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The Benefits of Online Holidays
This Christmas wasn’t exactly a Norman Rockwell painting for me. I actually spent most of the week sick with a nasty head cold. I was working from home, so mostly I had my laptop in bed with me. Given the timing of the holiday, our work schedules, and the distance to our families, my wife…
There’s A Lot of Mental Health Data Out There, But Do We Understand It?
I wanted to write this as a companion to something I wrote on my professional blog, Will Big Data Give Us a Whole Bunch of Questionable Correlations? That post, and this one, is also based on a recent episode of Seth Godin’s podcast. – Sample Size. The reason I think both of those things are…
On Martin Luther King Day
When I think of the famous speeches of Dr. King, I am always reminded of this fact. We have always seen certain groups of people as less deserving of the rights we willingly claim for ourselves. Be it blacks, immigrants, prisoners, those with mental health struggles or disabilities, members of the LGBTQ community, or addicts, it is far too easy to look at them with judgment and disdain. Maybe even fear. They’re different than me. What happens to them is not my concern. They probably brought it on themselves anyway.
Those are all too easy to say. The hard work is in looking at people who are different from us, who live different lives, make different choices, and recognize our common humanity. That’s what Dr. King was talking about. Not being blind to our differences but being aware that we are all human and deserve respect based on that. So when a black man is lynched, or a prisoner dies from a lack of medical care, or someone struggling dies from suicide without access to mental healthcare, or because their own family won’t accept them for who they are, we fail as a society. We fail to see human life as human life.
