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The hard work is developing the proper resources for people who need help after the immediate crisis. That costs money. Money that a significant number of people in the US will balk at paying because it goes to “other people.” These are the same people who balk at paying taxes for schools when they don’t have kids or at higher insurance premiums, let alone the taxes necessary for things like Medicaid, that pay for people who “made poor health decisions.” So, rather than stand up to that kind of thinking, many politicians at the state and local levels will go along with that. They won’t even attempt to provide funds for mental health services.
Some will even go so far as to say those services are just propping up “weak” people who need to get over those issues.
At the end of the day, while we can point to the number of people who talk about mental health and are supported for talking about it, we cannot say we’ve eliminated the stigma associated with it until we all put our money where our mouth is and provide the help that people need.
Until then, I’m afraid that many people will learn lessons the hard way, that it’s easy to write off funding resources for “other people” until you or someone you love winds up being one of them.
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This might just mean that the majority of the people around us right now are likely dealing with some sort of mental health struggle. This would also mean that there is nothing wrong with us, that we are the normal ones. That there is no weakness in us, or something lacking in us, but rather that we are having a normal reaction to a world that is causing anxiety and depression.
The fix is out there, not inside of us. We can only do what we can to cope, take care of ourselves, and find the tools that allow us to continue, but the real solution is much larger than that. The real solution will require much more. The real solution to mental health issues is fixing society and the world we live in.
If you want solutions, that’s where you start. How do we build a world where being anxious and depressed isn’t an understandable and normal reaction?
Sometimes our coping strategies need to adjust to these new realities. That doesn’t mean you are failing, it means you need to adapt. It’s no different than what I often encounter at work, where the technology we work with and assist clients with changes and evolves, and we need to change and evolve with it. What we did yesterday isn’t going to work in today’s reality.
The same is true for our mental health toolkit. We need to keep evolving with it to adapt to changes.
