World Mental Health Day 2019

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recognises World Mental Health Day on 10 October every year. The objective is to raise awareness of mental health issues around the world and mobilize efforts in support of mental health.

 

World Mental Health Day 2019 & Suicide Prevention

 

This year, the focus of World Mental Health Day is on suicide prevention.

 

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is one of the most recognized figures in art history. It is lesser known, however, that she suffered from many physical and mental health problems, including spinal problems, pain, infections, syphilis, and depression following the death of her father in 1941. These problems continued throughout the 1940s, despite the medical treatment she had received in San Francisco. She passed away in 1954 at the age of 47. Although the official cause of death was pulmonary embolism, her biographer Hayden Herrera has argued that Kahlo had in fact taken her own life.

 

 

According to WHO, every 40 seconds someone loses their life to suicide. Or, more than 800,000 people die by suicide every year, making it the principal cause of death among people fifteen to twenty-nine years old.

 

Suicide & San Francisco

 

Unfortunately, there is a strong connection between San Francisco and suicide. Between 1937 and 2012, an estimated 1,600 bodies were recovered of people who had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. Jumping off this iconic San Francisco bridge holds at least a 98% fatality rate; however, it is speculated the fatality rate is actually higher because of people whose bodies are never found after they make the jump.

 

 

Mental Health & San Francisco

 

However, every cloud has a silver lining. Despite the connection between the Golden Gate Bridge and suicide, there is a also a far more positive connection between San Francisco and mental health, as depicted in ‘55 Steps’. This is a 2017 film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Hilary Swank. It was directed by Bille August, the Danish director whose 1987 film ‘Pelle the Conqueror’ won the Palme d’Or, the Golden Globe, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

 

’55 Steps’ is based on a true story that transformed psychiatric practice in the United States. Eleanor Riese was committed to a psychiatric hospital in San Francisco and developed physical symptoms (side effects to the antipsychotic drugs she had been forcefully administered). She took the case to the court, and in 1987, in Riese v. St. Mary’s Hospital and Medical Center, the California State Court of Appeals declared that psychiatric patients had the right to exercise informed consent regarding the use of antipsychotic medication.

 

 

Resources

 

If you’re feeling suicidal or have harmed yourself, it’s important to seek professional help.

 

These are some resources available in the UK:

 

If you have already harmed yourself, call 999 for an ambulance or go straight to A&E.

 

For urgent help and support for suicidal thoughts and feelings, you can phone a helpline, such as the Samaritans. They’re open 24 hours a day, every day, and are free (call 116 123).

 

Or, you can contact your local mental health crisis team.

 

Alternatively, you can call 111.

 

Or, you can call your GP and ask for an emergency appointment.

 

 

Further reading

 

On this day last year, I shared my tips for better mental health & wellbeing:

 

10 tips for better mental health & wellbeing (part 1)

 

10 tips for better mental health & wellbeing (part 2)

 

Alex

 

(the Traveling Psychiatrist)