Pin Once again, we have a week dedicated to not just raising awareness of suicide as the epidemic that it has become, but thanks to resources like the ones provided by AFSP, there are things we can do to prevent the death by suicide of someone we know and love.
Please, take a moment to become familiar with some of the signs, and things you can do to help. You never know when it may save a life.
Pin In between work conference calls today, I had the opportunity to spend my lunch hour talking to Tiffany Werhner and the Moments of Clarity audience about being a survivor and the importance of World Suicide Prevention Day. I enjoyed having the opportunity to talk a bit about some of the really important issues, especially the…
Pin We need each other now, as always. We need our community. We need our connections. We need to know that we are not alone in this. So, let me, in the midst of my own exhaustion, do this one thing. If you’re feeling hopeless, angry, anxious, depressed, etc. because of the state of the world, or the state of your job, the losses you’ve suffered, the issues you are fighting for, the struggle to hang on to hope, you are not alone. I am with you. I see you. I share your exhaustion, frustration, anger, and your need for rest. Whether we’ve talked about this personally, or if you’re simply holding this all in and trying to keep it together, I see you. I’m with you. We are together in this, and we should share the little bits of hope with each other. They may be hard to see, but the more of us who are dedicated to looking for them, and sharing them, the more of it we’ll draw strength from.
Pin You could argue that the outcome will be a large number of people with mental health issues crammed into a massively overburdened prison system with almost no hope of ever getting out. (Where would they go? Back to being homeless and thus getting arrested again.)Â
We’ve tried that with serious mental illness, and it doesn’t work. It fixes nothing unless you think lots of people with mental health issues dying in prison is the answer. I prefer that most of us are not that callous and uncaring. But most of us aren’t writing these laws and upholding them. That’s for the elite few with power, and I’m not as convinced they would care about anyone with a mental health struggle because they surely don’t do much to provide resources and assistance to struggling people.Â
Pin Ellie damaged the lives of people she falsely accused. She has also potentially damaged the lives of many more victims who will be silenced because of this.
Pin This past weekend, I attended a SafeTALK workshop put together by the local chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The half-day workshop is designed to help train folks to be more suicide aware, and to be “helpers” for those in need. The idea behind TALK is: Tell Ask Listen Keep safe. Obviously, if…
Pin As you might imagine these sorts of activities are severely traumatizing, and Lauren’s response in the article I linked makes that clear. I also want to address the more subtle trauma here though. That trauma comes from those of you who will read this story and immediately respond “well she shouldn’t have been taking those photos”.
I want to be very clear here. That statement is 100% blaming the victim. This is the same exact thing as saying a woman shouldn’t have walked alone at night, or had a drink, or a child shouldn’t have been so friendly with strangers, etc. Lauren didn’t do anything wrong. What she and her husband do inside of their marriage is none of our business, no laws were broken, nothing untoward was going on. She was just a wife living her life and she was hacked. The person who stole these photos was the one breaking the law. The people sharing and selling those photos were breaking the law. Save your moral outrage for them and the people requesting to have these photos used to create fake rape videos because she was a rape victim.
Anyone who can read the entire story and walk away indignant more at her for having taken photos that were perfectly legal and a personal choice instead of the people who have violated her are simply violating her again.
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