Links

  • Sharing – Smashing Stigmas: From The Perspective of a Partner

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Depression tells you that you are alone. Knowing that there are other people, lots of other people, also dealing with it helps. It also helps to have a constant reminder that someone is on your side in this and looking for ways to remind you that you are not alone. If someone close to you is dealing with depression, and feeling alone, the best thing you can do is just be in their corner, helping them find help and connecting them with other people who can be part of their support network.

    That’s how we fight back against something telling us we are alone.

  • Sharing – Why telehealth for mental health care is working

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    It’s all about flexibility. As the article below points out, online appointments don’t work for everyone. They do require a stable and fast internet connection for video, and not everyone has that.

    On the other hand, they also point out that not everyone has transportation to a therapist’s office, time away from work to regular travel to appointments, or the ability to get the whole family, for example, transportation to the same location.

    For those folks, the switch to Telehealth that the pandemic thrust upon all of us is proving to be a godsend because they have something that was inaccessible to them previously. Even as others need a place to meet with a therapist, or simply connect better in person.

  • Sharing – Toxic Positivity: Harmful or Helpful

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    It’s the insistence that everyone around you also is positive all the time, demanding “Good Vibes Only” as the article points out, that worries me. Because people in real pain, social issues that cause real harm, etc. are not good vibes. When a team was winning gold medals, no one wanted to do more than focus on that success, and repeated stories of abuse went ignored. Is our constant need for positivity forcing us to ignore racism, homelessness, abuse, and many other social issues that we need to do more than give passing support to on social media?

    Maybe most importantly, are there people in our lives right now hurting, who desperately need our support, who we are ignoring because they bring us down?

  • Sharing – Create Support Network

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    These are all possible, they don’t require one person to fix things, which is where I suspect many of us get stuck. We want to support a loved one, or friend, who is struggling and in need of support, but that looks like a lot, probably more than we can handle. Frankly, it is more than you can handle, that’s why we all need the larger network. It only makes sense!

  • Sharing – Trauma-Related Dissociation: Symptoms, Treatment, Coping, and More

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    Of course, using this same defense mechanism in later life can be a problem, and when your brain has used this as a sort of “last resort” choice to survive, that might also mean that your memory of the event isn’t what others would like it to be. That’s OK, it helped you survive, that is the important thing. The rest is irrelevant if you don’t survive, so we are glad about that. Once you’ve survived, we can work on the rest of it.

    Read more about the what, why, and how of dissociation at the link below.

  • Sharing – Sexual violence within families: – It’s not a private matter

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t read a story in the news, or on social media that follows a similar path.

    Child abused by a family member
    The child tells someone in the family
    The child isn’t believed or is accused of trying to embarrass the family.
    Or, the child tells someone outside of the family
    The child isn’t believed, or the person doesn’t want to make trouble for the parents.