School

  • Sharing – 6 Things People Actually Need To Improve Their Mental Health Right Now

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    It’s all well and good to suggest someone take a mental health day, or maybe a spa day to relax and recharge. No one has a solution for doing that when you don’t get paid sick leave, or struggle to find childcare. It’s easy to suggest time in nature to people who live in a high-rise Section 8 building barely scraping by, or suggest that kids should get help when budgets for in-school mental health programs are being cut.

    Suggesting it isn’t going to make it possible. We have a massive problem with access to any kind of mental health care. If we don’t figure that out, the rest of this doesn’t make any sense.

  • Sharing – Hot Take: The Teens Are the Sanest of Us All

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    The real question is, how do you “treat” this level of anxiety when feeling anxious is a perfectly normal reaction to what you see in front of you every day? Should we even be treating it versus accepting it and teaching young people coping skills instead?

    I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that my own anxiety isn’t going anywhere. I’m learning to live with it, some days better than others, but I don’t see why I should think of my anxiety as an abnormal reaction. It makes perfect sense to me.

  • Sharing – Man who suffered child sex abuse now helps other survivors speak out

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    For Jeremy, the abuse stopped, and then he went on with life seemingly without issue. Until later, when there was an issue. We assume that all survivors keep their secrets because they are ashamed, and many of us do. But there are also survivors who don’t “look” like abuse survivors, they go on with a relatively normal and successful life, until one day they don’t. Someone who looks like your abuser, a different overwhelmingly stressful situation, an inadvertent touch, or a smell, can all bring it rushing back into your consciousness.

    This is another reason why people don’t tell until much later. They don’t really have a reason to, they seem to be “over it”, but they aren’t always really over it.

    This is yet another example of survivors being unique individuals and the fact that how each of us is impacted can be different too. Just because another survivor has a different journey than you, doesn’t mean much in the end.

  • Sharing – Kids Who Witness Domestic Violence May Suffer Mentally for Decades

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

    Despite childhood trauma’s disadvantages, kids can recover after childhood trauma and live perfectly healthy, successful lives. They need help. They need a support system and people there to help them navigate it, but childhood trauma is not, as we often hear a life sentence.

    I wish we would talk about this more. Survivors could use the reminder.

  • Sharing – We Didn’t Say ‘Gay’ At My High School. It Almost Cost Me My Life.

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Not acknowledging the humanity of anyone is what should not be acceptable. Trying to will an entire subset of humanity out of existence because they make you uncomfortable or some religious leader has told you that they are dangerous is not acceptable.

    People die from suicide when there is so much pain that they see no path forward. The solution to that is to connect with them, to show them a path forward that involves being in community with people who accept and support them. Anything less than that is a willful decision to let people die.

    If that’s what your beliefs tell you to do, you need better beliefs.

  • Sharing – Here’s How to Actually Talk to Little Kids About Sex

    ByMikeM Reading Time: 4 minutes

    Since you didn’t, and school isn’t allowed to, teach them someone else will. It might be online or in person, but there is nothing more attractive to real pedophiles than kids who lack the basic skills and open communication with adults to tell on them.

    Kids who are aware of their bodies and their place in the world can openly talk about sex with trusted and safe adults, understand what it means to be LGBTQ in some basic fashion and what to do when someone makes them feel threatened, making for poor targets. That’s not grooming; that’s teaching them basic self-defense. That’s teaching them the truth and the basics of reality.

    I know a lot of supporters and people in the child abuse community don’t want to hear this, but I will not stand by while we practice things that make children less safe. Lacking knowledge about these topics does that. You’re not protecting them. You’re endangering them.