New Raising Joy Podcast Covers Kids Mental Health
Cook Children’s Health Care System in Texas has started a new podcast about kids’ mental health as part of their Joy Campaign which is a suicide prevention communication initiative.
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Sharing – When You Have a Lifelong Struggle With PTSD and Depression
It can be a struggle when so many of our friends and even professionals want to help us overcome abuse to “get back to” ourselves when there is no previous version of ourselves to use as a target. I don’t think this should be the goal anyway. The goal for any child abuse victim should not be to go back to being a younger version of themselves before the abuse, the goal should be to build a life after abuse. I didn’t find much healing in trying to remember my early childhood, but I found a ton of healing in having someone help me design the life I wanted to have as an adult and helping me feel worthy and capable of having that.
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Sharing – Having your pain invalidated is associated with increased shame and, in turn, an increased risk of depression
There’s more at the link, but again I’m going to ask, given the positive impacts of validating someone’s pain and emotions, and the negative impacts of invalidating those same things, why would we do anything else?
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Sharing – Just how useful is childhood therapy?
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.
