Hi, and welcome to the Fatimah Files, The Comenian’s mental health column by yours truly, Fatimah Bouri!
If you aren’t familiar with me: I’m an English and History double major, and for a while, I wanted to create a column of my own. I’ve had the name “Fatimah Files” bouncing in my head for some time, and finally, I attached a subject to it: mental health!
I’m a huge fan of the “It’s Not Just You” mental health column by Healthline journalist, Sian Ferguson, so I felt particularly compelled to start my own.
I’ve had depression for nearly a decade, and to say that it has been difficult to live with would be an understatement. Yet, I’ve (somehow) learned to live around it even when it intrudes on parts of my life rent-free.
I know Halloween just passed but it really does feel like a ghoulish, psychological boogeyman. I’m constantly reinventing my toolbox when it comes to coping with it because some things work for a while until they don’t, so I have to get creative.
I’m not a psychologist but I hope this column can be a good outlet for those tools and tips!
Mental health and illness are hardly new phenomena but we still tiptoe around it. We’ve become comfortable with mental health yet are still squeamish with mental illness. Heck, even I still feel weird to admit that I have depression because I think of all the harmful and frankly incorrect synonyms: laziness, unfulfillment, insanity.
But, I want to show how humanistic it is to feel this way and to experience mental illness.
For this column, I’ll be focusing on depression and anxiety as those are what I’ve experienced firsthand and am undoubtedly familiar with how to deal with. Still, I hope the advice I provide can help no matter what you’re going through. I intend to cover mental health in relationships, burnout, anhedonia, and much more that we as college students must precariously endure.
I also would like to take anonymous requests and hear from you, my fellow Moravian students, about any mental health subtopic that you would like me to discuss. Again, I hope my advice can be beneficial regardless of mental illness, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
I’m very excited to get started with this and I hope you’ll join me on the sweet, psychic joy-ish ride!
If you’d like to send me a request, you can fill out my Google form or email me at [email protected] if you have any questions or concerns.
Stay sane, friends!
