Shared Links (bi-weekly) May 17, 2026
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Sarah and Daniel’s article is spot on for these two points. We are talking more about mental health right now, but… Talking about mental health won’t help, unless it extends to the talking about the reasons why so many experience mental ill health, and what collective action we can take to address those drivers. Secondly,…
Schools in poor areas where students are likely to be dealing with instability at home and poverty all around them have different mental health needs than kids living in a wealthy suburb. Programs designed to help families in poverty should be part of school mental health programs. As I’ve said many times, you can’t meditate or exercise your way out of poverty. A full-service mental health program would recognize the impact that something like poverty has on kids.Â
That’s our blind spot. We’re so busy looking for creepy, anti-social, stereotypes that we miss the charming abusers right in our midst, and we miss all the signs and hints that our kids might be dropping because we just didn’t stop to consider that adult to be dangerous. We just assumed they were safe, and our kids would somehow know better anyway.
Clearly, that strategy isn’t working.
I thought the reasons laid out in this article were interesting, not exhaustive by any means but an interesting way of looking at what happens in families when abuse is present. I do feel like all of them boiled down to this: At the time I was devastated by her response and I took it…
Creating a new number was the easy part. Similar to raising awareness because it’s necessary, it’s essential, but if there is no one there to provide the help we encourage people to reach out for, it’s not nearly enough. Here’s hoping these state and local organizations can find and train people to provide the necessary help during these calls. That’s only a start, of course. We still have so much work to do to make that help accessible to everyone who needs it.Â
In some ways, this struggle to staff the hotline is a microcosm of the entire mental health field right now. We need a lot of resources that just aren’t there right now. Can we figure out a way to get change that?
This episode, written by Jonathan Greene, falls over itself with its issues and is another that suffers from the need to provide twists and turns but ends up pandering to cliché and prejudice. The teen in the equation is the aggressor rather than the teacher but this is one of the twists after initially presenting…