How is a mental illness treated?

First, let’s deal with that term. Mental illness. That is a perjorative term. Similarly, there are other terms for minorities that suggest there’s something wrong with them, and we don’t use those nowadays. Instead of “mental illness,” we can use the term “behavioral illness” which is a more neutral term without shaming connotations.

Illnesses that affect our emotions, such as anxiety and depression, come from a physical location: our brain. As such, the brain is psychological, responding to our thoughts and emotions. Also, it is biological, having hundreds of chemicals and nerve pathways to send messages. And the brain is social. We emotionally respond to our social environment, for better or worse!

So emotional illnesses are best treated with biological treatments for biological issues. These include insomnia, anxiety attacks, poor focus, and poor memory. These symptoms suggest a significant problem with biological areas in the brain that regulate those functions. Often, a medicine can help those functions get dramatically better within days or weeks.

Biological treatments can include a sleep medicine for insomnia, and an anti-anxiety medicine for anxiety, or an anti-depressant for significant depression.

Psychological issues can feed into emotional illnesses in a profound way. A psychological treatment can therefore be quite helpful. If a person experiences trouble controlling their thoughts, with thoughts often wandering to dark and gloomy patterns, mindfulness training can be helpful. If lack of meaning is the issue, the focus on a person’s values, family history, and spiritual beliefs can similarly be helpful. Encouraging the person to take time to appreciate those values and act on them can be transformative.

At other times, the anxiety is driven by a lack of interpersonal skills. That might be why a person has a few friends or has trouble getting through a break-up. Interpersonal skills can include learning how to start to conversation, following threads of a conversation, allowing yourself to become vulnerable to others and respond to others without feeling fragile. Interpersonal skills often contribute tremendously to the quality of a person’s life and makes rewarding experiences possible.

Social skills often help with social problems that can add to anxiety. Social skills training includes helping people become socially intelligent and anticipating what other people want or need for a rewarding interaction. This can include skills in conversation, texting, writing, social media posting and related skills. Anxiety often gets better when a person has the social skills to create rewarding relationship experiences.