Over the past couple of weeks I have published a survey about the wording the general population use regarding mental health problems and the responses were surprising from the beginning. I'm not a data analyst or a specialist in any way at all, but I'm going to attempt to analyse the results to try better understand just what is acceptable, anger inducing or upsetting to the mental health community. I'm going to do this in installments so it's not such a daunting read so bear with me and I'll be as quick as I can, for those of you who stuck around for the AtoZ I promise to not take months this time!
We are constantly told that it's 'time to talk' but as a nation we are terrified to do so, I am not ashamed of my problems but I often feel that other people are ashamed for me. Words are whispered around us in case we spontaneously combust if we hear the word depression or schizophrenia, heaven forbid someone actually says the words mental illness.
The first thing I noticed, and something I found quite interesting, was that nearly all of the respondents were female. 86.4% in fact, with only 4.5% being male and 9.1% identified as other ( agender, trans etc.) This may be because of the outlets I used to promote the survey or it may even be that men just don't like surveys, however I feel that this is due to men generally being more uncomfortable with these sort of 'emotional' issues, for example if I see a male doctor about depression they are usually very fidgety and desperate to get me out of the room whereas the female doctors are much more open to talking about it, most men just don't seem to do feelings and I wonder if this is a cultural thing that men aren't 'soft' about emotions or if this is actually a biological factor. Back in the day men would hunt and gather and provide for the family, probably spending most of their time away from the home whereas women were literally bred to look after the home, the children and the elderly. Perhaps evolution has desensitised men to emotions.
I also asked those who felt comfortable to tell me their age, sexuality, ethnicity and job as I expected there to be a large trend in the results especially with age. However, I can find absolutely no trend whatsoever in any of them, I'm sure someone much more qualified than me would be able to, but to my untrained eye there is no significant difference at all. I thought that the older generation, older than mine that is as I am Generation Y, might be a little more free with language my generation wouldn't think of using. I always think of us as more accepting and liberal in general but I suppose I underestimated older people, sorry.
