J. Balvin talks sensibly about meds and hangs out with Spongebob
Also: Students in Washington State Get a Freakin' Break
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Washington state does a sensible thing
Starting this fall, public school students in my home state can get excused absences to take mental health days and the requirements for it don’t really exist.
In all, students will have an unlimited number of excused absences to use for mental health needs. (Some schools have procedures to contact students with excessive absences to get them back into the classroom.) A doctor’s note or medical diagnosis is not a requirement for a mental health excused absence, said Bridget Underdahl, the supervisor of Project AWARE, a program within OSPI that promotes mental and behavioral health education.
“Mental has as much significance as physical health and is similarly important to one’s overall well-being,” she said, reading a clarification made in House Bill 1834, which ignited the change.
Take what you need, get back to us when you’re ready. I’m pleasantly surprised that mental health days got approved and I’m pleasantly astonished that the days are self-directed.
Will slackers take advantage of this to skip class? Sure. Did slackers already take advantage of other mechanisms to skip class? Duh.
Holy cow I would have liked to have had this in place when I was a Washington public school student. To me, it’s a little like student loan forgiveness. Yes, I had loans that had to be repaid. And no, I don’t want other people to suffer just because I suffered because that’s mean and stupid.
This should be the state song of Washington:
David Sedaris on Monday
Our interview with David Sedaris was an adventure even before it began. We had scheduled a studio for him to go to for the recording but then he got diagnosed with covid. So we did it from his apartment but the recording program on the laptop he was using died halfway through (we’re using the Zoom backup). Then there was a loud pounding on the wall for much of the last part of the interview due to nearby home renovations.
The line that stood out to me, the one we’re using in promos on other Max Fun shows, was “My father was a good character but he wasn’t a good person.” He said some of the same stuff on Fresh Air recently:
I think what changed was there's a real person and then there's the character of that person. And when you're in a story or an essay, you're the character of who you are. My father was not a good person, but he was a great character. I know plenty of people who are good people, but terrible characters. They just don't work in an essay. They just don't advance anything. When I wrote about my father in the past, he was like, "Oh, that nut!, Gee, he can be tough sometimes, but it's lovable Lou!" But that's not really who he was. Now that he is dead, I just feel like I can kind of let that aspect of it go.
Anyway. Monday. Tune in. Turn on. Down load.
This item is on here because of the bluntness of the headline of the article referenced
J Balvin shares the ways he preserves his own mental health: 'I'm medicated'
“For me personally, I’m medicated. So I gotta take it in a humble way and just accept that I need the chemicals to balance my chemicals,” Balvin said. “But also, I meditate, I do sports. I try to be a better person every day, don’t get in trouble, even though sometimes it just comes to me.”
I’m delighted that straight-up taking meds is listed here. Meds get a bad rap so often or are seen as the thing you do when you’ve otherwise failed. And that’s bullshit. Meds help a lot of people. A whole big lot of people are better off in life because of the meds they take.
Unfortunately I’m not all that familiar with Mr. Balvin’s music. I mumbled to myself that he’s a spokesmodel for Balvin Blein jeans but that’s a joke that doesn’t even make sense to myself.
I do not, for instance, know what’s going here:
My reading of the credits on the podcast is about to get a little bit shorter
We’re a little over a month away from the 988 phone number going live in the United States. It’s easier access to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a number that I’ve been giving in the credits of my shows since 2016.
And that’s good. Because I’ve been reading that number off a page for that entire time but if you asked me what the Lifeline’s number is, I could not tell you. I know the last four numbers are 8255 because that spells TALK.
988, though? I can remember that.
US News (which still exists?!) wonders if people are ready.
"At the service level, the 988 transition is a simple number change," said Ryan McBain, a RAND policy researcher who co-led the study.
But on the ground, McBain said, it's a different story.
For one, local crisis centers need enough counselors to handle any influx of calls. Beyond that, some callers will need additional in-person help.
Yet, the study found, many jurisdictions lack such resources. It surveyed 180 state, regional and county health officials, and found that only half said their jurisdiction had short-term "crisis stabilization" services to which callers could be directed.
Even fewer -- 28% -- had urgent care units that could be dispatched to people in urgent need. Meanwhile, only 22% had call centers that could schedule mental health appointments on behalf of people who wanted them.