Mental health refers to your emotional, psychological and social well being. It affects how you think, feel, and behave, as well as how you handle stress, relate to others, and make choices.

Good mental health helps you cope with life’s challenges, while poor mental health can lead to conditions like depression, anxiety or more severe disorders.

What is mental health? Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social  well being. It influences how we can handle stress, how we relate to others, how we make our decisions, and our self esteem and resilience.

Mental health is important at every stage of life from childhood through adulthood. There are a lot of common mental health conditions, life anxiety disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, OCD, schizophrenia and other psychotic  disorders so you can have hallucinations or delusions.

People sometimes don’t know what causes mental health but it’s a lot of things that can like biological factors so like genetics and brain chemistry, life experience like trauma, abuse or even stressful events, family history like a family history of mental illness increase risk, and environmental factors like loneliness, financial stress, or substance abuse.

Signs that you need to watch out for of mental struggles are feeling sad or withdrawn for long periods, extreme mood changedm avoiding friend or social activities, trouble concentrating, changed in eating or sleeping patterns, and thoughts of self harm or suicide.

Mental health support and care you can go to  therapy, you can take medication, you can do some self care so regular exercise and healthy sleep/eating, and have a support team. It doesn’t have to be family, it can be who you are comfortable with.

May is a month dedicated to mental health awareness. Use this month to help yourself.