Should you feel compassion for prisoners?– what if I told you that maybe 72% of people in jail have diagnosable and long untreated, mental health disorders?
Live, laugh, lava: Yellowstone offers respite for teens struggling with mental health
We hear stories about this all the time. If your parents constantly compare you to an older sibling who could do no wrong, you spend much of your adult life believing you are not enough. If you come from a family that didn’t express emotion, you find it hard to be close to someone emotionally as an adult, and so on.
You take those messages about what is expected from your surroundings and adjust your behaviors and beliefs to fit in with them. It can be very difficult, not impossible, to overcome that and relearn a different message.
If this seems familiar to you, I want you to take the next step and imagine what kind of messages a survivor of childhood abuse carries from their childhood.
As the article explains, there is no federal law against this in the US. There are some state laws, but they’re not very effective. The problem is that we’ve always treated sexual abuse materials as criminal because, as the saying goes, behind every photo is a child being abused. With deepfakes, though, the abuse isn’t happening. So when a teen girl is the subject of deepfake porn, she was never sexually assaulted, so there’s no crime.
There’s a lot of harm, though. In the case of a celebrity, it might be reputational harm. In the case of teenagers, that fake can turn into blackmail, bullying, and all the mental health issues that go along with that. (The same is true of adults, but we know how vulnerable teens are to this and how this too often ends.)
That’s the take-away from this more recent study. We cannot point to childhood trauma as the explanation for all mental health issues in adulthood. Sometimes, it is a contributing factor. Sometimes, it isn’t. Mental Health is much more complicated. There is no simple explanation for why it happens, and there’s no simple explanation for why it’s been getting worse. Beware those who want to paint all mental health issues with the same brush. Human beings are a bit more complicated than that.
Sadly, as much as apps like TalkSpace might offer ways for people with no local therapist to find one to work with online, they still suffer from this very basic issue:
“The underlying problem of access — the fact that there simply aren’t as many therapists as there are people who need therapy — has not been solved by therapy apps so much as papered over. “
