Story Teller Note With Balloons around it

Link – Effective Messages to Fight Stigma

This is why, if you can, its important to tell your story.

Researchers, led by Emma McGinty, Ph.D., M.S., with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, looked at the effectiveness of various communication strategies in reducing stigma and increasing public support for mental health policies. They found that communication strategies using personal stories of individual experiences, struggles and successes, can be particularly effective. The research was published in Psychiatric Services in Advance.

It’s so very important for society to see actual, real, living, breathing, human beings instead of “those people” when it comes to anything, but especially when it comes to stigmatizing mental health issues. As long as it’s something other people have to deal with, and no one I know, it becomes too easy to dehumanize sufferers. By having to deal with real people in our midst, it becomes much more difficult to do that.

https://www.psychiatry.org/news-room/apa-blogs/apa-blog/2017/11/effective-messages-to-fight-stigma

Similar Posts

  • This Week’s Links (weekly)

    Best And Worst Things To Say To Someone Suffering From Depression (PICTURES) tags: CA Volunteering could add years to your life, may improve mental health: study tags: CA The Last Taboo: Breaking Down the Stigma of Depression tags: CA Michael Reagan speaks out about child abuse | Washington Times Communities tags: CA How and When…

  • Sharing – Similar patterns of behavior emerge in sex abuse scandals

    Look, if you work at a non-profit, you do so for a reason, and that reason is usually tied to the work that the organization does. It’s something you believe in, feel passionate about, and in most cases agree to work for a lower salary to be part of. It’s a massive part of your identity.

    Double all of that when the organization works on behalf of kids.

    So imagine, if you will, a scenario where you have so much of your own identity tied into the good work done by you and your coworkers, and someone comes along and claims that actually, there are kids being harmed in that environment, not helped at all.

    Are we all so sure we wouldn’t at least hesitate and consider for just a moment, that we’d be better off ignoring that and continuing the “good work” on behalf of kids?

    I can believe that happens. I can understand how it happens. I can understand how crushing it would be to have something you believed in that strongly, and have part of your team be accused of something so heinous.

    But we have to fight that, and make sure that the work we think we are doing on behalf of children, is the whole truth of what is going on in the organization. We cannot afford to lose ourselves, and our better judgment, to our passion for the work. We have to stay level-headed and aware.

    Those kids deserve that, and the good work you want your organization to continue doing, requires it.

  • Link – Why Pastors Are Committing Suicide

    Pastors aren’t immune to the rising suicide rates. More than half of pastors have counseled people who were later diagnosed with a mental illness (59 percent), and about a quarter say they’ve experienced some type of mental illness themselves (23 percent). According to LifeWay, 12 percent have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Chuck Hannaford, a…

  • Link – Kanye Mental Health Crisis, Public Shaming Celebrities

    Despite all of this, we still find ourselves immediately defaulting to judgment when he finally falls to pieces in public in a very real and big way. We spent the rest of the weekend pointing at Kanye’s misfortune, his confusion, his aggression, and saying “Look, there he goes again. He’s such an asshole.” Because the…

  • Reviews Elsewhere – Being Ana

    Many survivors struggle with any number of mental health issues through their teens and into adulthood as a result of their abuse. Anorexia, while not something I have personal experience with, is something that I know some survivors are dealing with. This look into one woman’s struggle with it may help provide a look at…

  • Finding Balance and Diversity in our Social Media Use

    I came across this article today: The Internet and Mental Health: It Helped & Hurt My Recovery As many of you know, this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, because I think, despite media attention to the contrary, can be part of helping abuse survivors, and those with mental health…

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.)