THIS week Friday is Christmas Day, and there is just something about the festive period that gets your juice running.
That it is holiday time probably has something to do with it, but there is something else.
Something intangible that you cannot quite put your finger on. You see it in people’s eyes at your local supermarket and in the guy at the filling station as you fill up your tank for those long journeys to be with family.
Everything is a little bit louder, from the red decoration colours in the shops, to the bus boy calling for passengers on a minibus, and the preacher calling for repentance in church.
Perhaps it is to do with the promise of a new year and the Christian message of a new spiritual birth.
Or perhaps it is just our way of unwinding after a long and difficult year.
During this period, it is a little bit more difficult to restrain the young from mischief and the old from over-indulgence. People let their hair down and also let their guard down.
It is time happiness and festivity open the doors too wide in many homes and sorrow sneaks in unnoticed.
Behind all the festivity and soon after comes the stress of paying for all the merry making. Stress, especially from family conflicts and money problems, are common triggers for mental illness.
Mental illness is not a popular topic. Almost any other illness is acceptable to most people other than mental illness.
What is mental health?
The Christmas season is not the best time to discuss mental health. After all, people are thinking of having fun and letting off some steam.
Unfortunately, this is the time people also worry most about the past and the future. It is also the time when self-harm or suicide is most common. So it’s the best time to ask how I can make myself healthier inside.
The World Health Organisation defines health not only as physical health, but also the presence of a good emotional or inner well-being. It was thought for many years that mental illness was a foreign concept in Africa.
It has become increasingly clear that this is not the case. It is just that the communal African cultures shielded the individual and provided a good social support method for mental health.
With the increasing adoption of more Western lifestyles and nuclear families, this support has begun to fail. This is evidenced by the increasing number of mental health problems seen in the communities around us.
Little attention is paid to mental health by most people until mental illness appears, then the reaction is an attempt to deny or suppress it.
Little effort or time is spent on trying to cultivate a good emotional well-being until one is threatened by disease.
Good mental health can be defined as that state of emotional well-being that allows us to accept ourselves and others. This emotional stability allows us to see life for what it really is, to deal with difficulties, form relationships and to reach our full inner potential.
What causes mental illness?
There are at least two major causes of mental illness. These are internal factors and external factors. The internal factors are those that arise from within. That is a character that we inherit, or that runs in our family. Some mental illness is passed on in families from one generation to the next.
Many times families try to keep this information among themselves to avoid the family stigma, which would often come from the community if this were commonly known.
No one wants to marry their daughter or son into a family where there is history of mental illness.The other factors are external, which relate to the environmental influences.
Common among these are factors like drug and alcohol abuse. Other factors are work, family or martial stress. In some cases the internal or inherited factors act as the key hole and the external factors as the trigger or the key that simply precipitates an underlying inherited mental illness.
What are the common types of mental illness?  How many times have you heard the cliché phrases on mental illness, like we all have mental illness, it’s just a matter of degrees?
There is truth in this statement in the sense that mental illness is a broad spectrum of diseases. In general it can be divided into three categories, which are diseases of mood, thought or behaviour.
The most common of these are abnormalities of feeling or mood. This is where the person has mood swings from extreme happiness on one day to extreme sadness on the other.
These mood swings disturb their ability to function normally in the community. A condition called bipolar psychosis or maniac depressive psychosis.
The second most common conditions are abnormalities of the thinking process. This is where the person loses touch with reality.
They may see things that other people do not see or hear voices that other people do not hear. Examples are the condition called schizophrenia.
The mental illness of behaviour is closest to normal, in the sense that the person thinks normally and has normal feelings. The problem is that their reaction to events or circumstances around them, are very different than the average person.
These are sometimes referred to as personal disorders or neurosis. Examples are obsessive compulsive personalities. Everybody loves to be clean and tidy, but when somebody washes their hands 10 times a day in order to be clean, then they have some obsessive compulsive behaviour.
How can I be healthy mentally?
First of all, it is important to debunk or remove the myths around mental illness. Many people avoid dealing with mental health because they fear that either by dealing with people who have it or talking/reading about it, they may get it.
The opposite is in fact the case. If you understand mental health better, you will be in a better position to avoid mental illness, recognise it and help others deal with it better.
There are three things that can be done to be more mentally healthy, and these are;
1. Emotional intelligence
2. Emotional support
3. Ethanol (alcohol) and drug avoidance
With maturity or age come self-awareness. Some call it emotional intelligence. This is the ability above all to understand yourself better.
To accept your strengths and weaknesses. To make deliberate efforts of self-improvement in the area of your feelings and how these affect your attitude to others.
People with strong emotional maturity are least likely to suffer mental illness. Most men are instinctively opposed to dealing with these soft emotions and are out of tune with themselves. Unfortunately, without emotional intelligence, you cannot be successful. To be successful you must be able to lead yourself first and then others.
So what should you do to have emotional intelligence? Talk to yourself or reflect inwardly daily, ask how by improving yourself you can be more helpful to those around you.
Dale Carnegie has written a book How to make friends and influence people. This book had a lasting influence on a young man in the 1950s called Warren Buffet. Who is now one of the richest men in the world.
Make a deliberate effort to have a good network of friends.
Have an emotional support system. Women are generally better at this than men. Share your inner struggles with your friends, this is the exercise of your inner self that will strengthen you.
Most people take it as a sign of weakness to share your inner feelings. In fact, it is an act of strength. Make an effort to chat with a friend once a week about each other.
Unburden yourself and let your friends unburden themselves on you, share your fears and hopes. Don’t be afraid of your emotions, mental health is all about having a good handle on your emotional life.
The abuse of alcohol and drugs is often the end result of a long-standing failure of good mental health. The difficulty of course is to get the individual to accept this.
In many instances the self-deception is that this is for social entertainment. If this is true then this should only happen with friends, at social events and on special days.
So beware when you begin to have a craving for drinking alcohol alone, excessively, during the week and during normal working hours.
Try to stop taking alcohol for a week. If you cannot, then you have a problem with your mental health.