Struggling with mental health is never the best part of anyone’s life. It can be hard to admit you’re struggling and even harder to get help and start recovering. Mental health issues are almost never material for humor.
But for my family, they are. Mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and OCD often run in families, and my family seems to be a prime example. Several generations of people with “strange habits” like obsessively labeling items or extremely controlling “Type A” personalities fill up my family tree.
While it’s definitely difficult to live with the mental health issues looming in our genetics, my family laughs at our weird and wonderful lives. If it’s going to be an unavoidable fact of our existence, then we’ll find a way to laugh at it and make it easier to bear.
I’ve written about mental health a lot: about how you can be suffering but still appear fine from the outside, starting therapy, and how to tell the difference between anxiety and stress. My family has found the humor through it all. We all have one issue or another, so we’ve learned to band together, make some jokes, and have mental health issues be a completely normal and acceptable part of our lives.
When I was in the middle of my CBT about two years ago, my wonderful aunt sent me well wishes with the phrase: “Don’t worry – we come from a long line of crazy women.” I frequently send posts to my family that only people who have done therapy will find funny.
Image source: Tumblr
I have some friends who have also struggled with mental health issues, and I’ve tried my hardest to make them laugh when I can. There are just some weird things about mental illness culture that you really only understand if you’ve been there, like how you feel obligated to sit in the same spot every time you see your therapist or the weird dreams you’ll start having when you’re on Lexapro.
In its own way, laughing about my problems with people who have the same issues is a kind of therapy. It helps to integrate my mental health issues more fully into my life. It helps me feel like my issues aren’t the sole means of defining my identity. Making jokes and laughing (sometimes through the pain) is by far the most effective way for me to balance my perspective.
Recovery comes in all sorts of forms, but for my family and friends, humor is one of the most powerful tools we can use. Making mental health into a laughing matter is a bit of a tightrope act, but making jokes at your own expense and sharing some of the strangeness with people who will understand is a helpful way to heal.
So go ahead, make some jokes. Make yourself laugh. Make others who are suffering laugh. It’ll make the bizarreness a bit more normal, and it’ll brighten your day at least a little bit.