Academics, please stop using the terminology of mental health if what you mean is stress levels. I recognise this is complex and I'll try to explain it clearly. That discourse tends to make invisible the many people with mental illness that isn't remediable via self-care.

If you're talking about improving mental health and your only suggestions involve time management, having a coffee with friends, having a nice hot bath, then you're failing to say 'and sometimes, mental health means getting a diagnosis and expert treatment.'

I keep coming back to this: mental health and mental wellbeing are not the same thing, and so many academics use the language of MH when they mean challenges to wellbeing and strategies to improve wellbeing.

When the research training people in my orbit talk about self-care and stress management, I wish they realised that I am a gotdarn expert at it, and sometimes I have to do *all of it* — every day — just to achieve baseline functionality.

And I don't think I'm alone in that. I suspect it's similar for my friends living with #MECFS and other disabilities. So that whole entire discourse resonates really differently when you're living with chronic illness and disability. And I never hear that difference acknowledged.