Hattie is, of course, correct. We want people to talk and seek out help with their mental health issues, but we have to acknowledge this too:<\/p>\n
“There are thousands of people waiting for therapeutic help right now. But they cannot access it, often because, like me, they cannot afford it. Instead, we find our way onto a waiting list that can seem never-ending (or quite literally, is never-ending), or we turn to the likes of Samaritans for anonymous help over the phone.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As she goes on to say in the post below, when someone needs help, and needs support, simply telling them to get therapy and going about your own life not thinking about that conversation again is not enough. We have to recognize that therapy may not be available for them, or it may be quite a long time before they can get therapeutic help. What do they do until then? What can we do, as a society, to make mental health care more accessible to everyone? Because right now, it’s not accessible to a very large number of people who need it.<\/p>\n
What do we do to correct that? That’s a much harder question, and will likely require a lot more thought, work, and hard decisions to be made. It’s certainly not something I can provide a pithy answer for in a short blog post. But, we can recognize the need to do that work, and have those hard conversations. It has to start somewhere.<\/p>\n
See, it’s really not so simple, is it?<\/p>\n