Similar Posts
Sharing – The Fun Is Why
I feel like this is something that has gotten continuously worse over the years too. Kids who never get to just play, but are fully booked with one after-school activity after another. Teens are under constant pressure to spend their time doing things that look good on college applications. College-aged young adults are about filling out the resume or getting into the best graduate school programs, only to graduate into jobs that expect them to always be on call, to learn and grow themselves on their own time, all while social media culture tells them they should also have a side-hustle or three.
Having fun is time that could be spent on any of these accomplishments.
I’d flip that around. What’s the point of all of those accomplishments if you never have any fun?
Link – Mental Health Treatment Associated With Fewer Depressive Symptoms for Teens
I’ve said it a few times in the last couple of weeks, but here’s a study that proves it. Getting people help early makes a huge difference in helping them not have serious problems later. What do we have to do to make sure there are resources available to youth and young adults? “The…
Sharing – Better Mental Health May Not Mean Exactly What You Think It Does
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.
Link – When a mental health emergency lands you in jail
Jail is a terrible place for someone having a mental health crisis: “Across the country, and especially in rural areas, people in the middle of a mental health crisis are locked in a cell when a hospital bed or transportation to a hospital isn’t immediately available. The patients are transported from the ER like inmates,…
