I am participating in the A-to-Z Challenge this month and today we are ½ way through the alphabet at the letter M.

                           http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com

Mental Health

Mental Health is one of those things we do not want to talk about but we need to desperately. I think it is safe to say we all know someone who suffers from some form of mental illness after all it seems as though everyone has battled depression at some point in their lives.

There was a time in society when if you exhibited the slightest symptom of being mentally fragile you were subject to being, locked away for years if not for life. These state run psychiatric facilities performed all sorts of horrific experiments on its residents at will.

We decided as a society we were not going to allow our mentally ill to be treated this way any longer. What we did not do was decide how we were going to treat them. We just basically, opened the doors of those ‘nut houses’ and told the residents they were free.

The states allowed these massive buildings to crumble or used them as Halloween attractions. This freed up a lot of state money, which of course quickly was funneled into something else.

That resulted in an epidemic of homelessness and a shortage of mental health out patient care.

We have to do something but nobody really has a clue and our state and federal government representatives wring their hands and move on because no matter what the solution is it is going to be expensive, very expensive.

We the people are beginning to demand something, be done and some politician said gun control. We have to have more control over guns. Yes, this will make us feel better for five minutes but it will not stop crazy people from killing.

Of course, we should have I.D and background checks to purchase a gun. Our representatives, ideas though are bordering on dangerous. They want psychologist and psychiatrist to report to some central information collection sight the mental health records of their patients. I may not be Einstein but if you were a crazy person [and most crazy people are quite brilliant and manipulative] would you go to a doctor for help if you new your information were being shared with who knows whom?

I was hoping the new health care bill would include a solution to our country’s mental health crisis. I read all three-thousand + pages and no, there is no solution to this crisis not even so much as a band-aid.

I do not know what the answer is but I think we need to start at home. We need to stop ignoring our crazy loved ones and gain some courage to help them. I know it’s hard to get any help from our health providers or any outside sources. That is why we need to be more diligent. We should not be buying guns for our unstable kids or letting them stay in our basements playing video games for days. We should not let them go off to college carrying around a stuffed monkey. We should not let them dye their hair carrot orange and play with chemicals.

We need to start by letting our young children learn social skills on their own and stop solving their problems for them. We need to help them learn to get out of uncomfortable situation, safely.

For the mentally ill in our society we need to treat them with kindness, help them to be comfortable talking about their illness and comfortable asking for help. We need to end the stigma so we can work together towards real life solutions.

I blame the Connecticut shootings on Adam Lanza’s mother for giving a mentally ill kid guns and I blame it on his father and brother for leaving him in the care of a woman who just spoiled him to shut him up and did not have his best interest in mind.