Mental Health

Link – Americans more open about mental health issues, but stigma lingers

ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

This is good:

The survey, of more than 3,000 U.S. adults, found that 70 percent said they feel people are more open to discussing mental health compared with a decade ago.

Most respondents also said they’d want to help a family member or friend struggling with depression or other mental health conditions.

Awesome news! They need more people aware of the problem and willing to find help for them!

But, there’s more work to be done:

On the other hand, age-old misperceptions were still common. Many people, for example, thought that mental health disorders were at least partially driven by “personal failings.””

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2017/10/03/Americans-more-open-about-mental-health-issues-but-stigma-lingers/5041507061656/

Similar Posts

  • Link – 6 Things I Didn’t Know About Depression Until It Happened to Me

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    “If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with depression, these insights from people who are successfully managing their own depression may help you.” There are definitely a lot of things that I didn’t understand about depression until I started dealing with it. For example, I really didn’t understand the difference between “feeling down”,…

  • Sharing – How to be a better person for yourself and those around you

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    This hit home pretty hard. Your relationship with yourself — how you speak to yourself, how you listen to your emotions and how you respond to your needs — is the base that any other relationship you have builds upon, Patel explained. “If you’re not responding to your needs, it will also impact your health…

  • The Truth About Trafficking From A 20-year Veteran of the Child Exploitation Task Force

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 4 minutes

    I think she’s right about that last point. I’ve written many times about the stories I hear, over and over again, where people don’t want to hear about child abuse and sexual abuse. It’s too sad and dirty. It isn’t very pleasant. People don’t want to know about how much sex trafficking goes on right around us every day and the hard work we could do to solve the problem. They’d rather believe conspiracy theories and look to their “heroes,” who are nothing but con artists, to fix it for them by going on rescue missions or attacking the “elites” who are supposedly controlling all sex trafficking around the world. That seems simpler than solving the problems that make kids vulnerable to trafficking: poverty, abuse, racism, a lack of support for kids transitioning out of foster care, or LGBTQ kids whom their own families do not accept.

    Those are real problems that create vulnerable kids who go on to become real victims. Fixing them will require hard work and resources from all of us.

  • Sharing – Healed is a Myth and Marketing Tool

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    So many survivors want the answer to that first question. They want to know when this will be over and done with, but that’s not realistic. It would be like me asking when will I be “healed” from diabetes. I won’t be. My disease is something that is part of me that I have to manage. I take medicine, I watch what I eat, I don’t drink, etc. That’s not going to end. I fully understand that there is no future version of me where I don’t have to do any of those things. 

    Similarly, there is no future version of me that isn’t a survivor of child abuse. It happened. There is no cure I can buy that will create a version of me where I didn’t have that experience and be shaped by it. That’s not to say that I cannot have a great life, but I will always have a life impacted by those events. 

  • Sharing – Don’t insist on being positive – allowing negative emotions has much to teach us

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    The article goes on to discuss the various ways those emotions we are trying to avoid by always being positive are actually good for us. How sitting with and processing those emotions help us learn and grow.

    Of course, the one thing I will say about that is this. Be prepared to do that work alone, or very nearly alone. The world is full of people who are not comfortable with their pain, sadness, grief, etc., and refuse to do anything but “be grateful.” They also have zero tolerance for other people “bringing them down” with their own emotions.

    These people are not capable of being a support to anyone else. The refusal to acknowledge the entirety of human emotion makes them utterly incapable of sitting with someone in their pain. Sadly, as these ideas have gained popularity, they have also limited our support networks. They have created a shortage of people who will sit with us.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)