Mental Health

  • Sharing – How to Respond When Mental Health Advice Feels Like Judgment

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Look, I get it, you tried something and it helped you, or you’ve seen it help someone else. Clearly, you are excited about the possibility of helping others, but you’re forgetting something. You’re forgetting that the person you are sharing this advice with, isn’t you.

    When you come walking into a conversation with friends, or especially into online communities with statements like the ones above, the message you are actually sending is “Gee, fixing this is easy, you’re just doing it wrong”.

    Imagine using those actual words towards someone you barely know. You wouldn’t, would you? At least if you’re a decent human being, you wouldn’t. But you are totally willing to take your beliefs, your own experience, and completely railroad another person’s current reality with it, you are doing something awfully similar. In a moment of emotional vulnerability, you have come in, guns blazing, with the suggestion that all of this pain they are in, and all of this struggling they are going through, should have been easy to avoid.

  • Sharing – How the Mental Health System Failed Me

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    Behavioral issues in school, getting in trouble, and wham! Instead of mental health care, you’re a criminal case. We do it to adults all the time, why would we not see it the same way with kids? Especially kids without the family means to get private care and assistance?

    This is what we do, and we need to figure out something else. The criminal justice system is not mental health care.

  • Shared Links (weekly) Feb. 28 2021

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    The problem with perfect

    6 Happiness Books That Mental Health Experts Trust

    Make Social Media Work For (rather Than Against) Your Mental Health

    The Difference Between Self-Esteem, Self-Confidence, and Self-Compassion

    This Nonprofit Found A Unique Way To Help Sexually Abused Children Heal

    But They Went Willingly – Understanding Teen Sexual Grooming

    Mental Illness and Homelessness

  • Sharing – I’m Open About My Depression—But Not Completely

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    As I have written before, being an advocate online for me means writing, sharing information and insights, interacting with other survivors, etc. but sometimes I just can’t. Not because I’ve lost interest or don’t want to do it, but because I’m just tired of the pushback. I’m tired of having stories about male victims challenged or dismissed, tired of people in the mental health space telling me that everyone should just do what worked for them, tired of dealing with other people’s definitions of what healing looks like, or how long it should take, and on and on.

    It’s all stigma, it’s all the stigma that I want to fight against, but some days it’s just exhausting. So I’d rather not talk about it.