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Sharing – Depression in Kids: All You Need to Know
ByMikeM April 7, 2022April 7, 2022 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Getting kids help as early as possible gives them a much better chance to have less depression and fewer effects as adults. Imagine how many people might have been able to develop mentally healthy strategies instead of devolving into worse conditions if it was common for kids to have access to mental health resources?

Please, don’t ignore signs of depression and mental health struggles in kids. Yes, they can be resilient, but the research clearly shows that they aren’t as resilient as we think they are, and waiting to get access to help is doing more damage.

In this case, it is better to be safe. The worst thing that happens is a kid gets some time to talk to a therapist who determines that it’s not depression but something else. This is not a bad thing, even if the stigma surrounding it says it is.

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Sharing – Depression Without Sadness: What to Know
ByMikeM April 5, 2022April 5, 2022 Reading Time: 1 minute

Numb is exactly the word I would use to describe what I felt. I didn’t look sad, and I didn’t cry. I didn’t talk about my negative emotions. I simply felt nothing. I had lost the ability to feel sad, happy, hopeful, angry, etc. Nothing made any difference, and nothing mattered.

Often we describe depression as sadness, and our media depictions are of people looking and acting sad. We can’t forget that there are also times when depression doesn’t look like that, it might look like numbness, and it might look like anger and irritation.

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Sharing – Getting Real About the Therapist Shortage
ByMikeM March 31, 2022March 31, 2022 Reading Time: 2 minutes

As she puts it, there’s a shortage of therapists in general, a shortage of therapists that take insurance, and a shortage of therapists with specialized training. None of that will change without significant changes to the mental health system, and even if it did, we still wouldn’t have enough therapists, especially in rural areas.

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Sharing – Music Is Just as Powerful at Improving Mental Health as Exercise, Review Suggests
ByMikeM March 29, 2022March 29, 2022 Reading Time: 1 minute

I have noticed that playing music around our house definitely raises my spirits in a similar way as exercise, so it’s nice to know that researchers are looking into some other options for helping our mental health above and beyond “get more exercise”.

What I like more though, is a research article that contains this common-sense reminder about how we are all different:

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Sharing – Why The Age You Experienced Trauma Matters
ByMikeM March 28, 2022March 30, 2025 Reading Time: 2 minutes

When we talk about the effects of child abuse and other childhood traumas that last well into adulthood, this is what we are talking about. The normal development cycle was simply disrupted and we now must play catch-up.

It’s not impossible to learn and develop even as an adult, but first we need to stop blaming ourselves for both the trauma, and the effects of the trauma. We need to be open to learning new tools without judging ourselves for not already knowing how to fix ourselves.

If it were that easy, everyone would do it. Clearly that isn’t happening.

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Book Reviews

Reviews Elsewhere – The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How we Learn from Love and Loss.
ByMikeM March 25, 2022March 25, 2022 Reading Time: 3 minutes

Losing a spouse, parent, sibling, etc. for me would be different than losing one of my friends. I love them differently, and I imagine I would grieve differently.. Losing anyone you love hurts but you likely have a variety of different relationships with people so it only makes sense that you would grieve them differently too, and then it also becomes obvious that we all will grieve differently from each other. There’s no straight line, there’s no “normal” way to grieve, there is just one individual processing the loss of another person that they had a unique connection to.

Wherever you are in that process is where you are. It’s not a contest and it’s not a pre-defined timeline. It’s a loss and you are free to mourn that.

Read More Reviews Elsewhere – The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How we Learn from Love and Loss.