Healing by Thomas Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), explores what’s wrong with the mental health care system and why there are so often poor outcomes for people with mental illness. While he characterized the current system as broken, he expressed hope that there are ways to fix it, …
Investing in mental health care and workplace mental health programs takes money, and in the short term, that can be an obvious deterrent. However, it can really pay off in the longer term. A number of organizations have each put together solid economic cases for investment in mental health, and this post will take a …
I’ve written before about the issues with language policing, but this is probably one of the more controversial areas where I believe that words matter less than people might think. We aren’t “supposed to” talk about successful suicide or failed suicide attempts. Sara of Surviving Sara brought this up recently, and I told her it’s …
Failed/Successful Suicide: Do Words Matter? What’s the Real Failure? Read More »
When Skinny Hobbit shared an iNews article with me the other day about the mistreatment of high-service-needs people with mental illness, I had no idea just how deep of a rabbit hole the whole thing would be. The story of Serenity Integrated Mentoring, the NHS (the UK’s National Health Service), and the way the whole …
Serenity Integrated Mentoring: Suicide Attempt? Do Not Pass Go Read More »
It’s been more than a year, and COVID is still going strong. It’s made a lot of people sick and it’s killed a lot of people. The lockdowns and social distancing have given most people cabin fever, and the ongoing stress has been bad for everyone’s mental health. But what about those of us who …
Has COVID Impacted Your Access to (Mental) Health Care? Read More »
People with mental illness can come up against stigmatized attitudes within mental health care, but having a mental illness diagnosis can also make it difficult to access appropriate care for physical health issues. A recent CBC News story provides an example of a man whose physical issues were written off because he was just a …
Black Lives Matter has been leading the charge in calling for defunding the police. While that may initially sound like a very bad idea, taking money away from the police is only half of the picture. The money that would be spent on police is instead shifted to community programs and supports to handle the …
Defunding the Police: What It Could Mean for Mental Illness Read More »
Stand Tall Little Girl is a memoir by Hope Virgo that focuses on her experience with anorexia nervosa. If you’re active on social media, you may recognize Hope from her Dump the Scales campaign to stop weight from being used as a barrier to mental health services for people experiencing eating disorders. The book is published …
Book Review: Stand Tall Little Girl by Hope Virgo Read More »
Is access to health care a right that should be shared by all people regardless of socioeconomic status? Or is it a privilege that belongs to those who can afford to pay? Views on that seems to depend a lot on where people live. Growing up in Canada, all I ever knew was a public …
When it comes to mental health care, or health care in general for that matter, a simple fact is that the sicker people get, the more it costs to treat them. Sicker people need more acute services, and they need to continue accessing those services for longer amounts of time. Acute care services are extremely …
Why Funding Community Mental Health Care Matters Read More »
