My mental health hotline joke, in which I attempt to help a fellow comedian out, is that “if you’re not laughing, you’re not listening.” I guess this is what I call an “all-consuming life” joke.
For some, the laughter could be a form of self-protection, allowing them to avoid the truth. But for others, it could be a form of self-mutilation, a way to escape the reality of their own mental health. Either way, the laughter is an important part of the mental health continuum. It is one of the ways that mental health is treated in our community, and it goes a long way in helping people better themselves.
You can’t really talk about mental health with a straight face, but you might as well. We all joke about it, and so the fact that people even joke about it is a good thing. In fact, it is a good thing that mental health jokes are a topic of conversation in our own community.
The problem is that most of our jokes are probably not directed at mental health, but they are still a part of the mental health continuum. This is where things get a little tricky because it’s hard to tell what jokes are directed at mental health. People might joke about their own struggle with depression, or they might joke around their own struggles with anxiety.
All joking about mental health is mental health-oriented. The problem is that if you don’t make jokes about mental health, then you might as well not joke about anything else. If you’re a comedian, you should be focusing on making jokes about how you’re funny and funny people are funny. If you’re a writer, you should be focusing on writing stories about the positive things that we all can do.
This one is a little bit of both. The problem is, we often take jokes about depression as jokes about being depressed because so many people experience depression and anxiety. But jokes about mental health often come off as overly serious, and it can be easy to forget that most people do have mental health issues. As a result, jokes about mental health are often taken as jokes about something “other” than mental health.
In this case, I’m talking about the mental health hotline joke. This one didn’t make a lot of sense to me because I never really heard about mental health issues. I mean, I knew someone had mental health issues, but I didn’t know how they got them. And even if you have that sort of information, there’s no universal definition of mental health.
The term mental health was first made popular by the American psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Rogers (1900-1961). Rogers was the first person to define “mental health” as an umbrella for a wide variety of mental disorders. Since then, there have been tons of different types of mental illnesses, and the term “mental health” itself has changed over time.
Although mental health has been defined by a variety of people over time, and there is no such thing as absolute mental health, there are some things that are considered “incompatible” with mental health. These include mental illness, personality disorders, and mental disorders caused by a physical illness. A good way to think about mental health might be that it’s a spectrum rather than a specific line. A mental health condition may be caused by a physical illness, but it is not always.
A good example of the spectrum of mental health would be that bipolar disorder has a physical cause, but it does not cause the person to have a major psychotic episode. If someone has bipolar disorder, they do have a mental condition, but they don’t necessarily have a psychotic disorder. People can have personality disorders, but they don’t have to. It’s also possible for a person to have both a mental condition and a personality disorder.
