Components of Mental Illness Prevention

What is the importance of integrating emotional and spiritual health for the prevention of mental illness? 

Note: You get to define spirituality for yourself! I attempt to remain as neutral as possible, even if only in the intention with which I share any specifics. All words are interchangeable for your best interpretation and internalized meaning.

Mental health, generally speaking, looks at thoughts and the process of cognition. This process is naturally separate from the more emotional functioning process of the brain. Emotionality can be viewed as non-logical, and this process is dedicated to feeling things that can be described with thoughts and words, but is inherently an experience separate from thought, yet informed by thought (and vice versa). If we’re being honest, the integration of emotionality is as much a part of mental health as logic!

Emotions and Emotional Processing

The emotional process can be a challenging, yet rewarding journey through experiencing (rather than understanding) the energy coursing through the body in forms consisting of these less-logical movements. These can range from the feelings of anger and rage, sadness and depression, happiness and joy, guilt and shame, and many others.

It was challenging for me to tap into anger and rage, but it also opened up a whole world of grieving that was stuck in the past. For instance, growing up with the knowledge I was adopted, I failed for a long time at providing myself the space to properly grieve not being raised by my birth parents. As anger is a natural, non-linear step in the stages of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance), the allowing of anger creates even more space for closure and something new to develop. To provide more context, the stages of grief are a natural process we go through when we experience the loss of anything in our lives. In this example of grieving the loss of my birth parents, I’m opening space for deeper connection with my adoptive family as well as the family I choose to create for myself. 

Challenging Emotions – Guilt and Shame

Two other emotions that have deep ties to who we are as humans and are oftentimes missed in identifying mental health struggles are guilt and shame. Guilt is an internal representation of taking blame; and shame is defined by the Verywell Mind (Cuncic, 2023) as “a feeling of embarrassment or humiliation that arises from the perception of having done something dishonorable, immoral, or improper.” Shame is one of those tricky emotions that can also come from an unconscious lack of acceptance for oneself, which is where the “perception” piece of this definition comes into play. For example, the perception that one did something wrong, even if they didn’t.

I have been working with deep seated shame over the years, and as a gay man born and raised in the south, it’s been something I haven’t found much community to work through the wounds with. The shame of being gay remained hidden, and subsequently stuck around for most of my life. This internalization of embarrassment for a core component of my existence, my identity, has created internal turmoil. So-called symptoms of this shame include the inability to feel comfortable being openly myself in public settings which leads to avoiding flirting with men who I’m interested in, but may not be openly gay themselves. And more generally speaking, I had major difficulties in my connections with men regardless of orientation, attraction, etc.

This shame, in my experience, has compounded emotions mixed in such as the anger for not feeling I had the childhood I imagine would have allowed me to not carry the emotions, including deep sadness and grief of not having truly significant sexual or romantic intimate relationships with other men. — And an important side-note is that these emotions simply cannot be separated from the mental (thoughts) or spiritual connections I experienced, or lack thereof. — The mental space I found myself unable to escape due to the trauma of carrying shame included close-to obsessive tendencies to create stories about meeting someone with whom I could connect with in a meaningful way. Spiritually speaking, a connection with something larger than myself was hindered due to the mental and emotional experiences being caught in these never ending thought and emotion loops (keep scrolling for more on this).

Here’s a great graphic to use for understanding depth of emotions that may be presenting themselves in your experience:

^{(Willcox, 2024)}

How are Spiritual Health and Mental Health Connected?

In relation to mental health, spiritual health can be seen as the energetics that underlie all of reality. Energetics can be defined as the movements in the world that are beyond physical, but can include physical reality. This isn’t a religious statement, rather one specifically oriented to an individual’s experience of whatever is beyond physical existence. This can include what we feel, see, and hear beyond that which can be identified as a shared experience with others. My personal experience of non-physical feelings and visual elements usually present as pendulating, natural movements of back and forth. Sometimes this pendulation can occur like a grandfather clock, and others its slower resembeling the course of a wave crashing on shore and returning to the ocean.

Grounding Psychosis into Reality to Experiment with Spirituality

Now, there is some overlap in the experience of mental illness and what I’m touching on with the integration of spiritual health. The best way I’ve personally found to experiment and practice with spiritual health and healing from mental illness is medication as a way to stay grounded. Seeing medication as a useful tool to force our psychosis into a grounded reality provides the foundation we need to safely experiment with spiritual and energetic elements. Combining medication with a therapist and a solid support network to maintain stability can be essential to this process as well. From the state of being grounded, healthy and slow experimentation with the spiritual components of health can allow for a unrushed integration into a positive experience with a personal relationship to something greater than ourselves.