How Love affects Mental Health within the BAME Community

Mental health is very important for our well-being. Whether you are young or old, your psychological health should be taken with great care.

It involves our emotional, psychological and social well-being, affecting how we think, feel and act.

BAME represents the people from the backgrounds of Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.

Within England and Wales, nearly a fifth of people come from these backgrounds.

The United Kingdom’s BAME community suffers the most when it comes to mental health problems.

Specifically, these issues derive directly from love and relationships.

We take a look at the key findings provided kindly by mental health specialists over at Smart TMS.

New Research

In the UK, one can source all manner of solution-based therapies for the human condition. This is through the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Unfortunately, the one area you will not be able to come across is a single corrective therapy on heartbreak. Smart TMS is the UK’s leading provider of transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy for depression and other mental wellness issues.

Revealing new insight, depression treatment specialists Smart TMS declare the relationship between mental well-being and love.

Critically, the discovery suggests individuals from BAME backgrounds are more prone to experience significant issues mentally due to their relationships.

This news comes alongside mounting research from various bodies, including the Mental Health Foundation.

Furthermore, this proposes that BAME communities have poorer access to mental health services. Typically, these individuals are exposed to factors causing mental health issues such as discrimination, lower-income and violence.

In the UK, issues regarding relationships currently do not constitute a valid reason for formal sick-leave.

In contrast, sick-leave for these types of illnesses are available in other countries like Germany and Japan.

Approximately 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem in the UK. More so 1 in 6 respondents experiencing signs in the past week alone.

In relation to the scale of this issue, NHS England aims to spend £13 billion towards health condition services in 2019/20. This amounts to 14% of the local NHS funding allocations.

Key Findings

Smart TMS is calling on employers, individuals and the wider industry to make a change. To expand, they want to evaluate the outcome of this national study and improve their mental health provision for employees.

The research obtained by mental health specialists over at Smart TMS is very intriguing. To clarify, they analysed the cultural distinctions which define mental health.

The findings and conclusions of this analysis are interesting yet eye-opening. For instance, the UK’s BAME community suffers the most from mental health problems derived from love and relationships.

In fact, almost 1 in 3 members of the BAME community say that their relationships are the primary cause of their mental stability challenges.

In contrast, that is a whole 31% representation compared with the UK-wide average being 23%. Also, over a quarter of the BAME community say they have never been able to maintain a healthy relationship.

This is due to the issues individuals encounter with their mental health. Additionally, the average representation across the UK is 15% whereas the BAME community is of 26% representative.

Evidently, the averages of mental wellness within the BAME community is higher than the UK in correlation to healthy relationships.

Understanding the influence of love and relationships on the nation’s psychological welfare is of great importance, more specifically to the healthcare arena, communities and employers nationwide.

The world’s leading professional membership organisation, ICAEW, estimates that in 2019, the national strain cost th UK economy £45bn . This amounts to £1300 per person for this strain.

A Call to Action

In society, there is a stigma surrounding the impact of our relationships and love on our mental health.

The CEO of mental health treatment specialists Smart TMS, Gerard Barnes, calls for the removal of this stigma, expressing:

“When reviewing the outcome of our research, we have discovered a considerable disparity in the rates of mental health problems stemming from relationship issues for the BAME community, versus the UK average.

“The relationships we maintain with others, particularly romantic relationships, can have a dramatic impact, both positive and negative, on our mental health, but this is an area that is seldom explored.

“Mental health is one of the biggest issues we face in our society today, with mental health problems costing the UK economy nearly £35b last year (2019) alone.

“That is why this research from Smart TMS is crucial in understanding the underlying causes of the UK’s mental health conditions.”

“It is essential that the public and private sector alike work hard to create an environment in which people feel more comfortable to open up about mental health concerns – if people do not feel as though they can be open about their issues, it will be extremely difficult to tackle the issues associated with these disorders to create a happier and more supportive society.

“It is also imperative that more mental health support provisions are made available, especially for individuals from the BAME community, who historically have had far less access to the services that they deserve.”

In conclusion, the research carried out by Smart TMS and their findings are very astounding yet revealing.

Notably, 33% of the UK’s BAME community suffer from mental health issues directly arising primarily from relationships.

This goes to show a lot of people are suffering in silence due to their mental instability and more must be done to tackle this worrying issue.