Mental Health
Your mental health has a direct impact on your well-being. The better you feel, the more you can focus, manage your daily life or even interact and engage with others. You feel well balanced.
So many different scenarios can affect the human psyche – things like having a stressful environment at home or at school, conflicts between friends, (cyber)bullying, the loss of a loved one or a traumatizing and stressful experience.
Sometimes there is no obvious reason and yet you feel sad, lonely, helpless, stressed, anxious, panicked or listless. Depressed mood, eating disorders, addiction, as well as suicidal thoughts or self-harming behaviour can develop.
Talking helps! But it’s not always easy to put your feelings into words and to share your thoughts and your private emotions with others. If it isn’t easy for you to talk to your friends, your parents or confidants, we are here for you. You can talk or write to us confidentially and anonymously. We will listen to you. We can reflect together about what could help in your situation. You are not alone. Call us or write to us!
Depressive mood
I don’t want to! Leave me alone! Just a bad mood?
“I wish I could stay in bed all day”, “I’m having a bad day!” “Somehow everything’s going wrong right now” – who doesn’t know the feeling? The difficult times when we feel listless or find no pleasure in life for a while are part of living. Feelings like tiredness, sadness, apathy and depression are also typical of a “bad mood”; these feelings appear at specific moments and the experience is very stressful. Some people can sleep all day, others, even though they’re exhausted, will sleep very badly. Even if we know that social contact would be good, or we feel a desire of some sort, we don’t get up or we only do so with great difficulty.
More often than not these are natural reactions to stress and they generally pass. Usually, after we’ve gone through a crisis, positive feelings return rapidly. Particularly during puberty, when hormones are upside down and can give rise to emotional mood swings, it’s important to take care of oneself.
If you notice any of these changes in yourself and suffer from such “depressions”, if you want to talk to someone or you don’t really know really how to deal with them, don’t keep your situation to yourself. Call us or write to us. We are here for you.
Fear
Always fearful
It’s in your way and blocking your path. Sometimes fear becomes greater and greater and can even give you a panic attack. What can you do?
Do you know the story of an imaginary menacing woman dressed in black knocking at your door? That is how the Swiss psychoanalyst C. G. Jung described fear. It doesn’t help at all to creep into the farthest corner of the room. No matter where we hide, we will still keep hearing the endless knocking. Jung tells us to be brave and open the door. We should sit down at the table with her and start talking. Doing so will make “the woman in black” gradually change into a “ wise woman”.
Fear has something dark, “black”, unpleasant and unsettling about it that makes us want to run away. On the other hand, it shows us its luminous, “white” side when it saves us from making mistakes, protects us from impending danger and encourages us to be careful; in retrospect it will be seen to have been a “wise” counsellor in our lives. A life without fear is not only unimaginable, it would be dangerous.
Talking about our fears helps us to be better aware of them and to understand them, because behind the fears there is always a cause, a trigger. Avoiding talking about them just increases the tension. The worst thing we can do with our fears is to be left alone with them.
So it’s important to talk about your fear to someone who will listen to you and help you, in order that the fear doesn’t keep getting bigger, like a pumpkin, just growing and growing. If you don’t know which way to turn, or who to speak to, or maybe you find it hard to speak to someone you know, we are here for you! Be brave and don’t be alone!
Stress, Pressure
It’s all too much! I can’t take it anymore!
School, exams, deadlines, working on your assignments, annoying parents or siblings, stressful situations with friends, no time to do anything at all, turmoil, Corona … STRESS! PRESSURE!
When it all builds up, you feel you’re facing a mountain that you cannot conquer – you’re too small and weak. You notice you have problems concentrating; your thoughts go round and round in your head, day and night, so that you don’t get enough sleep. Your head’s spinning there’s so much going on. You really want to say STOP.
If you notice that you’re tense and nervous, that you’re very irritable and unhappy, don’t keep it to yourself. Talk about it to someone. Talking helps! Try to take an inner journey with someone to find out exactly what the issues are that have created such a mountain. Maybe that will help you approach certain things differently, to establish priorities, put certain issues onto the back burner.
Life is full of changes. You change, and that’s a good thing – even if sometimes it’s a bigger challenge that doesn’t always come at the right moment. Mostly, in fact, it’ll be very inconvenient, because you need to have the energy to adapt, to settle down. Sometimes, you need new strategies.
When you feel that your mountain is blocking you, that your thoughts are unrelieving and turning round and round in your head, that a huge wave of problems and feelings is threatening to submerge you and you feel you’re losing control …
Don’t keep it all to yourself! It’s easier if two people share the burden. Confide in someone. Your parents, a friend, your grandmother or grandfather, an aunt, an uncle, a teacher, a neighbour, or us! We are here for you! Call us or write to us!
