#1in4

1 in 4 people will suffer with a mental health issue at some point in their lives. It affects 25% of the world’s population. No one is immune to it. It has the potential to affect every family. Before I was diagnosed with OCD, I believed that mental health issues were rare, and that those who had them were isolated from society, institutionalised in hospitals. Having learnt so much about mental health since being diagnosed, I now know that mental health conditions are not rare at all, and that the majority of people with mental health conditions are very much integrated and part of the community. There will be people at your place of work, school, university, sports club etc who are dealing with a mental health condition, and often in silence, or even unbeknownst to themselves. That is why I created my 1 in 4 graphics below, to try to highlight that fact, and demonstrate just how many people really are affected. If 25% of the world’s population became infected with a virus, it would be a pandemic and we would do everything we could to help those affected. Why do we view mental health differently? Why do we side-line it, when there is no way we would do so with a physical health problem that affected the same amount of people?