 So what causes a mental, what causes distress and a mental disorder? What are the causes here? Now, it's hard to know exactly what causes it, and I don't want you to think about, okay, this happened, so therefore it's a mental illness. I'm not going to get to that point. But I want you to consider how everyone's different. Now, a lot of you, even though you work for the same organization, you're based in different countries. You have different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, different values and different understandings of the world. Just like that, mental health has the same type of concept as well. So I want to go through the concept of what are called filters, okay, a filter, like a camera lens or camera filter. Depending on the filter that we look through, that's going to change our understanding of a mental health or mental illness, okay? So the concept of filters can really help us understand mental health or mental illness from different perspectives. And it's the idea that everyone views the world through different perspectives or different filters in this case. And so questions like what is mental illness or what is recovery are really going to come from the different filters. Let's go through some different filters, okay? And if it's not quite making sense for you right now, hopefully when we go through each one of these filters, it'll make a bit more sense for you. So the first filter, and I spoke about this very briefly, is the medical filter. In the Western world, in the Americas, Europe, Australia, Western world, there's a very strong view that a mental illness is a medical condition. So it's caused by something physical, something biological. It could be something in our brain that's a chemical imbalance, for example. And so when our body changes or something happens within our body, that leads to a mental illness, okay? That's the predominant view in the Western world, okay? So you can imagine if someone is going through some of these changes to brain structure, changes to their body, changes to their physical self, what happens when they go to the doctor and they will provide medication because it's a medical model. So that's one view. That's one view of the world. Another one, actually, before I go to the next one, yeah. If you believe that your mental illness is due to a physical or biological issue, well, you're gonna go to a GP, which stands for general practitioner, a psychiatrist, for example, and medication would be the main treatment. ECT is a form of medical treatment as well. And the recovery, the concept of recovery would be, well, I want a cure for this. I want a cure or I want reduced symptoms. So they're the kind of views that people will have. Let me take this for another example. This is the idea of a spiritual filter. And I'm not talking about religion necessarily, but it could be things like, I'm not feeling mentally ill as a result of a loss of connection with a higher power or a spiritual crisis or a loss of faith, for example, for sort of indigenous people, for example, in Australia, their spiritual loss is when they get disconnected from their land or their country. So it's a very different perspective there, and that could lead to lots of distress and mental illness as well. It could also be a loss of identity. So you might hear people say, I lose myself. It really means that I don't know who I am anymore. So depending on how you look at mental health and what sort of worldview that you have, the distress of feeling down or depressed or feeling anxious can be caused by different things. So we talked about a medical issue. It could be a spiritual issue. A psychological filter would mean that I'm feeling mentally ill because my thought patterns have changed. The way I think is different. I think very negatively about things. It's either the best or nothing. There's nothing in between. It has to be perfect. I can't make any mistakes. So the psychological filter says that, if my thinking is wrong, then I'm feeling mentally not well because my thinking is wrong. So what would help in this instance? Well, I'm a psychologist. I help with these difficulties as well. So it can be helped by changing the way we think about things, our thought patterns. It could be counselling, it could be therapy, it could be self-help books. And so yeah, as you can see, the treatment is very different depending on the filter that you view mental illness. I'll bring up some other filters as well, just so you've got a good understanding of this concept. So there's a trauma filter here as well, a trauma filter. Oops. And this is caused by, I guess, events that people perceive to be traumatic. Okay, so it could be through witnessing of some kind of violence. It could be from the military combat or war. It could be through grief and loss, loss of someone that's very close to you. But it could also be just stressful life events like I've written some examples there about giving birth, it could be getting married, even though getting married can be quite happy, the build up can be quite stressful. It could be sort of separation or divorce, et cetera. So lots of events can cause, I guess, that stress and even trauma. So a trauma, it's a normal response to an abnormally stressful situation. So you'll feel different things. You'll feel happy one moment, you'll feel really sad one moment and panicky one moment. But yeah, it's another filter that we can view mental, health or mental illness. Another filter that I've put in there is the political filter. And this is not so much about politics, but it's that at an extreme where someone who views the world with this political filter, they might say that, for example, mental illness or a mental disorder, there's no such thing. They might say that. Instead, what is defined as a mental illness might be much more subjective. It's a construct made by society, for example, and it's determined by the social norms. So I guess people trying to fit into a normal box, if you like. So they might view that as being mentally ill. So again, depending on your worldviews, depending on your own background values, that could really change what is meant by a mental illness. So some other examples there as well. All right, some other filters here. Diet, diet and exercise. This could be a filter as well. Someone might think that, why do I have poor mental health? Well, it's because I've been eating badly. I haven't been exercising. I haven't had the right balance in my eating. So they might believe that that is the reason that they have a mental illness. So caffeine, I think a lot of us have coffee, don't we? Coffee, caffeine, alcohol and vitamin deficiencies. So that could be another filter there as well. And so you can see how depending on the filter, the help that we get is gonna be very different. So it's not like everyone's gonna see a psychologist or doctor. It's not like everyone needs to go to hospital. You can see here for someone with a diet and exercise filter, they're going to actually change and change and improve their diet. They don't need to go see a psychologist, for example. So I think this is really important as well. Depending on the filter that individual has, the type of help, the type of support that they receive is going to be very different. I think someone mentioned about knowing how to support someone. Well, this is the first step. You need to understand their filter regarding mental ill health, okay? Let me go through one more. This is the systems filter. And this is really sort of caused by the different systems or policies. It's really where there's a lot of people around. And it's that idea where this social or systems filter would say that when there's mental ill health, it's not one person who's unwell, but perhaps it's the whole group of people or the whole sort of maybe a workplace, a whole family or a whole community, for example. So it's almost like we're a team and if something's not well for one person, then it affects the whole group as well. So it's sort of that systems idea. So what could be helped in this regard? Well, this could be changed by sort of organizational culture. It could be family dynamics. It could just be different conversations people have as well. And so again, it doesn't necessarily mean you need to take medication, right? Unless you have a medical filter, you may, getting medical help might not be the priority there, all right? So I hope that was interesting for you and I hope that's given you a different insight into what a mental disorder is. So really the key message here is that filters are also, first of all, it's about understanding that person as an individual because everyone's different, okay? No two people are the same. Everyone's very different. So one, it's about you getting to know that person or even yourself, if you're helping yourself there. And two, it's gonna guide you to the type of support that you provide. So are we gonna help them find a medical treatment, for example? Are we gonna help them find a spiritual connection? Are we gonna help them, I guess help with their diet and exercise? So the type of support that you provide is going to depend on the filter. Hi, I'm Amy Golding, Director of Psychology for the Workplace Mental Health Institute. We hope you liked the video. If you did, make sure to give it a thumbs up. We have more and more videos being released each week. 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