Get educated about trauma and the conditions that can be caused by trauma. Do it for yourself so that you can understand and heal from your trauma and do it for the people around you impacted by trauma.
Don’t tell me you don’t know anyone who’s been impacted by trauma. That’s simply not true.
And on and on. No matter the struggle, there will always be someone there to tell you what you’re doing wrong to explain why you aren’t getting better.
What if we simply understand that life is hard? Anxiety and depression are hard. Living in poverty is hard. Living with bipolar or chronic illnesses is hard. Going outside isn’t always going to fix that. Being positive isn’t going to fix it; some days will just be hard and miserable.
We have gotten better at discussing mental health over the last couple of years, and one thing that has become clear is how broken that system is. How underfunded and under-resourced mental health services are and how many people are forced to go without them.
We wouldn’t know all this if we didn’t start talking about it. Hopefully, this increased attention brings about real change, not a return to not talking about it. The subject of child abuse is still considered a “downer” that people don’t want to discuss. So we don’t, and we don’t spend much time and energy as a society finding solid solutions. The problem just gets worse in silence, and the people living with that kind of trauma live in silence without the things they need.
It’s an interesting read and might help you understand what is happening. When I say “that’s how my brain works” when describing how I conclude that people don’t like me, it is the way my brain works and interprets things. I’m not just being dramatic.
Neither are your friends and loved ones.
It’s been trialed in several areas, sending out a mental health team instead of the police to respond to certain kinds of calls. Typically calls that involve a mental health crisis, addiction, etc. What we didn’t have yet were real studies to show whether this was having the desired effect. It’s early, but this is promising:
The hard work is developing the proper resources for people who need help after the immediate crisis. That costs money. Money that a significant number of people in the US will balk at paying because it goes to “other people.” These are the same people who balk at paying taxes for schools when they don’t have kids or at higher insurance premiums, let alone the taxes necessary for things like Medicaid, that pay for people who “made poor health decisions.” So, rather than stand up to that kind of thinking, many politicians at the state and local levels will go along with that. They won’t even attempt to provide funds for mental health services.
Some will even go so far as to say those services are just propping up “weak” people who need to get over those issues.
At the end of the day, while we can point to the number of people who talk about mental health and are supported for talking about it, we cannot say we’ve eliminated the stigma associated with it until we all put our money where our mouth is and provide the help that people need.
Until then, I’m afraid that many people will learn lessons the hard way, that it’s easy to write off funding resources for “other people” until you or someone you love winds up being one of them.
