There are some pretty cool things happening in the world of mental health lately. We thought it’d be good to share some tweets from some mental health organizations. Social media has it’s downsides, but connecting people to resources is not one of them. Being aware about what’s going on in the mental health field is an important way to get the best information possible. These organizations are working hard to get the word out there about the importance of mental health. Check it out below!
Heard around mental health twitter
Today (3/30) is world bipolar day! This event is meant to bring awareness to bipolar disorders. Here’s what NAMI (The National Alliance on Mental Illness) had to say:
Smiling depression. A person can look as if their whole life is together but still be suffering from depression. Everyone experiences and expresses their depression symptoms differently. Psychology Today defines smiling depression as “appearing happy to others, literally smiling, while internally suffering with depressive symptoms. Smiling depression often goes undetected. Those suffering often discount their own feelings and brush them aside. They might not even be aware of their depression, or want to acknowledge their symptoms due to a fear of being considered weak.”
We can all have trouble understanding one another, but especially young people and their parents. On one hand, it is normal for young people to seek and want privacy – on the other hand, we know the better parents are at communicating with their children, the better their child does in all things parents want them to stay away from – including tobacco, drugs, alcohol, risky sex, and violence.
Here are some tips we modified from the U.S. Department of Education about communicating with your young person:
For today’s daily does of positivity, we wanted to share a website all about animals. The Dodo shares articles and videos “for animal people.” Their mission states: “Our goal is to serve up emotionally and visually compelling, highly sharable animal-related stories and videos to as many people as possible to help make caring about animals a viral cause.”
Bullying and harassment are unacceptable whether it takes place in person or online. First and foremost when it comes to cyber bullying, your adolescent should understand that it is not their fault. Bullying is not just an argument your adolescent was pulled into but it is repetitive and continuing cruel treatment. Some steps that your adolescent can take when experiencing this is to not respond in-the-moment. Your adolescent doesn’t want to empower a bully by engaging in this negative and aggressive dialogue. More often than not, it does not help the situation. It will often pull them out of character and potentially entice the bully to continue because they know the effect they are having over your adolescent. Encourage your adolescent to save and remember the evidence so it can be shown to someone to get help in the future, rather than just going with the initial reaction of responding.
In American society, a lot of words are casually kicked around that have the power to be stigmatizing, insulting, and harmful. Almost everyone is guilty of it; you find out that it’s supposed to be 70 degrees in February, “that’s crazy!” or you find out that your flights been delayed for five hours, “Oh my gosh, that’s insane…” These words, and many others like them, are thoughtlessly thrown around. But by using this type of language, society makes light the experiences of those with mental illness and other types of disabilities.
Because these terms are used so widely across our culture, replacing these words can seem like kind of a hard task. But it is an essential step to destigmatizing mental illness. Many of those with mental illness don’t have the same privilege as those who aren’t triggered when saying or hearing words like crazy, insane, and psycho. Words are powerful. They have the ability to hurt, demean, and stigmatize groups of people. To get started on finding alternatives, we found a great list of suggested words to use.
Lydia X.Z. Brown is an activist, writer and advocate for disability justice. Her website has a page on ableism and language. On it, Brown stated “I have included lists of alternatives to ableist slurs, descriptions, and metaphors, if you’re interested in unlearning the patterns of linguistic ableism in your own language.” Brown also provides a list of ableist words that can be stigmatizing (e.g. crazy, lunatic, nuts, stupid). Here is the list of alternatives from Brown’s website, with added definitions to some terms from dictionary.com: Continue reading Alternatives to the Language We Use
The SOVA team recently had the exciting opportunity to sit down with Dr. Carla Chugani, Ph.D., LPC, a licensed professional counselor that specializes in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). DBT is a type of therapy that was developed to treat individuals with suicidal thoughts and certain mental illnesses (such as borderline personality disorder). We had the opportunity to ask Dr. Chugani some questions about DBT. Here’s what she had to say!
What makes DBT effective?
Dr. Chugani explained that there are four parts of Dialectical Behavior Therapy:
Weekly group therapy sessions
Weekly one-on-one sessions with a therapist
Phone coaching – this allows patients to reach their therapist between sessions for support
Therapist consultation team – provides DBT therapists with support and motivation
These four different parts of DBT work together to help individuals achieve their goals and make positive changes. Dr. Chugani pointed us to a great website that further explains these components.
The group therapy sessions of DBT is like a class where the teacher is a group leader who plans out certain assignments and homework. The “class” tries to teach and encourage certain behavioral skills. Homework is assigned so the individual can practice what they learned in “class” in their everyday life. The one-on-one individual therapy sessions of DBT aims to increase an individual’s motivation. It also tries to apply the skills that were taught and learned during group therapy to specific challenges in the individual’s life. Individual and group therapy are carried out at the same time. The third part of DBT is phone coaching. This means the patient can reach their therapist between sessions for support. The last part of DBT is the therapist consultation team. This is a team that provides support and motivation to other therapists practicing DBT. The consultation team exists to make sure therapists are providing the best treatment possible to benefit the patient. Continue reading Professional Spotlight: Dr. Chugani and Dialectal Behavior Therapy
Wear Your Label is an online store that creates clothing to get the conversation started about mental illness. Their profound motto is: “It’s okay not to be okay.” Wear Your Label makes clothing that reduces stigma (they have a shirt that says “stigma free” on it), promotes positive body image and embraces mental health. Each of the team members behind Wear Your Label has experienced mental illness. All of the clothing items have phrases that support mental health. They also have a bracelet line with various colors signifying different types of mental illnesses. Watch their video to learn more!
Wear Your Label partnered with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in 2016. In this collaboration, they created clothing that aligns with NAMI’s #stigmafree campaign. Additionally, the online clothing store donates 10% of their proceeds to mental health initiatives. These initiatives include Jack.org, the Jed Foundation, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Project UROK, and Project 375, and the Semicolon Project. Wear Your Label also promotes fair, humane, and ethical work standards where their clothing is made.
Check out the website and let us know what you think!
