To mark Mental Health Awareness Month, KQED compiled a list of shows related to mental health and youth mental health for listeners. If you’re looking for some mental health shows to learn from, you could do worse than browse the featured one they shared, and the link to all of their previous mental health resources.
https://www.kqed.org/education/538678/resources-mental-health
I’ve talked about this before. As a male survivor, I have spent years on this site dealing with people that simply assumed I was gay, for no other reason than the fact that I was abused by a male perpetrator. I’ve known plenty of other men who’ve been shunned because of a similar assumption, or the much worse assumption that survivors, especially male survivors or gay men, are likely to turn around and also sexually abuse others.
None of this is accurate. Yes, the abuse can leave you feeling unsafe and uncomfortable in your own body and with your own sexuality. That is a side effect of being raped sometimes. That is not something anyone should be ashamed to talk about and no matter where they land on the spectrum of gender and sexual preference they deserve the respect and privacy to figure that out themselves. None of us asked your opinion, and none of us want to hear about your own illusions of how sexuality works after being sexually abused at a young age.
The more mature attitude is to recognize that healing from sexual abuse is a process that looks different for everyone, whether they are gay, straight, bisexual, non-binary and any other thing you want to consider. We all deserve a better response than to be accused of bringing it upon ourselves.
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.
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There’s no real difference. I should know. I was sexually abused by an older minor. There was no creepy old man, only an older and bigger kid who threatened me. Someone in my own family. Mall parking lots, school, and our neighborhood park weren’t the places where I was not safe, my family was.
And I had no way to tell anyone, because I wasn’t taught about that being child abuse. Only strange men in white vans giving out candy abused children. Whatever was happening in my family wasn’t to be discussed with anyone. It wasn’t, and it went on for years.
Maybe we should do better with understanding the ways kids abuse other kids, and talking openly about it. The link below can help.
This hit home pretty hard. Your relationship with yourself — how you speak to yourself, how you listen to your emotions and how you respond to your needs — is the base that any other relationship you have builds upon, Patel explained. “If you’re not responding to your needs, it will also impact your health…
I will be interested in this trend – “Analyzing historical data to forecast an event is called predictive analytics, and it’s already being used in some industries; credit card companies, for instance, use predictive analytic tools to detect fraud. In the case of child and family services, these tools could be used to process historical…
