Sharing – Food Insecurity Linked to Rapid, Reversible Mental Health Deterioration
Doing what we can to lift people out of poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, etc., is mental healthcare.
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Sharing – It takes a village to save a life
Saving a life is not about having a hotline, though they do help. (If you’re struggling, you can find a list of resources here.) It’s not about offering advice like “touch grass” or exercise more. It’s about being in a community that will sit with us at our worst and reminds us that we can get through this because we are not going through it alone.
Too many of us are incapable of creating that community for our friends and family members. If we don’t, who will?
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Sharing – New federal data show a decline in teen suicide
It turns out that teens with safe places to talk about mental health and better access to resources are helped. There is still a lot of work to be done to close the gap between teens who need help and those who can get it, but this is the work that makes a difference in the lives of everyone when it comes to mental health. It’s also hard work. None of the possible reasons for the lower rate discussed in the article are overnight solutions. They take time, money, work, and dedication. Putting a warning label on the internet is easy, but it’s not clear that it has any effect.
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We can’t rehabilitate while actively harming the mental health of prisoners
Being in prison is a traumatic experience in and of itself. Experiencing violence, witnessing death, sexual assault, etc., are additional traumas. We know for a fact that the higher the number of traumatic events that occur in our lives, the higher the rates of mental health issues. Yet, when it comes to prisoners, we seem not to care. We joke about violence and sexual assault in prison. We do nothing to combat corruption and violence among people who work in prisons, and we cut programs aimed at helping people adjust once outside of prison.
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Sharing – Why Lifelong Learning Feeds the Soul
That description of restlessness is familiar to me. That’s how I feel when I’m not engaged in learning something. That’s why I remain curious about the things I care about and why I share so much here and elsewhere online. It’s a motivation for me to continue learning, and that, in turn, helps my mental health.
It’s self-care for me.
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Sharing – Current mental health support systems often fail to meet men’s needs.
In the mental health field, I would agree with the experts quoted in the article. We treat mental health and trauma recovery based on the symptoms shown most often by women, because it is most often women who are seeking help. We define the symptoms based on what we see in those women, which are not the symptoms that every woman would have, let alone others. Someone who is abusing a substance, dealing with anger, taking risks, etc., isn’t typically what we consider “depressed,” but that might be the reality.
