Sharing – More than 50,000 Americans died by suicide in 2023 — more than any year on record
Does American society care about mental illness or not? Right now, I would argue that our society would get a failing grade on whether we care.
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Houston Landing Series on Deadly Detention
That’s a problem. Building more jails isn’t going to solve it. Creating processes that help identify inmates with mental health issues but not the resources to immediately get them into treatment isn’t helping either. The numbers will just get higher. The only thing that will help is getting more resources to the people who need them. But we don’t. I believe the biggest reason we don’t is that we don’t see homeless people with mental health issues who run into legal problems as people who are worth the effort.
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Sharing – Everybody Deserves Empathy
As Scarlett discusses, it’s easy to feel sympathy for the “good” people with mental health issues. That would be the folks who didn’t commit a crime, and who can act mostly in socially acceptable ways. The ones who have much messier situations often escape our empathy, especially if they happen to be homeless, or a member of an underrepresented group.
Mostly though, it’s just luck. Just as I’ve mentioned many times that I was privileged and lucky enough to be able to get help to learn how to deal with my trauma, I was also lucky enough to have only been homeless for a little while, and to have not had a violent or disruptive outburst that led to my being imprisoned or killed.
That luck doesn’t make me more worthy of empathy. It was just luck.
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Shared Links (weekly) June 12, 2022
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Should you feel compassion for prisoners?– what if I told you that maybe 72% of people in jail have diagnosable and long untreated, mental health disorders?
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Live, laugh, lava: Yellowstone offers respite for teens struggling with mental health
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Sharing – Prison is no place for people with mental illnesses. I know because I was in one
There is a direct link between the growing prison population and the lack of mental health resources. The only difference is that we can scare people into paying to build more prisons and keep “dangerous people” away from us. It’s much harder to convince people to invest in prevention through mental health treatment, even if that would be much more effective in protecting everyone.
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Sharing – What American Mental Health Care Is Missing
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?
