Mental health care vs Cancer care... do we have the balance right?
For those who have met me in my “adult life” in my current home town of Kitchener/Waterloo... you probably have no idea that I lost probably 3 years of my youth to depression and anxiety. I stumbled through my last couple years of high school; missing weeks or months at a time. I can still to this day, despite everything I’ve gone through up until today, say that those were the darkest days of my life. Many people think that The Big C is the worst possible thing you can face in life. But the thing about Cancer... you have a choice about how you are going to handle it, how you’re going to frame it, how you’re going to manage the things you can control. When you are in the depths of a mood disorder, you have no control over your emotional response or even your cognition around your emotions. You can feel utterly alone regardless how many people are trying to support you. The other facet of mental health that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough is the toll it takes on those around the ...