This year at the KT conference, a professional in the mental healthy industry spoke about emotional health/mental illness in relation to having a chronic condition, especially one as bewildering as KTS. From what I heard, it was the first time a mental healthy segment had been added to the Saturday portion of the scheduled line-up over the years.

As someone who has struggled (and still does) with clinical anxiety and depression these past few years, I was especially interested in hearing what the speaker had to say in regards to this topic matter.

When one is in a constant state of physical pain, it is going to impact their overall well-being emotionally. Of course the caliber in which this impacts a person varies due to several noted variables as demonstrated in numerous studies(genes, particular circumstances, environment, etc. The list could go on and on).

Say that one is able to eradicate their source of physical pain; maybe a new medicine has started to work, or perhaps some surgery was performed that helped in easing it.. Well, the physical pain is gone, but there is going to be emotional residue leftover.

All too often, people think that once their physical pain is eradicated, they will be happy and return to a peaceful state of mind

That's why it is equally important to treat not only the physical components of chronic illness, but the emotional ones as well.

I hope that the presentation inspired those who may be struggling emotionally to speak up and ask for help; hopefully they realize they are not alone and that there is help out there. Personally, I know it would have been of great benefit to me to see a presentation of that sort when I was a teenager.