John Oliver Takes a Look at Mental Health Care in the US

John Oliver Takes a Look at Mental Health Care in the US

ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

I wanted to share this with you because John Oliver makes some important points about how we have made so many strides in acceptance and encouraging people that it is OK to ask for help, and then the system doesn’t provide it. Sadly things have gotten so bad that we’re trying just about anything, and even the technology isn’t living up to the hype.

Real people with real needs are left with nowhere to turn. A society that claims to care about people cannot accept that status quo.

Sharing – How Does Trauma Affect the Brain?

Sharing – How Does Trauma Affect the Brain?

ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

Read the whole thing. It’s important. Children amid trauma focus on surviving. Their brains focus on surviving and not development. They then grow up to be adults without a chance to develop fully.

The fix is to get kids with resources to help them develop as early as possible. (And to also get them removed from the things causing so much trauma.) The longer this goes on without any treatment, the more damage is done.

We may not be able to prevent every kind of childhood trauma, but we need to understand the impacts and how to treat them. Otherwise, we are simply leaving too many people behind.

Shared Links (weekly) July 3, 2022

Shared Links (weekly) July 3, 2022

ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute
Sharing – If Republicans Were Serious About Addressing Mental Health, This Is What They’d Do
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Sharing – If Republicans Were Serious About Addressing Mental Health, This Is What They’d Do

ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

The article breaks the steps into two large buckets, and I’m going to ask you to consider these when you stop to consider whether your state, local, or federal representatives are actually doing something to improve the state of mental health care.

Are they doing something to make it easier to pay for mental health care services?
Are they doing something to make it easier to find mental health services?

If they’re not doing either of these things, or worse, cutting funding and services, they are not actually interested in improving the mental health situation in the US.

Sharing – 988 call centers struggling to hire people to answer the phones.

Sharing – 988 call centers struggling to hire people to answer the phones.

ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

Creating a new number was the easy part. Similar to raising awareness because it’s necessary, it’s essential, but if there is no one there to provide the help we encourage people to reach out for, it’s not nearly enough. Here’s hoping these state and local organizations can find and train people to provide the necessary help during these calls. That’s only a start, of course. We still have so much work to do to make that help accessible to everyone who needs it. 

In some ways, this struggle to staff the hotline is a microcosm of the entire mental health field right now. We need a lot of resources that just aren’t there right now. Can we figure out a way to get change that?