Honoured guests, Members of the Department of Mental Health and the Ministry of Health, honoured Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, members of the media.

With October being mental health awareness month, I am deeply honoured to have been asked to be the Patron of this very important part of health within the healthcare umbrella in South Africa.

The state of your brain is something that you may refer to incessantly without actually realizing it. When somebody says: “Get a grip”, “Are you mad”, “Are you crazy”, “Are you insane or on the edge of sanity”, “What is wrong with you?” it may just be a figure of speech but now you aware of how many times a day we refer to our minds. Even Michael Jackson had the unfortunately label of Whacko Jacko – a term the media coined not seeing it as a totally inappropriate phrase, but it is a great example of the misunderstanding and confusion surrounding mental stability.

Mental health matters!

Mental health is probably one of the most stigmatised aspects of our national medical system yet it is one of the most important aspects of our fundamental bodily condition and well-being. Our mental health has a deeply symbiotic relationship with our bodies, both on a physical and emotional level. Our mental faculties make us who we are, how we deal with situations, how we plan and strategize in the workplace, how we build deeper emotional and loving relationships in our family unit, how we revel in joy and deal with periods of sadness.

To be mentally healthy is to recognise all the levels of extreme emotion that the human body can go through but to also be able to cope with the variety of human emotions and realise that they are temporary and are further replaced by different emotions, on a cyclical nature. But sometimes we experience euphoric highs and lows. Just as a piece of barren land yearns for the first drop of rain, once the rain comes it may be soothing and beautifying, encouraging the germination of seeds and quenching the earth but possibly too much of a good thing can also lead to devastation, opening the floodgates of emotional torment –
But the rain will eventually stop and the sun will come out to shine, bringing with it rays of hope and endurance. For most of us there is a relief in the warming energy of the sun but for many, the sun does not shine, depression sets in and the gloom of a helpless situation carries on.

To understand mental health requires a multi faceted approach. It is not just a select group of people who can’t cope and need happy pills! It varies from people born with intellectual disabilities who should enjoy the same freedom and human rights and respect as others, not discrimination. Psychiatric disabilities such as schizophrenia should be more understood as they are mostly treatable in terms of managed sustained medication.

Bi-polar, chronic depression, stress and burn out are all terms almost synonymous with 21st century living, but it is having the rationality to understand that your mental health is not in check and ask for help, just as you would if you had broken a limb or need antibiotics to treat an infection. This is where the awareness aspect comes in. Assistance and treatment is available. There is a route to mental stability. This is what the department is promoting. Probably a much easier thing to accomplish in an urban setting than in a rural area. Women in the rural areas can also suffer - having post natal depression, or depression after the death of a loved one, as do men. The statistics reflecting mental health issues should not just be reflective to an urban sprawl or a rural area, as we are all human beings who envelope a variety of emotions irrelevant of culture or topography.
Mental health is the very core of our beings and always has been. In the Neolithic times there is confirmation of this through fossil research. There is evidence of trepanation – the cutting of holes into the skull, a possible attempt to remove ailments afflicting an unstable mind. Shakespeare was so enamoured with our mental wellbeing that the continued theme of madness was central to most of his plays. Early witch hunts in modern Europe were a frequent occurrence where the lack of awareness of mental health lead to people being labelled as processed or demonised. The installation of mad houses and asylums soon followed.

Lobotomies, shock therapy and other such atrocious treatments are recorded throughout history to treat mental disorders. It is only of recent, since the early nineties that antidepressants were prescribed, soon becoming one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. Mental health is not about what is wrong with your mind but rather an approach to looking after and nurturing the vitality of your very being. This awareness month aims to stop the negativity surrounding mental issues and to develop a comprehension - a positive understanding of your mental health status.

As Dr. William Menninger stated; “Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons but one out of one.” Five out of five, ten out of ten, All of us here today. The South Africa Federation for Mental Health is making the nation conscious to the fact that the collective mental health of our country resides in the mental stability of every individual, making sure, and by doing so, ensuring that our mental health is the nation’s wealth.

I would also like to take this opportunity as the proud patron of mental health for South Africa to thank the department of health, Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, Solly Mokgata and his treasured team from the South African Federation of mental health, for all your noble endeavours, in breaking down the barriers of negativity and encouraging all to ask for help in all aspects of health care. On behalf of our entire society, I’d like to thank you and recognise the sometimes insurmountable tasks that you bear. You are doing a fantastic job and I can only encourage you to carry on.

To the media, we need your help, assist us in getting the message out – MENTAL HEALTH IS THE NATION’S WEALTH. Thank you for being here today.

To add my own slant to the English poet William Blake:
“I have mental joys and mental health,
Mental friends and mental wealth,
I’ve a husband that I love and that loves me;
I’ve all riches bodily.”

I thank you.