Freedom: “Equal Rights & Opportunities” (Chapter. 3)

Written by Andi Bazaar, Co-wrote by Yevhn Gertz, José Schenkkan Joseph, Henrie Louis Friedrich and Tydalé-Oliver Schofield | Dec 15, 2023

Mental health acts as a spectrum worsening over time, no two people are the same and there are a wide range of issues making no two cases the same. This is where psychiatry often fails in helping, treating every case as a specific illness rather than the health of a unique person.

Tyler Freimann Schofield / Photographed by Timothée-freimann Schofield / MHMTID© 2023

Let’s talk about recognizing signs that someone may be struggling with their mental health because it is still heavily stigmatized, recognizing and opening a safe space for someone can be an amazing way to get them to open up and seek the help they need.

If it is someone we know, unless they are very high functioning to the point that their behaviour doesn’t change at all we tend to see some signs. Usually with depression, they may be having a hard time replying to communications, cancelling plans and more zoned out.

When it comes to anxiety and even trauma, there may be signs of restlessness even hypervigilant. They may be feel scared about any sudden noise or something unexpected in their environment, they can also be highly worried about something bad happening.

Another sign is simply not feeling any excitement about activities they used to enjoy in the past, their energy may be so low that they are not taking care of themselves. They may not be able to keep up with their work or studies even though they used to be good at them.

It is important to note that they can pretend to be okay especially when we see them or talk to them for short amounts of time but after that they may take a long time to gather enough energy to be in a social situation again.

It is easy for people who struggle with their mental health to lose friends or even partners, that’s because people confuse withdrawal with lack of care whereas it often has nothing to do with it and is a result of deteriorating mental health.

That isolation then further exacerbates the mental health symptoms. If you know someone who has dropped off from communications or reduced them significantly, checking in on them may be worth it even if they don’t reply or take a while, it may mean the world to them.

If you know someone who has gone through traumatic moments in their life even if they may act fine, that trauma can be deeply impacting their quality of life. This is by no means a definitive list, it is meant to help us notice so that we can ask.

Nothing replaces communicating with the person and asking them how they feel and keeping the door open in case they need any help but it is important to remember a few points because it is easy for these situations to impact the mental health of the people who are helping.

We can’t sacrifice our own well-being and boundaries, we can offer space and energy that we have but if we go too far beyond our capacity, it can backfire and we can start our own cycle of anxiety, depression or secondary trauma.

Another important point to remember is that we are not responsible for taking care of the mental health of people who have abused us or after a break up, there are some people out there who guilt empathetic individuals into coming back.

I hope that this part was able to help recognize some signs but also allow us to take care of ourselves and not stretch too much if it happens, mental health is important but its awareness is still lacking a lot in our culture!

⚠️ TW: SUICIDE ⚠️
ON MENTAL HEALTH AND SUICIDE

A few mutuals were discussing suicide and since it is that time of year again, I thought I'd write a mew chapter on it. I've (unfortunately) extensive personal experience in this realm and have studied the psychology and physiology behind it, so I hope what I say helps you recognize the signs of mental health deterioration in yourself and in others as well as better prepare yourself for when hard times come.

Let's lay some groundwork, first off I'll say that your health comes in four facets:

• Heart (emotions)
• Soul (willpower)
• Strength (body)
• Mind (thoughts)

Each of these is intimately tied into the other.

• If one is deteriorated or in bad health, it will negatively affect all the others.
• If one is extremely healthy, it will positively affect the others.

As an example, if you eat hot pockets all day don't exercise and get terrible sleep, your mind will be foggy, your body will be weak, your emotions will be unregulated and hormones unbalanced and your spirit will suffer for it over time.

If you are constantly drunk/high, you lose focus over time, it physically destroys your brain, your thoughts are scattered and your emotions become whimsical and overpowering.

• You need a healthy mind to regulate your emotions.
• You need a healthy body to produce healthy thoughts.
• You need a healthy spirit to form the discipline required to pursue health.
• You need healthy emotions to uplift and encourage your spirit.

The number one cause of bad health in any of these areas is stress. Stress comes in many forms and it can come slowly, as a trickle over time or fast, as a hammer to the head. Stress steals focus from your mind, it pumps adrenaline through the body it supercharges your emotions and it tests your spirit's will.

EXAMPLES OF A SLOW TRICKLE STRESS ENVIRONMENT:

1. Working for a micromanaging boss or having a heavy workload, too much work and not enough time to do it.
2. Being in a toxic relationship with an abuser, having to walk on eggshells and police your speech around them, not knowing whether they're going to love you or hate you today.
3. Money problems, living paycheck to paycheck, debt stacking up and income not coming in, too many bills with not enough money.

EXAMPLES OF HARD AND FAST STRESS:

1. The death of a loved one.
2. Being the victim of a crime, or a violent crime.
3. Assault.
4. Being in a car accident.
5. Losing your job.
6. Combat.

Everyone handles stress differently and depending on how healthy each of your four core parts of being are, can bear more stress without breaking but everyone has a breaking point. Too much stress, built up over time, or flooding quickly can cause even the strongest of people to crack under the pressure.

Think of it like being sick. You get a cold or an infection. It may go away on its own, or it may fester and putrefy if untreated. One health problem (obesity) can lead to other health problems (heartburn).

• If you’re stressed about money, you’ll probably be arguing with your spouse about money, so it affects your marriage.
• If you’re sleep deprived, it may make you grouchy, short tempered, dismissive, etc. You may snap at your boss or your wife and this will cause you more stress.

Tyler Freimann Schofield / Photographed by Timothée-freimann Schofield / MHMTID© 2023

As more stress builds up, your mental health deteriorates as you lose patience are thinking about too many things, or are missing meals. This can lead to things like depression and anxiety, these are more serious and can cause other issues that are unrelated to the stress.

Depression can cause unexplainable feelings of sadness, unworthiness and guilt. This will make your thought life unhealthy as you think things like "maybe I deserve this" or "I just can't get ahead/get anything right."

This is why we call them "mental illness" this requires treatment and is not the normal state of your brain. Depression can affect your posture, your gut health, your soul's health, your emotions and your thought life. It becomes a negative feedback loop, caving in on itself continually as it gets more and more severe. Thoughts of "I can't believe this is happening to me" become "I deserve this because I'm a bad person" and move towards "I don't even deserve to live."

A nasty anxiety combo with this is horrible making you paranoid, giving you heartburn, always on edge, untrusting, fearful and catastrophizing. You will actively look for the worst case scenario.

It's important to note, that mental health acts as a spectrum, worsening over time. No two people are the same, and there are a wide range of issues making no two cases the same. This is where psychiatry often fails in helping, treating every case as a specific illness rather than the health of a unique person. It's difficult to do and not everyone gets it right.

As mental health deteriorates, more symptoms of other mental health issues may start popping up. Time spent with both depression and anxiety may make a person grow a bipolar disorder (thought that may just be the defect of the brain), time spent with worsening anxiety may make someone paranoid, or schizophrenic. The illnesses all start to blend together into an unholy hive of total depravity.

This is where things become suicidal. As mental health deteriorates, a person may become more and more agitated, desperately looking for a way to relieve the stress. Their body is pumping hormones, adrenaline, and is trying to heal itself and the mind is trying to justify why this is happening to make logical sense of it.

Their stress levels start overflowing and their fight/flight has kicked in. If they cannot find a way to relieve the stress and escape their torment, either by escaping or defeating it, they experience the feelings of doom, existential dread, being "trapped."

They no longer have any options, so the only way out is to make themselves stop existing. They are in a hole and cannot escape. They are swimming in an ocean during a storm at night and no longer have the strength to swim.

One does not get here easily. It involves a massive crushing of one's soul, heart and mind. If one does not relieve stress, they can get here over time. Stress must be relieved to prevent this and better their health.

Somone who gets into those stressful environments and then cannot destress is at risk of suicide because of this, this is a large reason why veterans have such a high suicide rate. They spend long amounts of time in stressful environments (combat) and then do not know how to cope or destress when they get home or they simply do not have the time to.

A soldier coming home should have space to breathe, they should relax in a quiet place for a while. They should spend time talking with friends about their experiences and their trauma so they can process it and be validated/accepted, they should continue working out, they should catch up on sleep, they should have sex with their wife.

What often happens is they're alone and no one from their hometown reaches out to them, their kid doesn't recognize them. Their wife has been adulterous while they were gone, they start drinking to deal with the stress but start drinking constantly because they don't actually want to deal with it.

• They are bombarded with bills and more stress.
• They feel survivor’s guilt, and that death over there was preferable to the crap they have to deal with at home.
• They wanted to be a soldier their whole life but have just been medically discharged.

These are common issues among vets, while the military is doing a lot more to teach resiliency the lifestyle is not conducive to mental health. Being a warrior means you will take mental wounds even if you don't take physical ones, there are ways to heal though. A lot don't and we always ask:

"how did this happen?"
"why would they do that?"
We say to ourselves "I should've seen it coming, I should've called him."

SOMETIMES THERE ISN'T A LOT YOU CAN DO

A nasty side effect of bad mental health I've both experienced and observed is the "victim's mentality" this is when someone either internalizes or externalizes all fault for their mental health.

INTERNALIZED:

• “I’ll never get better"
• “I deserve what happened to me"
• "I don’t deserve to be happy"
• "I mess everything up"
• "I’m a failure"
• "I can’t accomplish anything"

EXTERNALIZED:

• “Why do bad things always happen to me?"
• "None of this is my fault and it’s unfair"
• "This is all my parents' fault"
• "Bad things keep happening to me, and I can’t do anything about"
• "That damn (insert political enemy here)"

A person with a victim's mentality often will not accept any help and will often make excuses for everything, a victim's mentality develops when one is either unwilling or unable to tackle their stressors.

They essentially cucked themselves.
They are "long housed" by their emotions, it is a way to abdicate responsibility, without accurately addressing or dealing with any of the issues causing stress. It becomes of cloak of deference.

• “I could work out, but I just have bad genes."
• "I go to bed, but I can’t sleep so I just go on my phone till I’m tired."
• "I could apply for jobs, but the economy is in shambles so it’s pointless anyway."

These are ultimately all excuses, a person with a victim's mentality will always find a way to not put in any effort or accept any responsibility for bettering themselves.

To help someone with mental health issues or to help yourself, you must first tackle this victim's mentality. You must force yourself to confront your role in this.

FOR EXAMPLE:

I blamed my parents a lot for the way I turned out, while I was a child when "the event" happened and there wasn't much I could do I blamed my parents well into my adulthood. It wasn't till my mid-20's that I put on my big boy pants and said "I've had several years as a fully functioning adult to better myself, I'm not going to use the excuse (my parents made me this way) any longer, I'm going to make the changes. I am responsible for my health. I am responsible for my behavior."

Once you shatter the comfortable facade of a victim's mentality and accept responsibility for your health and future, you can begin the healing process.

• You can take steps to change your environment so it’s no longer stressful.
• You can begin changing your diet.
• You can begin thinking in a healthier manner.
• You can begin bettering yourself.
• You can begin planning an escape.

The best way to have a healthy mind and everything that comes with that, is to take complete ownership of what happens to you and what you allow to happen to you. Obviously unforeseen circumstances happen, like car accidents or deaths in the family but choosing how you let those affect you is the key to being resilient.

You can let it devastate you, throw a tantrum and wail on the floor like a baby or you can accept the circumstances with cool indignation, take a healthy amount of time to mourn, then resume your normal routine, setting aside space to deal with those emotions as necessary going forward.

If you are stressed by your job and are being treated unfairly, apply for different jobs or start your own business. If you live in a bad part of town, save money and move somewhere else or organize a neighborhood committee to clean up your area. If you are in an abusive relationship, find a way to leave or assert yourself and make it better.

All this really boils down to is a lack of control, we spend all our lives fighting for control over our health and environment and when we lose control we start to lose sanity. Some things are in our control and if they aren't we can look for other ways to control other things, when bad things happen our brains seek to justify thembor make sense of them. This is how it regains control and mental health but some things we cannot control happen to us and sometimes we cannot justify immediately why they happen.

These things are called "traumatic events" these include physical assault, rape, molestation, abuse and the like. Sometimes someone another human being exercises their will against us in a harmful way and it is the most traumatic thing that can happen to us, some people are robbed and spend the rest of their lives in fear. Some people are raped and spend the rest of their lives unable to have sex with their spouse, something about another human being harming us is particularly damaging to the psyche.

It's particularly hard during these traumatic events because sometimes your brain cannot justify it or make sense of it and sometimes you cannot fight or flight, so your brain shuts down. You black out!

Memory becomes hazy and you can't recall exactly what happened, this is common with both rape and combat. Your brain will seek to justify what happened for the rest of your life and sometimes people can never justify it nor will their heart accept their justification.

It's times like these when therapy and medication can be helpful, during the healing process when thinking about the traumatic event the body remembers the trauma and may begin to go into fight or flight mode again. This is because the trauma is "unresolved" and the body and mind are attempting to solve it by kicking up adrenaline, until someone can "solve" it their body will continue to do so until the day they die.

Therapy can create a safe environment, with a trusted professional specifically there to make you feel safe and out of danger. Medications can dull the emotions so that they do not overpower the mind while it attempts to logically work through the trauma, finding the right medication and dosage can take time.

This process is by no means easy, sometimes the trauma is too great to deal with and people have full on psychotic episodes when trying to process what happened. Again, it all varies per person.

I myself had plenty of resiliency skills and time to think about my trauma, it wasn't until I had to go to a psych hospital and get on medication that made my anxiety null that I was able to relax and process through my trauma. This led to healing and acceptance of what had happened, as well as forgiveness and letting go. This put me back in control of my own mind.

"sometimes therapy like this is a needed intervention, sometimes we cannot go it alone and we need help. that's what community is for."

Health care like this is also a luxery. You may not be able to get it or afford it, to that I'll say "c'est la vie." Mitigate and self-treat as you can.

One more aspect to address and I saved this for last because some of you don't believe in the spiritual, is demonic influence.

9/10 when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis, some demonic force has attached itself to them. They've believed some lie and have opened themselves up to be driven further into mental health or they've fiddled around with the demonic like "paganism" the occult, etc and have allowed the demonic into their lives. Vices like alcohol and weed have also been known to do this.

Demonic influence is ugly, it's really ugly and I will not sugarcoat it. There is an entire spiritual world out there we know not a lot about and there are no scientific instruments to measure it or quantify it, sometimes you can't even explain it.

Bad things just happen and your thoughts do not make sense, this is why religion and specifically a Christian faith is important. God and the Holy Spirit will give you answers on how to combat this but you must ask through fervent prayer.

I myself was demonically possessed for about two decades before I figured it out and was able to be free, it's some of the worst pain I've ever been in physically, mentally and emotionally. It feels as those something is tearing away from your soul, something that's grafted on to you but it's also like a pressure that is released.

• Sometimes there is no amount of sleep, food, workouts, self-help books, therapy or comradery you can get to fix your mental health.
• Sometimes it is a demon(s) that need to be detached from your living soul, this process takes many different forms but seek out a Christian church if you believe this is happening to you. God is eager to help you.

Tyler Freimann Schofield / Photographed by Timothée-freimann Schofield / MHMTID© 2023

Let us not forget about those who have gone before us, leading the way in the fight for justice. Let us not forget our LGBTQIA+ brothers and sisters who have not only been fighting against racial injustice but also injustices against the LGBTQIA+ Community.

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and veteran of South Africa’s struggle against white minority rule died at the age of 90 in 2021.
• Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his non-violent opposition to apartheid, a decade later he witnessed the end of that regime and chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up to unearth atrocities committed during those dark days.

The outspoken Tutu was considered the nation's conscience, an enduring testament to his faith and spirit of reconciliation in a divided nation. "Like falling in love" is how Tutu described voting in South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, a remark that captured both his puckish humor and his profound emotions after decades fighting apartheid.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu lived his life guided by faith, that faith led him to fight against the incredible atrocity and racial injustice of apartheid and to fight for LGBTQIA+ Rights and against homophobia. He was a true man of faith and the world is a better place because of him.

"You don’t need to be part of the LGBTQIA+ Community to support people part of it, you don’t need to be black to know that Black Lives Matter. You don’t need to be disabled to understand the importance of accessibility, you don’t need to face injustice to fight for justice. You need to be human!" — Yevhn Gertz (Director of Photography from MHMTID)

My grandpa once quoted,

“we all bleed the same color no matter what race, culture, religion or language we all bleed the same color, we are humans that bleed the same color.”

It's shameful that LGBTQIA+ and black life matters had to become an occasion to get people to listen, it's 2023 and this should all be the norm racism should have died out along time ago homophobics should accept decisions. We are all human and no one is worth less than another and I still don't get why so many people are so much adamant on what makes them different and in their eyes "better" than others.

"no one is better than another, we complement each other and underneath we are all the same and bleed the same blood."

If you LGBTQIA+ in america, do your duty and fight against racial injustice. I've said it multiple times and I will say it again:

"it is through their fighting spirit that we were able to make it this far in society, without them marriage wouldn't be possible and we’d still be getting arrested and fired from jobs for existing. do your duty, do not think for a second that you should sit and do nothing! fight for the people that got us this far, support black people in america and continue to fight against racial injustice also fight for change and good."

"Racial Injustice" is an LGBTQIA+ issue you should put your pride month energy into the fight and action before celebration, donate, talk to also work with your community. Learn your history, encourage your friends to do the same. Remember what we can do and use it to make a difference.

"As many LGBTQIA+ colleagues fight against transphobia, biphobia and homophobia may we all unite to include racism in our fight for hatred and injustice to be a thing of the past."

For me LGBTQIA+ history month is about celebrating the civil rights movements and the contributions made by the LGBTQIA+ community, this also meant to raise awareness of and the continuing fight against injustice, bias, prejudice and discriminations against the LGBTQIA+ community.

While there is much cause to celebrate the progress, it’s achievements, diversity, inclusivity and visibility of the LGBTQIA+ community there is still perhaps a long way to go towards tolerance, equal rights and opportunities. We must be mindful that in many countries the LGBTQIA+ people is still facing hostility and state sponsored violence, trans people are still denied access to health care, education and job opportunities.

I will forever stand with our allies in the LGBTQIA+ community against this injustice will fight to preserve core commitment to equality.

to be continued...

A SPECIAL THANKS TO:

• Andi Bazaar (Writer)
• Mark J. Levstein (Co-Editor)
• Yevhn Gertz (Director Photography/Co-writer)
• dr Oliver Schofield, MD (Consulting/Co-writer)
• dr Seth Gryffen, MD (Consulting)
• dr Khaan, MD (Consulting)
• Timothée Freimann schofield (Photographed)
• Clayton Euridicé Schofield (Editor/Journalist)
• Scott Wynné Schofield (Publicist)
• Henrie Louis Friedrich (Analyst/Co-writer)
• Jwan Höffler Conwall (Art Interior Design)
• Hugo-licharré Freimann Schofield (Ass Director)
• Shot at GQ’s Studios by José Schenkkan (Co-writer) and Benjamin Schenkkan Joseph
• In appearance by "Tyler Freimann" (Model)
• In collaboration with "The Me You Can’t See UK" (TMYCSUK) / @tmycsuk