show up in so numerous different ways fatigue, sadness, wrathfulness, rage.
“ it is not a commodity you can just snap out of. There is a lot of stigma in the Black community around psychological and emotional health, and we have not been afforded the space to indeed interrogate where these issues might come from. They are entrenched in our functionality through our lived experience in societies and cultures where racism and racism exist.
“ Too frequently, we do not carve out the space and time we need to take care of ourselves. The way we are taught to work is to keep going, keep producing, pack down pain because psychological health is not the most important issue to be addressed.”
SOURCE
https://www.stylist.co.uk/health/mental-health/depression-diagnosis-positive/587627