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Shared Links (weekly) May 2, 2021

ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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  • Link – How Emotional Abuse From My Upbringing Contributed to My Mental Health Struggles

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    It’s not difficult to imagine how believing the things that you are told during an emotionally abusive childhood would create mental health struggles in adulthood. This is true for many of us: The words they spoke still linger in my mind to this day. The feelings of worthlessness, sadness, pain and shame are all still…

  • Link – Why So Many People Don’t Get Help For Depression

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    “Depression also often comes with a sense of hopelessness, or a belief that things won’t change no matter what you do, which doesn’t help when it comes to deciding to get treatment, Clark says. But unfortunately, not getting care can make things even worse. “This hopelessness, if left unchecked, can feed a vicious cycle of…

  • Link – What to Teach Kids Instead of ‘Stranger Danger’

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    This – “Telling kids not to talk to strangers fails to protect children at the most basic level,” writes early childhood expert Heather Shumaker in The Daily Beast. “Children are most often harmed by friends and family. This unsettling statistic is one we wish would go away. It’s far more convenient to blame the faceless…

  • Sharing – How to lower a troubling male suicide rate? End the myths about emotions.

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I’ve seen this time and time again. As men, we might even be told that we should be open to our emotions, but there are still very few spaces for men to show emotion. Sports is one example of a space where we can show excitement or disappointment. Sometimes, we can show more complex emotions, but only in romantic relationships—never with friends. 

    He also discusses the limited range of emotions usually deemed acceptable for men. Note how anger is one we are allowed to have and how it gets used as the cover for several more complicated emotions. That might also explain why men with depression don’t come across as sad but angry and thus don’t get diagnosed with depression as often as women. It doesn’t “look” like the depression we see in the media. 

  • Sharing – Better Mental Health May Not Mean Exactly What You Think It Does

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I will say that his discussion around what people come into therapy for in terms of defining good mental health is often an issue. When I started therapy I wanted to not dissociate, because the dissociative states were proving to be more and more dangerous. But, it wasn’t like we could sit and discuss plans to simply stop, we had to dig into what happens right before I dissociate and learn better ways of dealing with that. (In my case, stress)

    Even then, the desire to simply feel less stress is not always possible. It would have solved the immediate reason why I was in therapy, less stress would make me less likely to dissociate, right? But it also wasn’t sustainable because at some point life is going to be stressful. The key was not to avoid stress but to learn how to recognize it, acknowledge it, feel it, and deal with it in a healthier way.

    So yes, I agree our definition of good mental health needs to incorporate much, much more than “not feeling sad, anxious, depressed, etc.” because we will feel those things again at some point. They are unavoidable, but succumbing to them without a proper response is not. We can, and should, learn how to do that.

  • Sharing – Supporting disclosure for adult male survivors of child sexual abuse

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    The reality is that men who were sexually abused at a young age don’t often see themselves as sexual abuse victims, and often it’s because what happened to us doesn’t fit the descriptions we see on TV. In his example, what his older brother and his friends did to him was “just sex”, because he is gay anyway, even though he was 7 at the time it started. For many other male survivors, sexual abuse is what happens to girls, not boys, or if it does happen to boys it’s when a priest, or boy scout leader does it, not older kids, family members, women, or close family friends. That’s not sexual abuse, that’s something else.

    It’s the lack of communication around these kinds of experiences, on top of all the other reasons men are less likely to come forward for decades, that makes it almost impossible to truly know the rates of male sexual abuse. We simply have no way of knowing how many survivors there are who don’t even think of their experiences as abuse.

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