Getting your mental

My younger sister and I were four grades apart in school. While I was in law school, Emily was in college, and we both did our undergraduate work at the University of Oregon. One year, during a break from law school, I visited my sister on my old campus. Emily and I shared a quick wit and both of us possess acerbic tongues. She knew I would appreciate an article in the student newspaper, poking fun at the boneheaded comments of some of the student athletes. One of the basketball players, after performing poorly in a game, was quoted as remarking to his interviewer, “My mental wasn’t ready.”

Emily and I continue to recall that player’s lax attitude toward parts of speech, but maybe he had a point. We often go to the doctor for an exam—either yearly or before an event, such as a trip or a sports season. We call that visit a “physical.” It is so entrenched in our lexicon that the adjective has become a noun. Physical exams are so routine and so accepted that they have made their way into our common parlance.

What if everyone got a “mental” as often as a physical? To step across an international border, play on the high school tennis team, or qualify for a life insurance policy, you need to be examined by a medical doctor. That visit is not a fishing expedition to pry into your deepest, darkest medical secrets and scare up worries you didn’t have the day before. Instead, it’s a well-respected precaution that most often rules out problems rather than ruling them in. We entrust our physical health to a highly educated and experienced professional who can give us objective opinions about what we can do to stay healthy and the steps we must take if our clinician sees problems.

It would be a strong step forward if everyone regarded physical health as significantly as emotional health. When I volunteered in schools while in college and law school, I took a student under my wing when he began to have a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and missed a great deal of school. The school was less than sympathetic to his plight, and figured that he could force himself to attend his classes if he really wanted to. To the teachers and administrators, his absence indicated a lack of commitment. Even my own mother asserted, “It’s not like he got hit by a truck.”

“Yes,” I urged. “It is.” I had been depressed in high school and early in my college years. Some days I felt no more able to crawl out of bed than if I had been paralyzed by a spinal cord injury. We have to have respect for mental health just as we do for physical health.