This program is making a difference for veterans, and I have no doubt it would be the sme for many: The Safety Planning Intervention is a structured process that involves six distinct steps. A healthcare provider and a patient work collaboratively to identify personal warning signs that a crisis might be developing. They also outline…
These actions aren’t just specific actions that protect children; they’re the kinds of actions that come naturally when kids have an adult actively involved in their lives every day, the kind of involvement that would notice a nervous pause before answering, an odd comment that seems out of character, a small detail in a story about other people.Â
We all need more education, so be sure to share it with your network as well, especially with people who have kids or work with them.Â
This resource seems like something worth sharing. We spend so much time talking about online safety, banning phones until a certain age, or banning social media, and not enough time making sure we prepare kids for the dangers of being online at all. It’s like banning a child from leaving the house without a parent and then sending them to school with no skills for navigating other people on their own. At some point, kids learning about appropriate and inappropriate behavior and having a safe place to talk about it has to be the priority.Â
It’s not that we shouldn’t look at the individual cases; we should. But we have to address the systemic harm done to mental health by these issues. We have to stop pretending that economic issues don’t create mental health risks and ignore the real harm we do when we do nothing to lift people out of poverty or end racism and economic deprivation beyond calling anyone who wants to do those things a socialist.
It’s not working. It’s not solving the real problem.
As Whitney says, and I agree, the real work is in the complexities. That goes for our own mental health issues, healing from abuse, and social issues regarding these topics. We aren’t going to solve the mental health crisis by getting people to exercise more. It might help some people, but that one explanation will not work for everyone. We are all much more complex than that simple “fix” would lead us to believe, but believing it reduces the cognitive load of figuring out how to help millions of individuals.
