The Effective of Gardening for Mental Health Care

Gardening is the practice of growing and cultivating plants as a part of horticulture. In gardens, ornamental plants are often grown for his or her flowers, foliage, or overall appearance; useful plants, like root vegetables, leaf vegetables, fruits, and herbs, are grown for consumption, to be used as dyes, or for medicinal or cosmetic use. Gardening is taken into account by many people to be a relaxing activity.

Gardens are good therapy. Scientific evidence supports what many people know instinctively - being amongst nature and greenery can help to lift the spirits and offer solace, even in moments of darkest despair and then there's the act of gardening itself. The workout of digging and hoeing, getting your hands within the soil or turning your attention thereto which is elemental and material. Gardening is often an exercise in mindfulness. It encourages us to interact with the world through our senses, bringing awareness to textures, sights, sounds, and smells and faraway from troubled minds.

There is a growing body of evidence that supports a link between gardening and emotional well-being. One population-based study published in 2016 demonstrated that participants who spent longer time in green spaces reported lower levels of psychological distress.

In the UK, a new pilot scheme launched by the Royal Horticultural Society earlier this year means GPs can now prescribe gardening to patients affected by poor psychological state and dementia.

Nick Groom, spokesperson for the mental health organization See Change and is living with borderline mental disorder was involved within the project, and says he was keen to bring "a touch of realism" to the endeavor. He was adamant that the planning aspects should accurately reflect the truth of living with psychological state problems.

"There's tons of dialogue about mental health at the instant but a lot of it is quite sanitized," he says. "It's focusing on the people who say that they have recovered and are in a good place but what we would like to urge across is that it isn't sort of a physical recovery - not such as you have broken your leg and you recognize that the plaster cast is going to be on for  6weeks. Recovery in mental health is extremely much up and down," he says. "In very many cases it's an extended journey and it can be a couple of steps forward and 20 steps backward."

Nick's own struggles can be traced back to the sexual assault he suffered as a toddler. For many years, he told nobody. "A lot of individuals, myself included, who have suffered childhood trauma, there are awful feelings of shame, guilt, blame that somehow you're inherently evil. When the behaviors of the mental disorder began to manifest, I just thought that I was going mad, or that I was mad, or that I was just evil. So I was trying to hide it up, trying to be normal and which really ate away at me," he explains.

When he did openly acknowledge the reality, telling his wife, children, and parents what had happened to him, it precipitated an emotional unraveling leading him into one among the darkest periods of his life.

Last Christmas, having been diagnosed with both borderline mental disorder and complex depression, he became a voluntary in-patient at St Patrick's Campus in Dublin. He was there for nine weeks and another nine again over the summer, during which era he began intensive therapy. "It's a dark thing to mention but it really was a tremendous time. I learned a lot about myself, learned about the condition, took outing for myself and got the support that I needed."

Today he is able to say that he is in recovery, but he's keen to stress that recovery is complex and lifelong and there is no neat solution at the end. "It's up and down. There are days that are very dark, and there are days when I think, 'Yeah, great, overall I'm in a far much better place than I was this time last year'. But you cannot put a time-frame on it. You cannot say this time next year I will be cured. It's something that I do know that I'll need to work on for the rest of my life and sometimes you only think it's just easier just to let it take hold of you," he says.