By Tanya Ruckstuhl-Valenti LICSW, MSW

What makes the difference between those who recover from mental illness and those who do not? 

Three primary factors include social resources (therapy-speak for supportive friends and family members), financial resources (those with money have both access to treatment as well as transportation and time to make use of it), and-most difficult to define-personal resources. 

Personal resources includes squishy, hard to define qualities such as tenacity, optimism, prior success over adversity, intelligence, compassion, patience, spiritual belief system, sense of humor, openness to change and enthusiasm.  

These individual qualities are all associated with healing from mental illness. 

And here's the good news:  All of us have most of these qualities in specific areas.  The trick is to apply a personal quality from one area, say intelligence (quality) about structural engineering (specific area), into another area, such as mental health. 

For instance a person can apply their learning ability to mental health by reading popular psychology books, keeping a journal to deepen their understanding of the ideas they encounter and seeking therapy in order to get specific, individualized feedback about their perceptual process. 

Personal qualities are portable and flexible.  For instance, by nature I'm a very enthusiastic person.  Just not about everything.   I truly could not be paid to care less about sports.  Grown men and women running around, chasing a ball?  Getting paid ridiculous sums of money?   Often hurting themselves and others in the process?  Using illegal drugs to succeed?  Not only do I not care, I feel there is something deeply problematic about professional sports. 

Then I had sons.  I try to raise them in your standard, liberal-intellectual environment: plenty of Vivaldi and Mozart, limited electronic screen time, books up the wazoo, play dates with the children of similarly-minded parents.  But eventually it hit me that all my mama-friends were mothers of daughters and I was essentially raising a couple of boys-as-girls.

 I can be a little slow catching the clue train.  I started looking around at the boys who seemed socially confident and what do you suppose they all had in common?   Sports.   I realized other boys were friends with the kids from their sports teams.   

Well duh!  I re-examined my bias and had to admit that sports are not all bad.  They teach teamwork and effort and how to cope with losing and most importantly how to play together. 

Yesterday I spent a thrilling hour running up and down the sidelines of the soccer field, yelling like a maniac as my kid's soccer team was thoroughly trounced at the first game of the season.  It was a blast.  Losing was a disappointment but I loved the experience.  Gasp!  Suddenly I have become enthusiastic about a sport.