ABSTRACT
In times of crisis, real hardship or on hearing shocking news, some people just use self-help and never ask for help, but this is not a healthy way of coping with adversity. We know that lots of self-help coping mechanisms in childhood (to the exclusion of all asking for help) can all too easily lead to self-harming behaviours in the teenage years in the form of abuse of alcohol, drugs or smoking, just to manage painful feelings … all on one’s own. Also, we know that blocked grief (because you’ve never let anyone help you grieve) is a leading determinant of depression (Panksepp and Watt, 2011). So, we can see from the huge number of prescriptions offered for anti-depressants how many people have learnt to self-help with life’s inevitable traumatic losses and separations in the form of ‘stiff upper lip,’ denial of feelings or displacement of feelings, which eventually stop working as people fall mentally unwell.
