[THREAD] in light of some of the misinformation that has been circulating from big accounts, I wanted to take time to talk about the origins of mental health and touch on substance abuse a little bit as well. It is crucial to remember that ANYONE can be impacted psychologically!

There are biological, psychological, social and environmental factors that impact each other to form our mental health. When the conditions are right, it creates vulnerabilities that can lead to mental illness. For example, someone may have lost a loved one and work is hard,

it can create the ideal ground for depression to set in. Home is also where a lot of mental health issues start with pressure from parents, conditional love, weight shaming and a host of other issues that clearly lead to helplessness and hopelessness and therefore depression!

To say that drugs create mental illness is simply untrue. Usually, it is the other way around. Drugs are used as a way to self medicate from our mental illnesses, which is why they tend to be abused. They are an escape when other things don’t work as well.

Of course, certain drugs tend to bring a temporary relief but also worsen our mental health in the long term but they do NOT create it out of thin air. Even with people whose psychosis is drug induced, it is because they were susceptible to it already.

The drug may trigger the first episode but will not actually create it. If it is not drugs, a big stressor or traumatic event can also trigger that first episode. I hope that this small thread made it a little clearer. While that tweet (I commented on in an emotional way)

was willfully ignorant and stigmatizing, I thought I would also write something educational in the hopes that some people would read it and learn about clinical psychology in a more factual way. I am still a bit angry about these harmful tweets getting tens of thousands of likes.

The worst is that those who like them and absorb that information will spread it around and diminish mental health experiences of people around them, making us a less empathetic society, which hurts us all.