Links

  • Sharing – Addressing Childhood Anxiety as Early as Kindergarten Could Reduce Its Harmful Impacts

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Kids who show the signs of struggling with mental health issues do a heck of a lot better if we intervene. Sadly, we don’t do it enough. Sometimes it’s because we don’t have any intervention to offer them. There are no resources available to far too many families. Other times parents and adults are afraid to look for help due to the stigma associated with mental health issues, hoping the kid will grow out of it.

  • Sharing – 6 Things People Actually Need To Improve Their Mental Health Right Now

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    It’s all well and good to suggest someone take a mental health day, or maybe a spa day to relax and recharge. No one has a solution for doing that when you don’t get paid sick leave, or struggle to find childcare. It’s easy to suggest time in nature to people who live in a high-rise Section 8 building barely scraping by, or suggest that kids should get help when budgets for in-school mental health programs are being cut.

    Suggesting it isn’t going to make it possible. We have a massive problem with access to any kind of mental health care. If we don’t figure that out, the rest of this doesn’t make any sense.

  • Sharing – Hot Take: The Teens Are the Sanest of Us All

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    The real question is, how do you “treat” this level of anxiety when feeling anxious is a perfectly normal reaction to what you see in front of you every day? Should we even be treating it versus accepting it and teaching young people coping skills instead?

    I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that my own anxiety isn’t going anywhere. I’m learning to live with it, some days better than others, but I don’t see why I should think of my anxiety as an abnormal reaction. It makes perfect sense to me.

  • Sharing – Man who suffered child sex abuse now helps other survivors speak out

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    For Jeremy, the abuse stopped, and then he went on with life seemingly without issue. Until later, when there was an issue. We assume that all survivors keep their secrets because they are ashamed, and many of us do. But there are also survivors who don’t “look” like abuse survivors, they go on with a relatively normal and successful life, until one day they don’t. Someone who looks like your abuser, a different overwhelmingly stressful situation, an inadvertent touch, or a smell, can all bring it rushing back into your consciousness.

    This is another reason why people don’t tell until much later. They don’t really have a reason to, they seem to be “over it”, but they aren’t always really over it.

    This is yet another example of survivors being unique individuals and the fact that how each of us is impacted can be different too. Just because another survivor has a different journey than you, doesn’t mean much in the end.

  • Sharing – This One Thing Heals Childhood Trauma

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    This is what matters. Having people around you with the knowledge and willingness to support you. Far too many survivors, youth and adults, have never had that. We’ve failed them as a society that values our own discomfort with the topic over supporting people we claim to care about.

    Until we stop doing that and start connecting with anyone who has experienced childhood trauma, we’ll continue to see all of the negative effects writ large.

  • Sharing – Queer survivors of sexual abuse are frequently blamed for their own victimization

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    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.