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Loneliness Is A Mental Health Issue, Can Technology Help?
As you may know, I am a believer that technology can help us keep in touch, especially if, like me, you have relocated and aren’t geographically close to some of your closest friends and family members. I was reading the article today about Australian nursing home residents and other elderly people, and the use of…
Link – How to Find Accurate, Evidence-Based Information on Mood Disorders
This may be worth checking out if you are also struggling with seeing so much misinformation on the interwebz about mood disorders. There’s plenty of it out there, and even those of us who try to vet much of what we share can sometimes make mistakes. Personally I try to avoid a lot of the…
Sharing – How to Respond When Mental Health Advice Feels Like Judgment
Look, I get it, you tried something and it helped you, or you’ve seen it help someone else. Clearly, you are excited about the possibility of helping others, but you’re forgetting something. You’re forgetting that the person you are sharing this advice with, isn’t you.
When you come walking into a conversation with friends, or especially into online communities with statements like the ones above, the message you are actually sending is “Gee, fixing this is easy, you’re just doing it wrong”.
Imagine using those actual words towards someone you barely know. You wouldn’t, would you? At least if you’re a decent human being, you wouldn’t. But you are totally willing to take your beliefs, your own experience, and completely railroad another person’s current reality with it, you are doing something awfully similar. In a moment of emotional vulnerability, you have come in, guns blazing, with the suggestion that all of this pain they are in, and all of this struggling they are going through, should have been easy to avoid.
Sharing – I Feel Nothing: Emotional Numbness and How to Cope
In my experience all of that is true. The trauma of my childhood left me numb in early adulthood. The current pandemic and all of the other things going on around us every day have left me numb from time to time now. It’s the overwhelming stress that just living every day can bring right now. So, I find myself doing some of the things recommended in the article below to help in the short term, while also knowing that if that doesn’t work, I need to consider the long-term options as well.