Common Causes of Mental Distress

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are affected by mental, behavioural, neurological and substance use disorders. About 877,000 people die by suicide every year. In addition, one in four patients visiting a health service has at least one mental, neurological or behavioural disorder but most of these disorders are neither diagnosed nor treated. For example, estimates made by WHO in 2002 showed that 154 million people globally suffer from depression and 25 million people from schizophrenia; 91 million people are affected by alcohol use disorders and 15 million by drug use disorders.

Mental health is how we think, feel and act as we cope with life. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others and make choices. Like physical health, mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.

Everyone feels worried, anxious, sad or stressed sometimes. But with a mental illness, these feelings do not go away and are severe enough to interfere with your daily life. It can make it hard to meet and keep friends, hold a job or enjoy your life.

Mental illnesses are common – they affect about one in five families in the U.S. It is not your fault if you have one. These disorders – depression, phobias, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and many others - are real diseases that you cannot will or wish away. Fortunately, they are often treatable. Medicines and therapy can improve the life of most people with mental illnesses.

There are many reasons for a temporary disturbance to mental health. Some are are well documented -- dereavement, divorce or moving house, while others may be less obvious.

1. A reaction to immediate life events
The death of a loved one, the birth of a baby, the loss of a job, a serious accident or illness will throw most people, at least temporarily, off course.

2. Stress
Overwork, interrupted sleep, isolation, racism, sexual harassment, difficult, demanding or violent relationships all cause stress. Some stress is useful, but if we have too much to cope with, we may 'breakdown' under the strain.

3. A reaction to past life events
Children tend to submerge or suppress memories of particularly traumatic events, or simply create a new explanation for the event, that makes the pain explicable. Buried pain may come back to haunt us in ways we find hard to recognize, affecting the way we feel and behave and making us more vulnerable to stressful life events.

4. A biochemical imbalance
Some mental health problems may be biochemical in origin. It is hard to tell whether this is genetic or whether exposure to harmful life events has caused a kind of biochemical reaction similar to the effect of an allergen on someone susceptible to allergies.

Mental illnesses affect and are affected by chronic conditions such as cancer, heart and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and HIV/AIDS. Untreated, they bring about unhealthy behaviour, non-compliance with prescribed medical regimens, diminished immune functioning, and poor prognosis.

Mental Health

Mental, neurological and behavioural disorders are common to all countries and cause immense suffering. People with these disorders are often subjected to social isolation, poor quality of life and increased mortality. These disorders are the cause of staggering economic and social costs.


Most of the people take our mental health for granted. We get on with our lives, eat and sleep, laugh and cry, work, talk to our friends, travel, shop and cook. But there may come a time, perhaps very briefly, when the ordinary patterns of living become oddly distorted. Perhaps we cannot sleep or we feel anxious, we may be afraid to go out, lose all feeling of hope and optimism or swing wildly from peaks of furious activity to periods of deep gloom.

It is very common for mental health to be disturbed now and again. Most people have experienced an occasional attack of the 'blues'. It is part of being human. Sometimes these attacks come in cycles, affected by menstruation, or by the seasons. You feel low for a while and then bounce back up again. If you learn to recognize the reason for gloom, you can usually learn to wait it out, then circumstances change and life seems to get better again.

Occasionally people get submerged, stuck inside misery. You need to ask for help to find a way out and back into the light again, but you may feel too low to make the first move, and sink into a cycle of feeling sad and uncared for. There may also be the fear of being considered weak, or perhaps of being labeled "mad". You may hope that by ignoring your pain it will magically go away by itself. Maybe it will, but you will almost always feel better for a little support. You may believe that you can pull yourself together, but the more you force the lid on your feelings, the more difficult it will become to deal with them and learn, first to accept them, and then to move on.

For some people the distortion of everyday reality becomes frightening -- either to them or to the people they are with. They may see or hear things that others are not aware of; behave in ways that friends find disturbing; threaten, or actually attempt suicide.

When reality has slipped too far away, others may need to intervene and help you find a route back, or a way of living that decreases the stress and pain. It is not uncommon to have a breakdown, but nor is it uncommon to recover completely. The sooner you find help, the faster the process of recovery will be, and you can learn to find ways of keeping yourself out of the abyss in the future.