Behavioral issues in school, getting in trouble, and wham! Instead of mental health care, you’re a criminal case. We do it to adults all the time, why would we not see it the same way with kids? Especially kids without the family means to get private care and assistance?
This is what we do, and we need to figure out something else. The criminal justice system is not mental health care.
We know from previous posts that there are places in the US and Canada, where there simply aren’t any mental health resources. Rural areas show up in that list often, so I am glad to share this resource:
We aren’t really hard-wired to notice the stuff we do correctly everyday. The more often we do them, the more likely we pay absolutely no attention to them, and yet, we do all of them successfully and pay undo attention to the one or two things we don’t do correctly.
I see so many survivors stuck in a black/white perception. You’re either healed, or broken. You are strong and resilient, or you’re weak. You have a mental health problem, or you don’t.
When the truth is so much more complicated than all of that.
As I have written before, being an advocate online for me means writing, sharing information and insights, interacting with other survivors, etc. but sometimes I just can’t. Not because I’ve lost interest or don’t want to do it, but because I’m just tired of the pushback. I’m tired of having stories about male victims challenged or dismissed, tired of people in the mental health space telling me that everyone should just do what worked for them, tired of dealing with other people’s definitions of what healing looks like, or how long it should take, and on and on.
It’s all stigma, it’s all the stigma that I want to fight against, but some days it’s just exhausting. So I’d rather not talk about it.
These are the stories we don’t hear about often enough, and that leaves a whole lot of victims out on their own when it comes to finding support.
“What do you think you know about boys and sexual violence? I thought I knew that boys are victims only rarely, and I automatically equated “child sexual abuse” with adults preying on kids. But I was wrong on both counts.
