Mental Health Struggles: History and Ways to Cope
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Let's say you’re an average reader, which is 250 words per minute. In 11 minutes you read about 10 pages, one person dies to suicide in America. Continuing reading 20 more pages and now three people have died, in a 33 minute time period. By the time you finish the 200 page book, 18 people have died in the USA alone.
Imagine that anywhere you go you always have a heavy chest. Never getting a full breath, whether you’re around people or not. Then someone comes up to you and starts saying how mental issues aren't real, and how people are making it up. The deaths are piling on—it’s not stopping. Your friends say how they can’t take a break as well. How they'll stop breathing if you let them go, and focus on your own breath. The room starts to spin, heart rate increases rapidly. Your throat closes. The panic sets in when you can’t take a breath. This is what an experience of high anxiety can feel like.
For people with mental struggles like OCD, bipolar, and anxiety it isn’t always “a movement of free air” (Harper, 2025). Something that should be involuntary makes some people have to stop and focus on it. Having a steady breath throughout the day is a major play on staying focused in completing tasks, as well as mood, motivation, and stress levels. People with a panic disorder worry excessively about their episodes, avoiding triggers like stressors or social settings. It can occur as “frequently as several times a day or as rarely as a few times a year” (National Institute of Mental Health, n.d.). This is a huge disruption to people’s days, and it takes a toll mentally. It is harder to continue on after these episodes, causing distress.
However, it is crucial to learn about people and their struggles, especially if their experiences are different. This way, we can make sure people that are struggling are heard, and can find the resources they need. Having more awareness helps break the taboo topic that generations have tried to ignore in the past. Because of the stigma and discrimination, more than half of people with mental illness do not reach out for help to avoid the negative connotation that it has with getting help (American Psychiatric Association, 2024). The relevance to breaking the stigma is to have a more safe environment for people to reach out if they are struggling.
In contrast to treatments now, in the 1900s treatments severely harmed the first patients that were put through them. People with mental illness were locked up in asylums, viewed as a problem and less than a human being. The sigma started here, having people go to these areas and be tested on with new technology to ‘fix’ them. “Until the 1820s, commonly used “therapies” for serious mental illness included bleeding, cathartics, ice water immersion, restraints, and beatings“ (PubMed Central, 2023). They harmed patients for their own research, that made people afraid to talk about if they were struggling, in fear they would be sent to the asylums. George Santayana’s famous quote states, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." We as a society have moved from this harmful ideology of mental struggles in the medical field. But we need to remember what happened in the past to understand why we still have these injustices about mental illness.
Mental health is incontrovertible, it is real, not up for debate. “One in 10 Wisconsin teens attempted suicide last year, said Amy Marsman, a senior research analyst with the Office of Children’s Mental Health” (Hess, 2024). It is not an opinion on if mental health is real or it is not, it is statistically proven that mental struggles are the top 10 reasons for death. This number will keep climbing if awareness isn’t spread, and the prejudice/bias continues to our future. Having support of hospitals and people in general, will continue to help involve people who want to get the help they deserve. Just continuing to talk about it and create new ways of support will decrease the amount of isolation and harm caused in our communities.
I am personally thankful that I have reached out for resources to find help with my own mental struggles. But not everyone is as fortunate to go into programs or get medications. Even more than 27 million people did not have the money or resources to get mental help (Modi et al., 2022). Talking about my struggles, and things I have learned to cope with, could truly help people that can not get the support they need.
When people have anxiety or OCD (any other mental struggles), they can use breathing exercises to cope. It is a skill that can be used in practice within a calm time or when a distress happens. Items like the four-by-four breathing help calm the nervous system, with the steady breath of inhaling and exhaling. To do this method, a person will breathe in for four counts, hold for four, exhale for four, and finally hold for four steady counts. This helps the brain only focus on the counting; regulating the nervous system back down to a normal heart rate, making it easier to breathe. One thing that works for me in a high anxiety moment, is holding or eating ice. It shocks the body’s system and calms the vagus nerve, creating more balance (National Library of Medicine, 2023). It promotes calmness and relaxation, a simple sensation distraction, in opposition to the panic. This also is the same for sour candy or mint. Another thing that I use is watching simple youtube videos, specifically the baby dancing fruit and bubbles. Watching this creates a more light and funny environment, being able to only focus on the motions. These are DBT skills, meaning mental or physical skills to use in a moment of distress. They can help people redirect themselves from harmful behaviors, as a way to cope. Learning about these skills can help people know what to do in a time of panic in the future. Not every coping skill works for every person. Even if a skill worked in the past had been successful, it may not in the future. So experiencing and finding skills that are more helpful than others, can help know exactly what could help in the moment.
My friends and support system have seen my struggles, and are there for me. Everyone has their struggles, but holding it in because of the stigma hurts people more. We need social interaction to live, and to make sure that talking about getting help is essential. “It’s okay to not feel ok,” is a popular quote used in movies and in mental health resources. It expresses that anything that people are going through should not be ashamed of. That help is available and people don’t have to go through struggles alone. I still have struggles but I now have ways to cope and an open understanding of it.
Making sure awareness is spread, biases that came from the past are subsided, and reading people’s experiences is how more people will feel less alone in their struggles. All of these items have helped me on a personal level, so I truly believe it will help other people as well. I am alive. I can breathe in and I can exhale that breath.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2024, March). Stigma, Prejudice and Discrimination Against People with Mental Illness. American Psychiatric Association. Retrieved October 15, 2025, from https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/stigma-and-discrimination
American Psychiatric Association. (2020, September). A Brief History of Electroconvulsive Therapy. Phychiatry Online. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.2020.160103
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. (n.d.). Carbon Dioxide Provocation of Anxiety and Respiratory Response in Bipolar Disorder. National Library of Medicine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1850806/
Garnett, C. (2019, November 1). When Faces Made the Case for Lobotomy. NIH Record. Retrieved October 20, 2025, from https://nihrecord.nih.gov/2019/11/01/when-faces-made-case-lobotomy
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Harper, D. (2025). Origin and history of breath. Etymonline. https://www.etymonline.com/word/breathe
Hess, C. (2024, January 12). Wisconsin's youth continue to struggle with depression, thoughts of suicide. WPR. Retrieved October 23, 2025, from https://www.wpr.org/news/wisconsins-youth-continue-to-struggle-with-depression-thoughts-of-suicide
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Modi, H., Orgera, K., & Grover, A. (2022, October 10). Exploring Barriers to Mental Health Care in the U.S. AAMC. Retrieved October 10, 2025, from https://www.aamc.org/about-us/mission-areas/health-care/exploring-barriers-mental-health-care-us
National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute. (2022, March 24). How the Lungs Work - How Your Body Controls Breathing | NHLBI, NIH. nhlbi, nih. Retrieved October 10, 2025, from https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/lungs/body-controls-breathing
National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Panic Disorder: What You Need to Know - National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). National Institute of Mental Health. Retrieved October 20, 2025, from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/panic-disorder-when-fear-overwhelms
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