The Mental Health Version of an Annual Physical Is Here

By Montgomery County Counseling Center

You get the annual physical. You go to that 9am dentist appointment. You’re vigilant about your sleep and exercise. You treat your well-being as something you maintain, not just repair. Why is mental health different? Why aren’t we more proactive? Why do we only seek out support when something goes wrong? Mental health is so often treated like an afterthought when routine check-ups can make a world of difference. Montgomery County Counseling Center is working to change the way we view mental health with a new offering designed to put wellness and preventative care on the map for good.

For most people, mental health care follows a pretty predictable pattern. Something gets hard enough and it lasts long enough that it finally feels like a problem worth addressing. So then you find a therapist and you start working on it until you’re out of crisis, and then you stop. But that’s not the only path and for a lot of people, it’s not the best starting point either; the threshold for “is it bad enough to say something” ends up being way higher than it needs to be, and a lot gets ignored in the meantime.

Think about how you approach the rest of your health. You don’t wait for a heart attack to see a cardiologist. You don’t wait until you’re sick to get your flu shot.  You plan ahead. You stay on top of it. You check in. You make decisions based on something more than a gut feeling or a bad stretch. The value of a routine checkup isn’t that it always finds something. It’s that you know either way, and make minor precautionary tweaks. Mental health doesn’t have to be any different.

And yet, for most people, it is. There hasn’t really been the equivalent of an annual physical for mental health. No annual touchpoint, like a birthday or a new year, where someone sits down with a professional and simply goes over how they’re doing. There’s certainly no outside party, like a school, a sports league, or a camp that insists you get checked. That’s why people fall through the slim cracks between doing great and being at risk. After all, the absence of a crisis is not the same thing as a clean bill of mental health. (more…)