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Sharing – Just how useful is childhood therapy?
ByMikeM February 18, 2022February 18, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Unfortunately, whether therapy is effective for your child, or for yourself as an adult, depends on a number of factors. Finding someone you can trust is an obvious one, and sometimes a real struggle. Elsewhere in the article, Melinda talks about the child not currently being in a traumatic situation, notably one interviewee who was seeing a therapist for depression while also being sexually abused at home. She knew she could talk about that, so the therapy was doomed from the start.

Sometimes I believe we look at mental health treatments like therapy and dismiss them because “it didn’t work” without considering all of the outside factors that can influence whether it works or not.

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Youth Mental Health – A Crisis, but Ending Pandemic Rules Won’t End the Crisis
ByMikeM February 16, 2022February 16, 2022 Reading Time: 3 minutes

There’s been a lot of talk about youth mental health during the pandemic, including a number of prominent voices raising the alarm about this crisis. There have been almost as many voices suggesting that ending things like lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and just getting “back to normal” will fix this mental health crisis.

I am not one of those voices.

Now let me be clear, I’m not saying that the pandemic hasn’t played a number on mental health for all of us, it clearly has. But, the crisis in mental health for everyone, but especially young people, existed long before COVID-19.

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Sharing – What American Mental Health Care Is Missing
ByMikeM February 14, 2022February 14, 2022 Reading Time: 2 minutes

We actually know the things that can offer hope, we just don’t have a system that can deliver them. Our system is broken, the medical community can offer medicine and some limited treatment options but the day-to-day support and the work to reach a state of something more than symptom reduction doesn’t actually exist for most people.

This has to change. Go read more of what he has to say, I think for many of you it will seem familiar, but maybe provide some hope that we are not alone in seeing it.

Now if we can just find enough of us to care enough to fix it. We should all want to, mental health issues will happen to someone we all know and care about, eventually. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to offer a system that does not involve homelessness and prison time for far too many?

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Sharing – Don’t Touch Me: Unwanted Affection Causes Stress
ByMikeM February 10, 2022February 10, 2022 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Turns out, we’re all a lot more complicated. If you read the rest of the article, what you’ll see is that none of this is simple, not only is there the line between wanted and unwanted affection, there’s also a point where we’ve simply had enough and don’t want more, and that line is not going to be the same for everyone.

All of this leads me to believe that the best way to navigate this in romantic relationships, or just with family and friends, is to communicate openly about what we want and don’t want.

Believe it or not, abuse survivors, you can do that. You can create your own boundaries, and ask for what you want in any relationship. It just takes some time to learn how.

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Sharing – Self-help resources can encourage victim-blaming of individuals with depression, study finds
ByMikeM February 9, 2022February 9, 2022 Reading Time: 2 minutes

There’s no language in this belief system for “some other person decided to hurt you for no reason at all and it had nothing to do with you”. There can’t be any language for that, because the entire system is self-centered.

The world isn’t. So please stop telling people who have suffered real harm that it’s all just lessons to learn, that simply excuses away harmful behavior, provides overly simple “fixes” for mental health issues, and places the blame for it square on the victim. That’s no way to support anyone.

Read More Sharing – Self-help resources can encourage victim-blaming of individuals with depression, study finds
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Sharing – How To Tell If Your Parent is Suffering from Depression
ByMikeM February 8, 2022February 7, 2022 Reading Time: 1 minute

As pointed out later in the article below, the second-highest rate of suicide belongs to elderly white men. We have created a stereotype of the “grumpy old man” in our society. We’ve even made movies out of it. But don’t let that fool you, that grumpiness or the other moods we assume are just part of getting older, might not be that at all.

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