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Sharing – How Mental Health Advocacy Helps Me Bridge Gaps
How often do I see people talking about “wanting to be an advocate” and waiting for someone to invite them to be some sort of official spokesperson as if that is what makes one an advocate. It’s not. Advocates see holes and fill them. Sometimes that’s volunteering to work with kids, sometimes it’s telling your story, and sometimes it’s just seeing the people around you dealing with child abuse or mental health and letting them know they aren’t alone.
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Sharing – Smashing Stigmas: From The Perspective of a Partner
Depression tells you that you are alone. Knowing that there are other people, lots of other people, also dealing with it helps. It also helps to have a constant reminder that someone is on your side in this and looking for ways to remind you that you are not alone. If someone close to you is dealing with depression, and feeling alone, the best thing you can do is just be in their corner, helping them find help and connecting them with other people who can be part of their support network.
That’s how we fight back against something telling us we are alone.
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Sharing – Why telehealth for mental health care is working
It’s all about flexibility. As the article below points out, online appointments don’t work for everyone. They do require a stable and fast internet connection for video, and not everyone has that.
On the other hand, they also point out that not everyone has transportation to a therapist’s office, time away from work to regular travel to appointments, or the ability to get the whole family, for example, transportation to the same location.
For those folks, the switch to Telehealth that the pandemic thrust upon all of us is proving to be a godsend because they have something that was inaccessible to them previously. Even as others need a place to meet with a therapist, or simply connect better in person.
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Shared Links (weekly) Sept. 26, 2021
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The Pandemic Has Hurt Men’s Mental Health. Other Men Can Help
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10 Mental Health Podcasts That Will Help You Feel Seen (and Teach You Something, Too)
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You are not alone: How to raise awareness during suicide prevention month
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Colleges expand mental health services for students
– It’s nice to see a report on increasing services somewhere.
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How to Respond to ‘Toxic Positivity’ Mindsets: 5 Things You Can Say
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Sharing – Toxic Positivity: Harmful or Helpful
It’s the insistence that everyone around you also is positive all the time, demanding “Good Vibes Only” as the article points out, that worries me. Because people in real pain, social issues that cause real harm, etc. are not good vibes. When a team was winning gold medals, no one wanted to do more than focus on that success, and repeated stories of abuse went ignored. Is our constant need for positivity forcing us to ignore racism, homelessness, abuse, and many other social issues that we need to do more than give passing support to on social media?
Maybe most importantly, are there people in our lives right now hurting, who desperately need our support, who we are ignoring because they bring us down?
