I want abuse survivors to know that healing is possible. I want people dealing with mental health issues to have hope that they can get better. I work hard to get that message out, but those 700,000 people who died by suicide in 2019 won’t ever get to read what you just read. They aren’t here.
I’m tired of that. These numbers are so much more than numbers.
I love the fact that her boss was just honest about his mental health issues, and the fact that he took antidepressants, and how much difference that made it her own ability to talk about mental health. Simply put, this has to be what we do. All of us who advocate for more mental health conversation, awareness, and resources, need to create a space where anyone, everyone, can share their own stories, and advocate for their own care, without fear of being judged for needing it.
Kudos to WHO, and the folks who shared their stories. As the WHO says on their website, 1/2 of all children experienced some sort of violence in the last year, and that violence leaves lasting impressions. (And that is pretty much the norm every year, as well.)
We have to have serious discussions about mental health resources, for adults and kids. This isn’t even about stigma or awareness, this is a system with fundamental flaws, that creates this lack of available, and affordable, resources. This is a society that is unable, and unwilling, to provide basic care for too many of its own members. Is that the society we want to live in? I hope not, but as long as we continue down a path where the best plan we can come up for a teenager struggling with suicidal thoughts is 17 days on a gurney, and sedated, inside of an ER, we are not that society.
I would imagine that part of the reason that no one agrees on the why and how has a lot to do with the fact that it might actually be different for different types of people.
For example, I know some folks who benefit from writing out their emotions, as the article talks about. But there are also those of us who benefit not necessarily from directly writing our emotions to release them, but gain self-awareness through focusing our thoughts to communicate them in written form.
Maybe, there are just a lot of ways writing is good for you, mentally?
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.
