As well as the other stories, Channel 4 also reported how Savile was put in charge of mental hospital Broadmoor at the height of his fame. That’s part of their collection of story transcripts reported in the past ten days which you can read here.
So let’s get this out there. Tomorrow is a day to raise awareness about the importance of mental health. It’s an opportunity for anyone who is dealing with mental health issues to see that there are many people who get it, and do support them, even if only virtually. It’s also a day to be reminded, sometimes literally, that there is still far too much stigma, and far too little investment, in mental health. That’s not fun. That’s not uplifting.
Taking care of yourself is an incredibly important part of looking out for your own mental health. Tomorrow is also Saturday. If your mental health will be better off by you not being online tomorrow, go do exactly that. Go enjoy your weekend, and know that I see you, and I feel what you’re saying. Your frustration is my frustration too. Being tired of the stigma, and how hard it is for people to get help is normal. I’m exhausted. I’m tired of talking about it, tired of reading about it, and tired of seeing stories of people who can’t get help when they need it, all around the world. I’m also tired of all the people on social media who make talking about it even harder than it already is, who want to troll, or just create drama because it’s never enough for them.
Again, I’m exhausted. I also know how incredibly lucky I was the get help, and I want that same thing available for everyone. So, I’ll find away to continue talking about it here, while also taking care of my own mental health. I hope you will too, even if we don’t all take part in the same events.
The Economist quoted a few sentences from the report No Easy Answers, in which 200 victims of various sex crimes were interviewed. It’s 146 pages in total. However, even attwo years old, it’s worth reading properly by itself in order to get the most rounded reaction, even if you might disagree with the report’s eventual…
There’s been an ongoing debate about the memory of child sexual abuse and whether it would be better to have forgotten entirely and never have remembered after shutting down the initial trauma, compared to processing the experiences through therapy. The Guardian newspaper ran a Weekend magazine article today about a survivor whose memories had to…
These two facts are hard to explain. “Spending for all types of substance abuse treatment was just 0.9 percent of total health-care spending in 2017. Mental health treatment accounted for 2.4 percent of total spending. In 2017, 70,237 Americans died of drug overdoses, and 47,173 from suicide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and…
So, when I see a study like this, I don’t feel defeated, I don’t feel like we are all just broken and doomed to poorer outcomes. I see the possibility that there is room to change this current reality, but it’s going to take changing how we deal with childhood adversity and doing it in an open, honest, and immediate way.
High levels of childhood adversity don’t have to be an early death sentence. We can, and should, intervene early in order to prevent many of these outcomes. We just need the determination and will to make it happen.
Do we have that?
In a fairly quiet note last week, the investigation into accusations by two former Syracuse University ball boys against former assistant coach Bernie Fine was dropped, without any charges being filed. Coming on the heels of the Jerry Sandusky case, this seemingly similar case got lots of national media attention in the US when the…
