Perhaps if we all focused on connecting with individuals and creating for one another, and less on consumption, we wouldn’t need to enact laws that prevent people from accessing the opportunities that the internet makes available to us.Â
Mental health advocates like me can talk all day about the importance of community and the life-saving value of human connection, but who are we if we take that away from anyone?Â
Having people in my life who I can talk to has been a massive support in my healing. Being able to tell my story with my voice has been a huge blessing for me.Â
I’m also acutely aware of the downside when it goes wrong, however. I know too many survivors who’ve been further damaged when trying to share their story as opposed to getting the support they were desperately seeking. Please, be careful with your story and yourself.Â
What was obvious to me when reading the list was that most, not all, of the counties without a shortage of mental health resources were relatively suburban. They offer numerous advantages compared to urban and rural areas. Good schools, safe neighborhoods, access to healthcare of all kinds, etc. If you win the zip code lottery and find yourself born into one of these areas, there’s a fairly good chance that mental healthcare will be available for you if needed.
You can see how it’s not simple. Mental health across a generation of individuals defies every attempt at a one-size-fits-all narrative, because we are not all one size. On the other hand, our brains want a simple narrative because what they want more than anything else is a reason to think that this won’t happen to our kids or us. So we run to simple solutions like bees to a hive. Sometimes that causes us to miss a lot of the details.Â
Let’s hope we continue to see improvements, but understand that there are a host of things we can and should be doing that don’t involve social media at all.Â
Make no mistake, gutting these programs will cause deaths, and that’s acceptable to far too many people in this country who seem to think that this complete antipathy toward killing other human beings will somehow skip them when the time comes.Â
It never does.Â
