World Suicide Prevention Day is Also Hurricane Prep Day This Year for MePin

World Suicide Prevention Day is Also Hurricane Prep Day This Year for Me

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

I had considered writing something about Suicide Prevention Day as it approached, but then we also found out that Francine is approaching as well, and my attention has been on hurricane prep instead of writing for the blog.

As I sit here early in the evening, though, it occurs to me that my focus on working and also preparing for the storm is a metaphor for suicide prevention. Consider:

You have to prepare for the worst and make all of your plans before the storm arrives. Once the storm is on you, stocking up on water, charging your electronics, figuring out your escape route, etc., is impossible. It’s too late.

We did all those things 24-72 hours before the storm, which should make landfall sometime tomorrow. We’ve got our water stock and have everything on chargers, batteries, and flashlights ready. Our cars are full of gas, cash is on hand, and ice is getting picked up now.

If/when the power goes out tomorrow, we’ve got the necessities and a pretty good idea of where we will head on Thursday if it appears we’ll be without power for a few days.

Similarly, we don’t wait until someone is in a mental health crisis to figure out how to keep them alive. Plan. Know who to call, where to go, and what activities help you in crisis. Let the people in your life know the plan so they know what to do.

Please don’t wait until the storm is on you to figure out how you will ride it out. Find your local resource, connect with your support network, and know what self-care works best for you. Follow the plan, and make sure it’s flexible enough to adjust on the fly if something changes. It’s the smart thing to do.

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    When it Comes to Abuse, Trafficking, and Violence, Do We Have a Race and Gender Problem?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    What I want to address, however, is how our society defines victims and how it leaves far too many people behind. The article above is a great example. How many people, if asked about sex trafficking, picture little white girls or women abducted from Target? Probably a lot. For many, the only information they’ve ever gotten about trafficking are warnings about Target or shopping mall parking lots from their Facebook friends. They don’t know how many teenage boys from broken homes, living in poverty, are pulled into being trafficked. How many gay youths, rejected by their families, fall victim to it? How many immigrant children here, with no parental supervision, are sold off by the people who should be protecting them from sexual slavery? 

    Those stories, even if they’re told, are not going to grab national headlines. They are not going to evoke world-wide outrage and sympathy. Those are things that happen to “other people”. We might even be tempted to start looking for reason why it’s their own fault, or at least the parents fault, right? 

    From a media perspective, we also have to keep this in mind. An abduction of a young white girl from her home, is a rare event. It’s actually newsworthy because it happens so rarely. When it happens, it’s shocking. A trans, minority, teen being coerced into selling themselves, with no one to turn to for protection, isn’t any of those things. A gay male teen being kicked out of their parents house and trying to make it through homelessness, is also not something that happens so rarely that there would be major news coverage of it. These things happen all of the time. So often, that they aren’t really news. 

    So, which group should we have support and services for? I’d like to vote for ALL OF THEM. But that will take educating people about the reality of who gets abused, who gets trafficked, and for us all to accept that it happens everywhere. Until we get there, and are willing to see all different types of people as victims, we will continue to fail one group or another. That’s not acceptable. 

  • Why SEL Should Not Be Controversial

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    While I’m not an expert by any means, I look at it similarly to how I look at mental health in the workplace. You simply aren’t going to get the best results from people until you recognize that they are people first, and employees (or students) second. That means that they cannot perform their best when they are also dealing with various life situations and struggles that have nothing to do with the immediate work at hand, and we would get better results if we made efforts to support the whole person and not just the robot that is there to do work.

    SEL is that for schools. It recognizes that kids come to school with a variety of issues that would hinder their ability to be successful in school, and makes an effort to support them in those struggles so that they can be more successful not only with school work but with the interactions they have with teachers and other students.

    But, this acronym has gotten mixed in with all the other things that some parents are upset about and they are demanding that schools stick to teaching math, science, and reading instead. Let me try and point out why this is a mistake.

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