Mental illness is dreaded far and wide because of the many truthful or otherwise negative information spread about mental illness. It is the stigma associated with mental illness that makes it a feared condition amongst many.
Some scientist states that having mental illness could reduce one’s life expectancy by about 10 to 20 years. Truthful as this statement may be, mental illness still remains a serious condition to contend with.
Mental illness could have some adverse effects on your physical health, some of which you may never have thought of. We gathered some of these to explain to you in details below.
Mental Illnesses can cause Heart Disease
There are several mental conditions that have been found to link to Heart disease both as a cause and effect. The conditions include:
Anxiety
Most of us think that anxiety is how you feel when you are worried or stressed. That may be true to some extent, but anxiety is bigger than occasional feeling of worry and stress. When you have anxiety, it becomes difficult for you to control how you feel which drives you into serious health conditions such as heart disease. While some forms of anxiety may be traced to a single cause, the difficult form of anxieties are the ones you can’t trace back to the cause. You end up having incessant worry and stress which affect your heart beat rate hence heart attack.
Depression
When you are depressed you tend to constantly feel dejected and lost making you to stop performing your normal life activities. It may be normal to feel sad and moody occasionally but it is not normal to experience these feelings intensely for extended periods and sometimes without even a traceable cause.
Depression changes how you feel about yourself and makes it much difficult for you to manage your life. You may lack energy and experience sleepless nights, sleep excessively, have heart related problems and become less concentrative among other effects.
Mental illness Worsens Cancer
Mental health and cancer are interrelated. While having cancer may lead to depression and other mental illnesses, these illnesses may in return worsen your cancer condition and speed up death. People suffering from cancer and have metal illness have been found to have worse outcomes. They may be less likely to stick to the treatment schedules, follow their exercise plans and are more likely to indulge in alcohol abuse. In some instances they even miss their therapy sessions.
Mental Illness Worsens Diabetes
Mental illness highly affects many aspects of your life in the event that you get affected. It affects your relations with others, how you feel and think, how you handle stress and even how you make choices. All these will in turn make it harder for you to stick to your diabetes care plan worsening your general diabetic condition.
The two conditions become interrelated in that, when your diabetes worsens, your mental condition worsens too and vice versa. In the same sense, when you get to manage one condition well, the other tends to get better too.
Adverse Effects of Schizophrenia
When you suffer from Schizophrenia, you will be unable to interpret reality in a normal way. It may push you to hallucinations, delusions and extremely disordered thinking and behaviors that interferes with your daily functioning. When managed at early stage, Schizophrenia may not get worse and demanding of your physical health. Some of the symptoms of Schizophrenia that may have adverse effects on your physical health include:
Hallucinations
This symptom makes you hear or see things that do not exist in reality. Repeated hallucinations drain you not only mentally but also physically as it makes you feel fatigued and weak to carry out your normal duties.
Delusions
Delusions make you believe that virtual events are actually happening to you in real life while they are not. You may have experiences like feeling you are being targeted by people in the way they speak, or believe that someone is in love with you when they are not. When you repeatedly experience such conflicting thoughts, you may eventually end up reducing weight and becoming weak to act normally.
Lack of Motivation
When you get demotivated to do anything, it even becomes hard to manage your mental illness itself. Demotivation makes you to stop doing the exercises you were doing that kept your physical health in check. You may start adding extra weight which may lead to obesity and other related illnesses.
Schizophrenia promotes Osteoporosis
Having Schizophrenia has been found to increase the chances of developing Osteoporosis, a condition that is associated with low bone mass. Having Schizophrenia not only exposes you to higher risks of developing Osteoporosis but also experiencing hip fractures. A study to investigate the prevalence of low bone density and osteoporosis, revealed that having schizophrenia almost doubled the chances of having low bone density. The study also found out that 50% of people with Schizophrenia will also have low bone mass and a higher risk of developing osteoporosis.
While many scientific research agree that there is hardly no separation from your mental health and physical health most mentally ill patients tend to think there is a disassociation in the two. The earlier one understands that there is consistent link between mental and physical health, the easier it is for them to get help and reinstatement of normal life.
Mental illness is not a preserve of a selected group of people. Anyone can have mental illness based on various factor regardless of what you do in life. For example, if you read through this psychologist’s personal experiences on mental illness at themadnessforreal.com, then you will get to learn how even a psychologist could not escape the wrath of mental illness.
Most mental illnesses are manageable and you can get back to your normal lifestyle if you seek help early enough. Psychologists and doctors will work together to see to it that you regain your former greatness within no time. Remember, for you to have a blossoming physical health, then you need to have a superb mental health as well.
