Books

Reviews Elsewhere – Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me

ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

Found this review from Louise Bradley on the Mental Health Commission of Canada website and thought the book by Anna Mehler Paperny might be of interest to readers here as well. In her words:

Paperny is a journalist. She also lives with treatment resistant depression. Her book could be summed up in three words: know thine enemy.

Using her considerable reporting skills and her unquenchable thirst for knowledge, Paperny leaves no stone unturned in her quest to understand the history of her affliction, the available treatment options, and new research shimmering like a mirage on the horizon.

While her reporting is as impeccable as her sources are unimpeachable, it is the frisson of urgency — a subtext wrought by the author’s own desperate desire for recovery — that makes this book so much more than a state of the nation on mental health care.

If you’ve read the book, let us know your thoughts on it. I can see where having someone who is used to investigating and reporting describing her own search for information and treatment would be quite an eye opener for people not familiar with the current state of mental health care, and also educational to those of us who want to learn more about mental health conditions and how they occur. The more information that is out there, the better informed we can all be.

Similar Posts

Sharing – How to support people worried about coronavirus

Sharing – How to support people worried about coronavirus

ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

There have been a number of articles that I’ve shared on social media about this, but I wanted to pause and mention this one in particular, because as someone who works with technology everyday, I cannot stress this enough. We have use the tools we have to stay connected. 1. Maintain connection “As humans, we…

This Week’s Links (weekly)

ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

Barbara Kay: Eight to 16% of the male population has been abused sexually in youth. Often by women tags: CA ChildAbuse Prevention begins with a willingness to talk tags: CA ChildAbuse There Is a Public Health Issue In the USA That Affects 130,000,000 People tags: CA ChildAbuse World Suicide Prevention Day, 2014 tags: CA Depression…

Link – Preventing Suicide Among College Students

Link – Preventing Suicide Among College Students

ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

The privacy rules for college students are, in general, a good thing. They prevent a lot of colleges from sharing too much information about individual students, and having that information abused. FERPA also prevents colleges from even sharing information with parents without the permission of the student. Again, that can be a very good thing,…

Sharing – Calls are up, but many 988 call centers lack resources to offer in-person help

Sharing – Calls are up, but many 988 call centers lack resources to offer in-person help

ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

The hard work is developing the proper resources for people who need help after the immediate crisis. That costs money. Money that a significant number of people in the US will balk at paying because it goes to “other people.” These are the same people who balk at paying taxes for schools when they don’t have kids or at higher insurance premiums, let alone the taxes necessary for things like Medicaid, that pay for people who “made poor health decisions.” So, rather than stand up to that kind of thinking, many politicians at the state and local levels will go along with that. They won’t even attempt to provide funds for mental health services.

Some will even go so far as to say those services are just propping up “weak” people who need to get over those issues.

At the end of the day, while we can point to the number of people who talk about mental health and are supported for talking about it, we cannot say we’ve eliminated the stigma associated with it until we all put our money where our mouth is and provide the help that people need.

Until then, I’m afraid that many people will learn lessons the hard way, that it’s easy to write off funding resources for “other people” until you or someone you love winds up being one of them.

Sharing – Just how useful is childhood therapy?

Sharing – Just how useful is childhood therapy?

ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

Unfortunately, whether therapy is effective for your child, or for yourself as an adult, depends on a number of factors. Finding someone you can trust is an obvious one, and sometimes a real struggle. Elsewhere in the article, Melinda talks about the child not currently being in a traumatic situation, notably one interviewee who was seeing a therapist for depression while also being sexually abused at home. She knew she could talk about that, so the therapy was doomed from the start.

Sometimes I believe we look at mental health treatments like therapy and dismiss them because “it didn’t work” without considering all of the outside factors that can influence whether it works or not.

Leave a Reply

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