Healthy Mind

Date : Jan 2025

What is “Mind“?

According to dictionary it is the part of a person that thinks, reasons, feels and remembers. Medically speaking it is synonymous with BRAIN. However, whenever we talk of “feelings ” and “emotions “, it is to the heart that we point, disregarding the scientific fact that emotions and feelings come from the same place as logic and reason, i.e. Brain.

Brain is the most complicated organ of our already complicated body and scientists even today are working rigorously to understand it completely. It controls the complex workings of every single organ of the body. It is made up of specialised cells that are connected by millions of wires (neural pathways) communicating with each other using multiple chemicals (neurotransmitters), working together continuously even during sleep. Due to this complex and as yet incompletely understood structure and function of the brain, mental illnesses do not have a straightforward diagnosis like, say, infectious diseases, where we know the exact cause of the disease.

Mental illnesses are multi factorial in origin, i.e. multiple causes are responsible which include intrinsic ( genetic and hereditary) as well as extrinsic ( stress and environment) factors. These factors interact with each other to cause various chemical imbalances in the brain, leading to mental illnesses. There are a vast number of causes of mental illnesses and research is still ongoing to better understand brain function and mental illnesses.

Therefore to have a healthy mind we need to have healthy brain. And to achieve that we need to first give it the importance it deserves. Mental health is of utmost importance, as physical health cannot exist without mental health.

If having an Anxiety Disorder or Depression (which are the most common mental illnesses) or any mental illness for that matter was in control of that person, life would have been so much easier. So to tell a person with depression to be strong, or a person with anxiety disorder to be calm, is like telling a ship to stay still in a storm.

We should stop stigmatising mental illnesses and start empathising with those suffering from them. Just because an ailment is not visible, unlike a physical illness, we should not downplay and ignore it.

So stop calling names and using terms like crazy, mad, paagal, veda (to name a few), routinely while speaking.

Start speaking about mental health.
Start working towards a healthy mind.
Start giving Brain the importance it deserves.