CAUSES OF MENTAL ILLNESS

October 12, 2021August 26, 2026 by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 5 Comments

Ask what causes mental illness and you will rarely get a single answer, because there rarely is one. Most of the time we are looking at a combination of factors, usually grouped into three broad categories: biological, psychological, and environmental, the same divisions at the heart of the biopsychosocial model (Engel, 1977). Risk factors sit within each of these, and they tend to work cumulatively. The more of them present in a person’s life, the greater the likelihood that a mental illness will develop.

None of this happens in isolation, either. A predisposition to mental illness can lie dormant for years, only shifting into something active when a person’s circumstances and exposures line up in a particular way. That shift has a name: a trigger, and triggers are stubbornly personal. What derails one person may barely register for another. Clinicians describe this pattern as the diathesis-stress model, the idea that an underlying vulnerability combined with sufficient pressure produces illness. It is one of the more useful frameworks for understanding why the same event can be a footnote in one life and a turning point in another.

Biological causes

We have all heard someone describe depression or anxiety as “a chemical imbalance.” It is a familiar phrase, but it oversimplifies something far more complicated. Neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers that carry signals between nerve cells, clearly play a role in mood and cognition, and disruptions along these pathways are associated with various mental disorders. What the evidence does not support, though, is the idea of a single measurable imbalance that reliably explains conditions like depression. Researchers now understand brain chemistry as one piece of a much larger, more tangled picture, rather than the whole explanation.

Physical damage to the brain can also alter mental health, since so much of who we are runs through it. A brain injury can change mood, thought, and behaviour, and the particular shape that change takes usually depends on where the injury occurred, how severe it was, and how it affected surrounding brain tissue.

Genetics plays its part too. Much as we inherit physical features from our families, we can also inherit a heightened susceptibility to certain mental illnesses. This is not destiny. Having a parent or sibling with a mental illness raises the odds without guaranteeing the outcome, and other variables, especially environment and how a person responds to it, weigh in alongside genetic risk. This is where triggers resurface: a genetic vulnerability can sit quietly for a lifetime, or it can be activated by exposure to trauma or abuse. Epigenetics has begun to map how this happens, showing that experience can switch certain genes on or off without altering the underlying DNA sequence itself. It is also part of how researchers now understand intergenerational trauma, where the effects of a parent’s or grandparent’s experience can echo forward in ways that are biological as well as learned.

Physical illness belongs in this picture as well. Conditions such as thyroid dysfunction or autoimmune disorders can produce psychiatric symptoms directly, and poor health rarely travels alone. It tends to arrive alongside other risk factors, poor diet, reduced activity, and the cumulative effects of medication, each of which can push a person further along the path toward a mental illness.

Substance use deserves its own mention rather than a footnote, because the relationship runs in both directions. Alcohol and drug use can bring on a mental illness in someone already vulnerable to it, and equally, an existing mental illness can drive someone toward substances as a way of coping. This overlap, often called dual diagnosis or co-occurring disorders, is one of the more clinically important patterns to recognise, since treating one side while ignoring the other rarely works.

Even the period before birth leaves a mark. A developing fetus is shaped by its environment in the womb, and disruptions to that environment, broadly termed prenatal damage, can have effects that last well beyond childhood. A mother’s use of drugs or alcohol during pregnancy, exposure to infection or illness, or exposure to violence, abuse, and high stress can all interfere with fetal neurodevelopment, leaving a child more vulnerable to mental illness later in life.

Psychological and environmental factors

Biology sets the stage, but our environments write a lot of the script. Psychological and environmental risk factors tend to intertwine, both pointing to the same underlying truth: emotional stress can act as a trigger for mental illness. Severe psychological trauma, whether emotional, sexual, or physical, raises that risk substantially, though how much it affects someone still depends on their individual response to it. Childhood neglect and the early loss of a parent belong in this category too, laying groundwork that can surface as difficulty much later in life.

Everyday life supplies its own stressors. The illness of a relative, a divorce, or a change of job or school each carries the potential to tip someone toward a mental illness, particularly when it lands on top of existing vulnerability. Living in poverty or within a dysfunctional family can bring on an episode on its own.

Beyond the personal, larger social forces leave their own mark. Political unrest, socio-cultural pressure, discrimination, and social disadvantage all carry consequences for wellbeing that can outlast the circumstances themselves. Post-traumatic stress disorder is perhaps the clearest illustration of how environment and trauma intersect, a condition triggered specifically by witnessing or living through a distressing event.

How exposure affects someone depends on more than the event itself. Its length and severity matter, as do the person’s age and whatever stress they were already carrying. Because no two people are built quite the same way, resilience varies too, shaped by personality, coping style, and whatever trauma came before. None of this is fixed, though, which is worth holding onto before turning to what protects against it.

Protective factors

Just as certain conditions raise the likelihood of mental illness, others lower it, buffering people against the very same pressures described above. Strong social support, whether from family, friends, or community, is consistently one of the most protective forces available to us. So is a stable, secure attachment in early life, a sense of purpose or meaning, reasonable physical health, and healthy coping strategies developed over time. None of these make a person immune. What they do is change the odds, sometimes considerably, and they belong as much in the clinical picture as any risk factor.

None of us walk quite the same path, and the road someone has travelled shapes how they respond to the world in ways that are not always visible from the outside. Understanding the variation and accumulated causes behind a mental illness tends to make sense of things that might otherwise look inexplicable, in ourselves as much as in anyone else.

None of this is meant to be fatalistic. Understanding where a mental illness comes from is usually the first real step toward doing something about it, whether that means therapy, medical treatment, lifestyle change, or simply a more informed conversation with someone you trust. Causes are rarely simple, but they are rarely permanent either.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is shared for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute professional psychological, medical, or counselling advice, and is not a substitute for assessment, diagnosis, or treatment by a qualified mental health professional. If anything in this article raises concerns about your own wellbeing or that of someone you know, please reach out to a registered counsellor, psychologist, or your local emergency and crisis services. Where personal experiences are shared, names and identifying details have been omitted or changed to protect the privacy of those involved.

COPING AMID COVID-19

September 28, 2021September 7, 2026 by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Who would have thought we would find ourselves living through a global pandemic. Maybe Bill Gates. But for the rest of us, COVID 19 arrived the way most life altering events do, without an invitation and without any real warning. One month we were going about our lives complaining about traffic and deadlines, and the next we were watching streets empty out, schools shut their gates and entire economies hold their breath.

Governments responded with lockdowns and restrictions designed to slow the spread of a virus we barely understood at the time. Those measures were necessary. But they also opened the door to a second crisis that received far less attention in the early months, because you could not see it on a chest scan or track it on a case count graph. This was the psychological cost of the pandemic, and in many ways we are still counting it.

The most obvious loss was human life, and there is no framing that softens that. People lost parents, partners, children, colleagues and friends, often without being able to say goodbye in the way they would have chosen. But grief during this period was rarely confined to death alone. It showed up in places we don’t usually associate with mourning. A final year student who never got to walk across a stage. A couple who postponed a wedding so many times they stopped setting new dates. A small business that quietly closed its doors after twenty years. A person who lost a job that had become tangled up with their sense of who they were.

We tend to reserve the word grief for bereavement, but psychologically, loss doesn’t check whether it qualifies before it affects us. The pandemic handed millions of people reasons to grieve things they struggled to even name, and that ambiguity made it harder to process. When you cannot point to what exactly you lost, it becomes much easier to dismiss what you are feeling, or to assume you have no right to feel it at all.

It is also worth separating out what we were actually experiencing, because fear, stress and anxiety are not interchangeable, even though the pandemic made them feel that way. Fear is a response to a threat we can identify. Stress is what the body produces when demands are placed on it. Anxiety tends to live in anticipation, in the mind running ahead to work out what might happen next. During those first waves of COVID, it became almost impossible to separate the three, because the questions kept multiplying faster than the answers. Would I get sick. Would my parents get sick. Would there still be a job to return to. Could I afford the next grocery run. When would I see the people I loved again.

The mind does not cope well with an open loop. We are built to look for patterns and explanations, some sense that we understand what is coming next, and when that sense of control disappears, the nervous system tends to stay switched on far longer than it should. This is part of why the psychological toll of the pandemic cannot be separated from its economic and social one. Financial insecurity and unemployment stretched across entire communities for months. Some households absorbed the shock with savings and remote work. Others were left weighing rent against groceries, or trying to navigate healthcare and childcare with responsibilities that had multiplied overnight. The pandemic did not distribute its impact evenly, and pretending otherwise flattens a story that deserves more nuance than that.

For one family, lockdown might have looked like working from a spare room with a garden to step into when things felt overwhelming. For another, it meant losing an income with no real cushion underneath them. And for some, home itself was not a safe place to begin with. When movement is restricted and people are confined indoors for extended stretches, existing tensions can intensify rather than ease. For those living with domestic or intimate partner violence, isolation also cut off access to the very support systems that might otherwise have offered a way out. The World Health Organization identified family violence, social isolation, unemployment and fear of illness among the key contributors to psychological distress during this period, and that list reads as a fairly accurate map of what so many households were quietly enduring.

Then there were the people who were already struggling before any of this began. Existing mental health conditions were disrupted as access to treatment and support became harder to maintain. Others experienced anxiety, low mood, sleep disturbance or changes in substance use for the first time in their lives, without necessarily having the language to describe what was happening to them. Healthcare workers carried a particular kind of weight, showing up daily to the exact threat the rest of the world was trying to avoid. Parents watched the boundaries between work, schooling and home life dissolve into something unrecognisable. Children tried to make sense of a world that had changed its rules without much explanation. Older adults navigated increased health risks while being cut off from the people who usually kept them company.

There was never one pandemic experience. There were millions of overlapping ones, shaped by circumstance, resources and history, and that is perhaps one of the more important psychological lessons to take from the period. We are often quick to measure someone else’s struggle against our own coping, wondering why they are finding something so difficult when we appear to be managing just fine. But coping was never a competition, and functioning well under pressure does not make someone stronger than the person who is barely holding on. It usually just means they are working with a different set of circumstances.

Technology became one of the strange double edged tools of this era. Video calls kept families visible to one another across closed borders. Online spaces offered a kind of company when physical contact was off the table. But the same screens that connected us could just as easily overwhelm us. Every time you opened your phone, there was another statistic waiting, another headline, another theory, another argument to wade through, and our minds were being asked to metabolise an extraordinary volume of information while already running on uncertainty.

Misinformation found fertile ground in that environment. Conspiracy theories travelled quickly, and conflicting claims about the virus and the vaccines created a kind of noise that made it genuinely difficult to know what to trust. There is nothing wrong with questioning information, and in fact critical thinking depends on it. The problem arises when that questioning detaches itself from evidence altogether, and reaches instead for whatever explanation feels most satisfying in the moment. Humans want explanations, particularly when something frightening and unfamiliar is unfolding, but the explanation that feels most comforting is not always the one that is accurate. Media literacy quietly became a mental health skill during this period. Learning when to put the phone down, noticing the point at which scrolling stopped informing you and started frightening you, asking whether the information in front of you was helping you make a sensible decision or simply feeding your anxiety something new to chew on. That distinction mattered more than most people realised at the time.

The pandemic also challenged the idea that looking after your mental health means staying relentlessly positive. I have never subscribed to the belief that we owe the world constant good cheer regardless of what we are carrying. Some days were genuinely fine. Others were not. Plenty of people found themselves grateful and exhausted in the same breath, appreciating what they still had while mourning what they had lost, and both of those things were allowed to be true at once. There is a place for hope in difficult seasons, but hope was never meant to require us to deny what was actually happening.

For me, one of the things that made the harder stretches of lockdown more bearable was structure. When so much of the external world felt unpredictable, building some rhythm into my own day gave me a small sense of influence over something. That didn’t need to be complicated. Waking at a reasonable hour, eating regularly, getting outside, moving my body and staying in contact with people I cared about became small anchors during a period that otherwise felt formless. None of this replaces professional support when someone genuinely needs it, but these habits form a kind of foundation, and it is easy to underestimate how much they carry us.

I found myself gravitating toward things that brought me back into my body rather than keeping me trapped in my own head. Yoga and breathwork gave me pockets of stillness I didn’t know I needed. Being outdoors offered a change of scenery when the walls of home started to feel a little too familiar, and there was something quietly grounding about remembering that a garden was still growing and the sky was still changing, regardless of how contained life had become.

Movement mattered in a similar way, and not because it needed to look like anything impressive. A walk counted. Stretching counted. Dancing badly around your kitchen counted just as much. The point was never punishment, it was reconnection with a body that had spent months being asked to sit still and absorb bad news. The same logic applied to food. Routines shift under stress, and people respond differently. Some eat less, some eat more, some lean into comfort food, and none of that makes anyone good or bad at managing a crisis. Food is tangled up with culture, emotion, access and pleasure, and the more useful question during that period was rarely how perfect someone’s diet looked, but whether their body was getting what it needed to keep functioning.

Sleep deserves the same honest attention, because it was one of the quiet casualties of the pandemic for a lot of people. Working from home, financial worry, disrupted routines and endless screen time made it harder for many of us to switch off at night, and when sleep suffers, everything else tends to get louder. Irritability becomes easier to trigger, concentration becomes harder to hold onto, and emotional regulation starts to slip. None of these habits are lifestyle trends dressed up as wellness advice. They form part of the actual foundation we use to withstand prolonged stress.

But if there was one foundation that mattered more than any other, it was connection. We are relational beings, whether or not that fits neatly into the story we tell about independence. When physical closeness became restricted, we had to get creative about maintaining it in other forms. A phone call. A message that said more than just checking a box. Actually asking someone how they were doing, rather than accepting fine as a full answer, and making yourself available to receive that same honesty in return.

Reconnecting was not automatic once restrictions eased either. Plenty of people found returning to crowded social environments genuinely difficult after long stretches of isolation, and social anxiety did not simply switch off because the rules changed. For someone struggling to re-enter those spaces, a quiet coffee or a walk with one person often felt far more manageable than diving straight back into a crowded room, and that adjustment deserved patience rather than pressure. It probably still does.

The pandemic stripped away a great deal we had taken for granted. It exposed cracks in healthcare systems, economies and communities, but it also exposed something more personal, which is how much we actually depend on routine, connection, certainty and each other. It reminded us that mental health has never existed in isolation from the circumstances surrounding it. Sometimes distress is not a sign that we are failing to cope. Sometimes life is simply, legitimately hard, and recognising that is not the same as surrendering to it. It is closer to being honest enough with ourselves to understand what we are actually carrying.

As the world slowly opened back up, the task in front of us was never only about returning to how things used to be. It was worth asking whether normal was something worth rushing back to at all, or whether some of what we learned during that strange, difficult period deserved to stay with us. The importance of checking in on people. The value of slowing down occasionally instead of treating exhaustion as a badge of honour. The recognition that our work is not the whole of our identity. The understanding that asking for help was never a weakness, however loudly certain communities insisted otherwise. And perhaps the simplest lesson underneath all of it, that we are human beings, not machines built to operate indefinitely under pressure.

There will always be another headline, another crisis, another difficult season somewhere on the horizon. We cannot control most of what reaches our front door, but we can become more deliberate about how we respond to it when it arrives. Stay connected to the people who matter to you. Question what you consume before you let it settle into fact. Move your body when you can. Rest without guilt attached to it. Make room for the harder emotions instead of trying to talk yourself out of them, and when what you are carrying starts to feel too heavy to manage alone, reach for support. There has never been a prize for suffering quietly.

COVID 19 will be studied for years to come, and rightly so. But perhaps its most enduring lesson is that the invisible consequences of a crisis deserve just as much attention as the visible ones. You cannot see anxiety on an X ray. You cannot measure loneliness with a thermometer. You cannot put grief behind a mask. None of that makes any of it less real.

So as we keep finding our way forward, it is worth holding onto what the pandemic taught us about ourselves, and about each other. We were never meant to carry all of it alone.

Mind over matter.

HEAVY ON THE SOWING AND REAPING.

September 20, 2021September 11, 2026 by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 3 Comments

There are some questions that arrive in childhood and never really leave.

Mine was simple.

Why?

In the community I grew up in, difficult things were met with a fairly straightforward philosophy: you thug it out. If you fell, you dusted yourself off. If something hurt, you carried on. Resilience meant enduring whatever was placed in front of you. It was almost a cultural reflex. Adversity was rarely given much room to breathe. You dealt with it, moved forward, and didn’t make too much noise about the parts that were hurting.

I understood the strength in that approach long before I understood its limits. There is something powerful about learning not to crumble at the first sign of difficulty. But even as a child, I was drawn to everything happening underneath that surface. What made people respond the way they did? Why did the same event mark one person for life and roll off another? Why were some emotions spoken about at the dinner table while others were swallowed whole?

Why?

Those three letters became a doorway into a much bigger world. That curiosity eventually introduced me to psychology, and it was, quite honestly, love at first sight. The human science of understanding the mind and behaviour. Psychology gave language to things I had been observing without knowing their names. It became more than a subject I enjoyed at university. It became a kind of life compass.

But like most first loves, the reality eventually got more complicated than the infatuation.

As a young graduate in 2017, I had a very clear picture of where I thought I should be. I’d finished my undergraduate degree at twenty and, with the wonderfully uncomplicated confidence of being young, I imagined myself fully qualified by twenty-four. I was goal-oriented to the point of obsession. I journalled my plans, mapped out the next box to tick, and liked knowing what came next.

Then a professor asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks.

“How could a 24-year-old counsel a 45-year-old patient?”

I don’t remember the question as a suggestion that I couldn’t learn. I remember it as a challenge to think beyond what could be taught in a classroom. Life experience matters. Maturity matters. Understanding people isn’t only about knowing theories about them. It’s about having lived enough to appreciate the grey areas between those theories, and about meeting people whose lives look nothing like yours without reducing their experience to something you can understand quickly.

So, rather reluctantly, I let some items on my carefully constructed life plan sit in pending.

It turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened to me.

Instead of staying where I felt competent and comfortable, I went and collected some life. I travelled, worked, and lived in different countries. I met people whose beliefs, histories and circumstances challenged my own. I learned what it meant to be the outsider, what it felt like to adapt, and that you can belong somewhere and still miss somewhere else terribly.

Somewhere along that journey, I realised psychology didn’t have to stay confined to a lecture hall. I could take what I was learning and make it accessible.

That was the beginning of Mind Over Matter: Psych Talks.

The idea was never to build another platform that tells people what to think or feel. I wanted somewhere that encourages curiosity, that makes psychological ideas easier to understand without stripping them of their complexity. Somewhere to open up conversations about the things many of us inherit, experience and carry, often without the language to explain them.

Because mental health doesn’t exist separately from the lives we live. It sits inside our families, our relationships, our workplaces, our cultures, our histories. It’s shaped by the environments we grow up in and the messages we absorb about what it means to be strong, successful, independent, lovable or worthy.

For many of us, those messages are subtle. Sometimes they sound like “don’t cry.” Sometimes they sound like “other people have it worse.” Sometimes nobody says anything at all. You simply learn which emotions are acceptable, which subjects get avoided at the dinner table, whether asking for help is sensible or shameful. These lessons become so familiar we stop recognising them as lessons at all. That’s part of what drew me to psychology in the first place. I wanted to understand the things we inherit without ever consciously choosing them.

The world I entered as a young adult made that curiosity feel even more relevant. So much of our attention is directed outward. Appearance, achievement, productivity and success are constantly on display, while how our lives actually feel stays hidden behind the curation. A person can look fine and still be struggling. Can be successful and exhausted. Can be surrounded by people and profoundly alone. The internal world is much harder to photograph. It deserves attention too.

The COVID 19 pandemic brought that into sharper focus for me. It was during that period that I started thinking seriously about building an online space for psychological knowledge to be shared through open, honest conversation. Room for the uncomfortable subjects as much as the comfortable ones, for different perspectives, for questions that don’t always have neat answers.

Most of all, I wanted to keep learning. That’s still one of the reasons I value psychology so deeply. It’s never felt like a field where you arrive at a final answer and close the book. People aren’t formulas. Context matters. Culture matters. History matters.

And the more I’ve learned, the more I’ve realised how much there still is to learn. It’s made me less interested in quick labels and more interested in context. Less interested in telling people what they should feel and more interested in understanding why they feel it. Less interested in resilience as simply the ability to withstand hardship, and more interested in what happens when we never get the chance to process what we’ve survived.

Which brings me back to that little three letter question that started everything.

Why do we respond the way we do? Why do some patterns follow us into adulthood? Why does something that protected us at one stage of life start to limit us at another? And why are we sometimes so quick to judge a person’s response before asking what shaped it?

Those questions have followed me through different countries and different versions of myself. From South Africa to the UK to the USA and beyond, into new communities, new friendships, experiences that challenged what I thought I knew. They’re still following me now. I think that’s a good thing, because psychology taught me that curiosity doesn’t mean having all the answers. Sometimes it just means being brave enough to ask a better question.

This blog is an extension of that curiosity. It’s a space for psychoeducation, reflection and honest conversation about the psychological experiences that shape ordinary human lives. Some pieces will explore established psychological concepts. Others will start with something personal and use it as a doorway into something broader. None of it is here to tell you how to live your life, diagnose you from behind a screen, or replace professional support where it’s needed.

It’s here to create a little more understanding. A little more language for the things that are hard to explain. And, every now and then, a reason to pause and ask ourselves a question we’ve been avoiding.

I don’t think my younger self knew what she was starting when she kept asking why. She was just trying to understand the world around her. Years later, I’m still doing exactly that.

And maybe that’s the most honest introduction I can give you to Mind Over Matter: Psych Talks.

Not that I have people figured out. Not that I have all the answers. But that I remain deeply interested in the human experience, and I believe there’s value in making space to understand it.

So this is where I begin.

Not with certainty.

With curiosity.