Shared Links (weekly) Oct. 13, 2024
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We have gotten better at discussing some mental health issues, but there’s still so much more to do. It’s still not safe for too many people to even admit they need help with anxiety and depression, even though right now we all need support. There is still a severe shortage of help available, and we still treat other mental health issues with something other than fear.
If not now, when? Those of us who can share our stories, should be doing exactly that. For all the people who can’t. And, maybe even more, we need to remind the world that these issues affect people everywhere, from all backgrounds. It’s not just Hollywood, and it’s not just on poor neighborhoods, it affects plenty of people that we probably come in contact with every day. People we know, people we love, people we work with, neighbors, friends, family, etc. are, or have been, struggling with their mental health.
Maybe once we convince enough people of that, they’ll care enough to do something about it.
Haven’t we been talking over and over again about the lack of human connection and the impacts on our mental health? Maybe if we spent a little more time complimenting each other when a job is well done, or on a new look, or a trait that we admire, we’d have more human connection in our days.
Again, as Peter goes on to describe the issue is not that people might suddenly play some Tetris when dealing with trauma. That’s probably not going to harm them much, it’s that we, as a society, will come to expect that is the “magic pill” to help everyone deal with trauma and start dismissing it as something that’s easy to fix with some Tetris when it’s much, much more complicated than that. We shouldn’t lose sight of that fact.
The article below describes how this can happen, mostly focused on several factors. One, things change. The family’s circumstances change over the years, your parents change over the years, and so an older or younger sibling might have been raised differently than we were. Also, we are different. Some kids’ personalities mesh differently with their parents compared to their siblings. That’s all pretty normal.
I want to talk about childhood abuse, especially why it can seem like our siblings don’t understand when we tell them about our abuse. One of the things that becomes clear as you read the link is that kids might grow up in the same biological family but not necessarily in the same circumstances.
I’ve never forgotten the lesson my math teacher taught me: that we need to learn how to talk about suicide. Here are a few numbers he probably didn’t know, but should: suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States and claims more than 41,000 lives every year. I was not the only…