Sharing feelings important for mental health
Sharing feelings important for mental health
By Santi W.E. Soekanto
JAKARTA (JP): Which habit is better for your mental health: bottling up your feelings, especially anger, in order not to upset other people (as many Indonesians tend to do), or venting them?
The question may seem basic, but the answer, unfortunately, is not so easy to find. People say, "Oh, don't keep them all inside, spit them out or you'll have an ulcer", which perhaps contains a grain of truth.
At least it is true for Alia (not real name), a 20-year old woman, who was once diagnosed as "depressed" and disturbed enough to warrant hospitalization.
The young woman said she realizes now that her "illness" was the result of long-repressed emotions, especially sadness and anger after being told by her mother that the man she called Papa was not her biological father.
"I was 14 when she told me that my real father was killed in an accident before I was born, and that she almost committed suicide because of it," she said.
"I should have just screamed, cried, anything, instead of just sitting there, trying to comfort my mother who was already depressed because she had to bring the bad tidings. I was so afraid that I would upset her further that I chose to be quiet and act 'mature'" Alia said.
"Even after that I went on behaving like a 'normal' child and teenager. But, I exploded years later," she said, describing the depression she experienced following stressful high school exams.
After a period of hospitalization and a number of alternative healing methods, Alia recovered. But she often wonders now, "what drove me over the edge? What caused me to slip into the abyss?"
Even for mental health experts, Alia's questions were not easy to answer. In addition to dealing with the mystery of mental illness, both experts and health authorities have to contend with the problem of the ever-rising number of mentally ill patients in the country.
Magnitude
Despite society's incomprehension of mental illness, the magnitude of the problem makes it serious enough for President Soeharto to call for more humane treatment of the mentally ill.
Three of 10 Indonesians seeking treatment at public health centers (Puskesmas) and have symptoms of mental disorders, Soeharto said last year. "Those people should be loved and respected," he added.
According to Ministry of Health statistics, 1.4 per 1,000 people in urban areas and 4.6 per 1,000 people in rural areas suffer from psychosis - any form of severe mental disorder in which the individual's contact with reality becomes highly distorted - while 98 people out of 1,000 have problems such as drug abuse and alcoholism. The Indonesian population currently stands at around 185 million.
The World Health Organization painted an even bleaker picture when it reported last year that two to three of 1,000 people in the world suffer from mental illness. It also said that six to eight out of 1,000 suffer from mental illnesses, including emotional, neurological and psychosocial disorders.
An annual increase of 20 percent in the number of mentally ill occurs in Jakarta alone, according to officials. With the rapid social, cultural and political changes that the nation is experiencing, the handling of the problem of mental illness may continue to gain importance.
Ignorance on the part of the people around the mentally disturbed often results in inhumane treatment. Many Indonesians, especially in provincial areas, neglect the mentally ill by isolating them in wooden shackles and placing their legs in stocks.
Alia, too, though she lives in Jakarta, received rough treatment at the hands of hospital orderlies.
"They clenched me, pressed me down on the bed, pulled down my pants and just jammed me with a needle to sedate me when all I had been doing was crying incessantly," she said, holding back tears. "I wasn't behaving violently, but they treated me as if I were some kind of crazy animal."
Oration
One of the experts who continues to be preoccupied with the problem of mental health is Dr. Suprapti Sumarmo Markam, a senior clinical psychologist from the School of Psychology, University of Indonesia.
Suprapti chose "the experience of emotions and mental health" as the topic for her scientific oration which she delivered last Tuesday on the occasion of her installment as the school's professor, and strove to reveal scientific answers.
Suprapti, daughter of Slamet Iman Santoso, one of Indonesia's most prominent scholars and founder of the School of Psychology at the university, finds a number of reasons why bottling up or venting emotions are not ideal.
The newly-elected dean of the school also said that suppressing feelings for fear of offending people may lead to feelings of isolation and alienation. Shared emotions are more healing as they usually bring a feeling of well-being, she said.
Definition
But what is mental health? How can you tell that a person is mentally healthy?
The World Health Organization defined in 1946 that "health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity".
The term mental health represents a variety of human aspirations: rehabilitation of the mentally disturbed, prevention of mental disorders, reduction of tension in a conflict-laden world, and attainment of a state of well-being in which the individual functions at a level consistent with his mental and physical potential.
"Here, health means a condition of 'high-level wellbeing' supported by education, optimum growth and self actualization," Suprapti said.
A person is emotionally healthy when he can balance the onslaught of negative feelings, such as sadness or anger, with positive ones, such as the feeling of happiness. The person should also be able to accept and cope with emotional swings, has the ability to enjoy the positive occurrences of life, and to survive the bad times. He is generally able to "control" his emotions.
What differentiates a "normal" person from a person whose ability to experience and "regulate" emotions is disturbed is their judgment. Normal people display "adequate adjustments" to their surroundings, she said.
Suprapti quoted a study in which subjects were asked to "suppress" feelings which emerged while they were watching certain movies. For comparison, another group of subjects, on the other hand, were allowed to experience and express their feelings of sadness or happiness.
It was found that subjects who suppressed their feelings showed a decline in somatic (bodily) activities and an increase in certain brain activities. The two reactions have been associated with ill health.
"The act of suppressing emotions is indeed correlated with a person's ill health," she said.
Suprapti added that a person can suppress feelings and yet remain comfortable, while another person inhibits emotion and experiences discomfort.
"The expression of emotion is healthy when the individual does not have conflicts over it," she said. "When you want to share and express your feelings but are unable to do so, that's when you're unhealthy."
The ideal choice would then be to become a mature person who is able to reflect on the feelings that they experience, control emotions when necessary, share them appropriately, and able to respect and accept other people as they are, she said.
"And families still have the greater responsibility to raise those mature, mentally healthy, individuals," Suprapti said.