Mental Health

  • Cancel Culture Exists Online, It’s Just Not What You’re Expecting

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    It’s enough to make you just give it all up and walk away.

    That, to me, is cancel culture. I know there’s a lot of talk about cancel culture and whether it even exists or not, but frankly, to me, the real canceling that goes on online is when the good, thoughtful and caring, people just walk away instead of being here and having their voices matter. Because they’re tired. They’re tired of the constant outrage, the constant anger directed at them for not doing, and believing, everything random people expect them to. The vitriol directed at them in direct messages, comments, and tweets for simply trying to have a conversation, from all sides. For not supporting conspiracy groups, for not using the correct words, for not advocating for exactly the same things, in exactly then same way. Because if you don’t “agree” with them and show your support, in clear, and often financial, ways, you are the enemy.

    Seriously, it gets old. It’s toxic. It’s exhausting. It makes you question why you even bother with this at all. I, for one, don’t need this in my life on a regular basis. No one does. So, instead of having real conversations about real issues, and doing real education, we’re walking away and letting the worst kinds of people win the internet.

    I’m tired, but I’m not ready to do that. If 19 years of working to educate people, and let anyone know that they are not alone as a survivor, or as a person dealing with mental health issues, isn’t enough for you, and you can’t understand that all of the things I do online to make this happen I do in my spare time, for free, then you can go somewhere else.

    Take all of your fake outrage and fake “facts” with you too.

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    More on Athletes and Mental Health

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    When I wrote about watching Athlete A last week, I mentioned the fact that the win-at-all-costs mentality of USA gymnastics blinded the organization to the fact that girls were being abused right under their noses, and played a role in their lack of response to allegations. They had one guiding quest, winning gold medals, and…

  • Quick Thought #15 – Stigma Around Mental Health Issues May be Lessening During COVID-19, but Will it Stay That Way?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    You may have seen someone talking about this on social media, or in an article online, or somewhere else. I’ve seen it in numerous places. The idea is that, right now, with a pandemic, racial justice issues, and everything else that we are dealing with, suddenly talking about anxiety and depression, or being lonely and…

  • Quick Thought #14 – When it’s Someone You Know, You Know.

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Why do I see these two things as related? Well. let’s start with Sean Astin. It’s hard not to think that he has lived an amazingly privileged life. He’s been famous since he was a little kid, after growing up part of Hollywood royalty. If anyone has the means to shelter himself away from the harder topics of life, he’s one of those people. But he chooses not to, because he’s seen first hand what it is like to life with, and love someone with, mental health issues. That experience drives him to advocacy. He wants to share what it was like, and help others watching a mental health condition tear apart their own family.

    In short, he gets it because he knows.

    The same seems to be true when it comes to how serious COVID-19 really is. It seems to me there are a lot of people thinking it’s not very serious because well, no one they know has died or anything serious. 130,000 “other people” have died in the US. On the other hand, there are those of us who do know people who’ve died, or spent time hospitalized, tend to take it very seriously. Because we know. We’ve seen it. We’ve grieved because of it.

  • How Much Blame Should We Really Get for not Picking up on Grooming?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    Think about it. Right now, this very second, you are reading this post because either you found the headline intriguing and clicked, or someone shared it with you and said you should read it, and you clicked. In both cases, you were persuaded by another person to do something. If you saw it on Facebook or other social media platform, there’s a Facebook algorithm watching you and trying to give you more stuff you like, to persuade you to keep coming back to Facebook, and you’re reading it on a device that you were persuaded to purchase by some other factor in your life. 

    Not to mention the fact that parents, teachers, or someone, somewhere, persuaded you to learn to read. You were persuaded, even manipulated, to go to school, study, become the sort of person who could get a well-enough paying job to own a piece of technology and pay for an internet connection, and all of that wound up with you, right here, right now. 

    You were “groomed” to do what you are doing right now. And yet, so many want to look at children, and make them responsible for knowing which persuasion is good for them and which isn’t. 

  • Just Stop – The Universe did not Cause My Abuse For My Greater Good

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 5 minutes

    I was abused by people who made the decision to abuse me. I did nothing to cause it, and there was no lack of purpose to which I needed to be directed. I was a little kid being beaten, and eventually molested, for years. My purpose in life was to be a little kid. There was nothing fair about it, there was no sense to be made of why it happened, it was the result of another person’s actions which happened to be directed toward me because I was there. And, I was there by chance. Not by divine interference, just random chance.