Links

  • Sharing – I’m tired of people telling me to go and get therapy?-it’s not that simple

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    As she goes on to say in the post below, when someone needs help, and needs support, simply telling them to get therapy and going about your own life not thinking about that conversation again is not enough. We have to recognize that therapy may not be available for them, or it may be quite a long time before they can get therapeutic help. What do they do until then? What can we do, as a society, to make mental health care more accessible to everyone? Because right now, it’s not accessible to a very large number of people who need it.

  • Sharing – A suicide safety plan saved my life. Here’s what it looks like, and why it worked

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    So, maybe before you or someone you love, gets into a crisis situation, it would be a good idea to work on this kind of plan with a professional, so that when you really need it, it’s there. Of course, as Kimberly points out, that means we should be able to talk about our struggles and our own risks when it comes to suicidal thoughts in the first place without the fear of being stigmatized.

  • Sharing – Supporting disclosure for adult male survivors of child sexual abuse

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    The reality is that men who were sexually abused at a young age don’t often see themselves as sexual abuse victims, and often it’s because what happened to us doesn’t fit the descriptions we see on TV. In his example, what his older brother and his friends did to him was “just sex”, because he is gay anyway, even though he was 7 at the time it started. For many other male survivors, sexual abuse is what happens to girls, not boys, or if it does happen to boys it’s when a priest, or boy scout leader does it, not older kids, family members, women, or close family friends. That’s not sexual abuse, that’s something else.

    It’s the lack of communication around these kinds of experiences, on top of all the other reasons men are less likely to come forward for decades, that makes it almost impossible to truly know the rates of male sexual abuse. We simply have no way of knowing how many survivors there are who don’t even think of their experiences as abuse.

  • Sharing – 3 Less-Known Reasons Why Men Don’t Talk about Mental Health

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    The article below goes into some of that, and it is definitely something to consider. Do we “excuse” men who self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, are irritable and lash out, etc. as just men acting out? Or do we consider that those are depression symptoms just as much as the ones we see in the media every day? (Which are almost always women looking very sad, and mostly white women at that.)

    Frankly, if I considered being irritable, drinking and acting out as just part of being a man, I probably wouldn’t even know to talk about my mental health. We need to be sure and talk about all aspects of mental health, and what symptoms might look like, before we can expect people to know enough to talk.

    For men, we may not be doing a good enough job.

  • Sharing – 11 Factors That Increase the Risk of Child Sexual Abuse

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    For example, if we know that kids who don’t understand boundaries, are lonely, live in stressful family situations, and do not have open communication with other people in their lives, are more likely to be sexually abused, what does that mean when a teen comes out and is not accepted by their family? Or when a blended family becomes dysfunctional, or a kid with disabilities is not taught boundaries but kept hidden away from others?

    You have kids who are lonely, who don’t feel safe and loved, who don’t understand boundaries, etc.

    If a kid who’s lonely and lacking in self esteem is at risk. And a kid who identifies as LGBTQ+ is at risk, can we stop for a minute and consider that it’s not being LGBTQ+ that is a risk factor, it’s how much more likely that kid is to be lonely and lacking in self-esteem?

    And thus, the cycle continues. When it shouldn’t. We know what it is about disabled kids, kids from blended families, or LGBTQ+ kids that make them more prone to abuse, mental health issues, and suicide. It’s not their reality, it’s the responses to their reality that create the risk factors. The things that make them more likely to be loners, disconnected from family support, lacking safe adults to communicate with, etc.

    So maybe we should focus on being more supportive of all kids?

    And, since we’re on the topic and it is June. Happy Pride!

  • Sharing – Are You Hypervigilant?

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Sound familiar? I know, for me, this is absolutely the truth, and even though I’ve done a ton of work to overcome this, and learn how to turn off this hyper vigilance, there are still times when it kicks in, like say during a pandemic.

    I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it here. The last 16 months have forced everyone into being hyper vigilant. How do we suddenly turn that off? How exhausted are we from spending that much time constantly on the lookout for danger, and the worst case scenario?

    Personally, that exhaustion goes beyond any words I have to describe it. It reminds me very much of what it was like in my 20s when I only had the life skills I learned as a kid, which were mostly just responses to abuse, not healthy ways to live as an adult.