This Week’s Links (weekly)
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Similar Posts
Sharing – It takes a village to save a life
Saving a life is not about having a hotline, though they do help. (If you’re struggling, you can find a list of resources here.) It’s not about offering advice like “touch grass” or exercise more. It’s about being in a community that will sit with us at our worst and reminds us that we can get through this because we are not going through it alone.
Too many of us are incapable of creating that community for our friends and family members. If we don’t, who will?
Link – The largest mental-health facility in Texas shouldn’t be a jail
No, this should not be the way to treat mental health. Sadly, when measured in terms of inmates who suffer from mental illness, the Dallas County Jail is the second-largest mental-health institution in the state — after the Harris County Jail in Houston. That is why local law-enforcement officials consistently identify the need for better…
Sharing – What We (Still) Refuse to Believe About Mental Illness
It’s true that most people dealing with bipolar or schizophrenia are not dangerous, and it’s also true that someone in the middle of a psychotic episode is not going to seem very “normal” to us. Unfortunately, what that often means is that people will call the police, because who else is there to call? Then, the police, who are trained to deal with dangerous criminals, act accordingly, because, again, they have no other training. The best option for them is to get the person off the streets and way from the public, which means jail, because, once more, there’s probably not anywhere else to take them.
Now they are part of the criminal justice system. A place with almost no mental health treatment available.
Of course, as the article below also reminds us, that’s only if they actually survive all of these encounters, which is, far too often, not the case.
Sharing – Seeing grieving as learning explains why the process takes time
So maybe, instead of agonizing over your friends not “being over it,” understand that they are learning a whole new way to navigate the world and figure out how you can help.
