Sharing – Mental Health – Keep talking about it. Make it public and open
I 100% agree with Alison on this, we are not comfortable talking about mental health, and we aren’t comfortable even hearing someone else talk about it:
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Sharing – Why Is It So Hard to Explain Mental Illness?
In 2022 we could say the same thing about “sad” but I would argue that we see the same thing even more so with the word “anxious” or “having anxiety”.
Of course, with a war going on in Ukraine, two years’ worth of pandemic, political turmoil, and everything else we see when we tune into whatever news source we follow, almost everyone would consider themselves anxious, so how do we differentiate between being anxious about the state of the world, and the kind of anxiety where we are consistently dealing with panic attacks at the very thought of leaving the house?
We don’t have a different word for that. We only have anxiety, or panic, which again, just seem like normal reactions to what is going on around us.
On top of that, when I try and describe my anxiety to someone, even if I can get them to understand that it’s something more than just watching the news and feeling a bit nervous, I can’t really describe it. I don’t understand it. If I did, I might be able to just fix it and be better, but I don’t.
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Sharing – 11 Things People Wish They Were Told After Someone Dies
There were also people who simply weren’t there. People we thought we could depend on, and they just didn’t show up. I have always suspected that many of them simply didn’t know what to say, so they stayed away. What they didn’t realize is that I never needed them to say the right thing, I just needed to know they were there. When they weren’t, it just added more grief.
Your words are not what’s important. Your words can’t heal someone grieving. But your presence is everything.
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Sharing – Prison is no place for people with mental illnesses. I know because I was in one
There is a direct link between the growing prison population and the lack of mental health resources. The only difference is that we can scare people into paying to build more prisons and keep “dangerous people” away from us. It’s much harder to convince people to invest in prevention through mental health treatment, even if that would be much more effective in protecting everyone.
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Sharing – People harm themselves to cope with big emotions. You can help them heal.
I appreciate that there is someone researching this, and I am also glad that the subject of the article, artist Donalen Rojas Bowers, is sharing her story as well. It’s not an easy thing to talk about, it’s not an easy thing to learn about, and it’s definitely not an easy thing to find out someone you love is self-harming.
None of that unease should matter when compared to understanding and helping kids and adults who feel the need to self-harm because there have no better options available. The only way we find those is to talk about this.
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Sharing – When You Have a Lifelong Struggle With PTSD and Depression
It can be a struggle when so many of our friends and even professionals want to help us overcome abuse to “get back to” ourselves when there is no previous version of ourselves to use as a target. I don’t think this should be the goal anyway. The goal for any child abuse victim should not be to go back to being a younger version of themselves before the abuse, the goal should be to build a life after abuse. I didn’t find much healing in trying to remember my early childhood, but I found a ton of healing in having someone help me design the life I wanted to have as an adult and helping me feel worthy and capable of having that.
