Government

  • The importance of unlearning our childhood stories

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    I could not heal until I unlearned that my abuse was something I somehow caused. Unlearning that opened up the possibility of learning something different, namely, that I was abused because someone decided to abuse me. Did that happen overnight? Of course not! Unlearning is a process, and the more closely we identify with a belief, the more difficult it becomes to unlearn it. So many survivors learn at a very early age to keep secrets, that bad things will happen if they tell anyone.

    People who’ve never had that belief drilled into their young minds wonder why victims wait decades to come forward and tell their stories. That’s why! That belief is hard to unlearn. Many of us grew up with silence being the thing that prevents the abuse from being worse. Why should we start discussing it? If you tried to tell someone as a child and got shut down, this only gets worse. 

  • Quick Thought #23 – Change is Needed, but Callousness is Not

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    As I have said many times, solving the mental health issues that plague the US will involve a lot of hard work, difficult conversations, and measured steps to create positive impacts for all of us. Adults need to be adults and have mature discussions about how to help as many suffering people as possible. 

    What we’re seeing from our government now is anything but adults being mature.

  • The US, where being homeless could be a crime.

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    You could argue that the outcome will be a large number of people with mental health issues crammed into a massively overburdened prison system with almost no hope of ever getting out. (Where would they go? Back to being homeless and thus getting arrested again.) 

    We’ve tried that with serious mental illness, and it doesn’t work. It fixes nothing unless you think lots of people with mental health issues dying in prison is the answer. I prefer that most of us are not that callous and uncaring. But most of us aren’t writing these laws and upholding them. That’s for the elite few with power, and I’m not as convinced they would care about anyone with a mental health struggle because they surely don’t do much to provide resources and assistance to struggling people.