Author: MikeM

  • What I learned from my husband’s suicide | Lori Prichard

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 3 minutes

    I saw this talk shared the other day and bookmarked it to go back and watch later. It’s a powerful talk given by Lori Prichard about her husband’s suicide. If you’ve not lived with depression, or lived close to someone dealing with it, you may have a hard time relating, but I want you to try, because I know how accurate this is. I’ve been depressed. I’ve lived with that bully inside of my own brain that told me every day how much better off people would be without me, and I managed to hide it and downplay it so that most people didn’t know anything was wrong at all, or as Lori put it, they let me get away with talking them out of any concerns.

  • Sharing – Common Mental Health Advice We Should Actually Ignore Right Now

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 3 minutes

    For example, I’m not anxious JUST because my brain is working overtime, or because I find myself focusing on the negative. I’m also anxious because over 400,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19 and a large number of people in my local area feel no need to change their behavior in acknowledgement of that fact.

    You know what that is? That is reality, and there’s no amount of “good vibes” that is going to make that reality not a reality. It’s totally normal to feel anxious about that, and telling me to “think positive”, or get more sleep, or exercise, isn’t going to change that.

    We all live in a very uncertain, and difficult, reality right now. The answer to social injustice and racism, again, is not just thinking positively about it. It’s having difficult, often painful, conversations about the topic. It’s about listening to other people’s experiences and working hard to understand the world differently than we did yesterday.

    That too, is a source of anxiety.

  • Shared Links (weekly) Jan, 31 2021

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    Unseen scars of childhood trauma

    Two thirds of child sexual abuse survivors didn’t tell anyone about abuse at the time

    Why we should never use childhood trauma to excuse male violence

    – Can we also talk about how offensive these connections are to male survivors?

    Is Stigma Derailing Your Mental Health Goals?

    9 Books to Make 2021 a Happier, Healthier Year

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    Sharing – Mental health books: Books to boost your mental health

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    These are Joanne’s suggestions, and I wanted to share them with you all in the interest of offering some small reviews of books about mental health issues. As she says: ” I think everyone needs a self-care library – if you need a little inspiration for what to include in yours, here are some of…

  • Sharing – Population vs Individual Prediction of Poor Health From Results of Adverse Childhood Experiences Screening

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Now, here comes a study, linked below, that has done the real scientific research and found:

    “ACE scores can forecast mean group differences in later health problems; however, ACE scores have poor accuracy in identifying individuals at high risk for future health problems.”

    Yes, there are statistics that show that there’s an impact at the societal level from childhood trauma. We should be addressing those issues as a society, things like child poverty, parents in the prison system, abuse, neglect, etc. because we know that as we lessen those impacts on kids, and make resources available for the kids who’s trauma we can’t prevent, we can impact the overall increases in depression, addiction, crime rates, etc. that are a direct result of childhood trauma. But, at an individual level, these things aren’t fate. How one person navigates trauma and is impacted by it, is not going to come down to just the number of traumas they dealt with as a child. When we identify one person with 4 or more ACEs according to the survey, all that really tells us is that it’s basically 50-50 whether or not they are depressed, or there’s a close to 30% chance they’ve used illicit drugs, but a 70% chance they haven’t. One person is not going to neatly fit every category and shouldn’t be treated as if they do. 

  • Sharing – Facing Down a Mental Health Crisis

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    The pandemic and other events have, perhaps, crystalized this reality for people, but let’s not kid ourselves. The lack of available treatment resources for many, many people has been a sad reality for years. Decades even.

    Simply finding more therapists isn’t going to cut it. I’d agree with that conclusion from the article, and perhaps some of the ideas shared could help. I don’t know if they will, but I know what we currently do, doesn’t work for too many people.