Pro sports teams are not social service agencies
So let's not write them huge checks! And let's take mental health days! And love corn!
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Just a short and punchy newsletter today. Four items instead of five. Because I’m trying to take time off. I guess for me time off means reducing my workload by 20%. Don’t be like me. Instead, be like students taking mental health days…
Back to school and just taking a day to friggin’ not go
Early August was always kind of a bummer for me when I was a kid and would walk near any kind of store that sold school supplies. “BACK TO SCHOOL!” shouted gaudy banners, often with some kind of chalkboard font. Gross. “BACK TO THE SALT MINES!” they might as well have said. I didn’t like school.
The problem was the relentlessness of it all. School was every. single. day. The only way out was a feigned illness (I always got caught), an actual illness, or skipping class (I always got caught).
But society sometimes improves! In some ways!
And it’s getting a little better! Society, I mean! In certain ways!
There are currently 12 states where students are legally allowed to take mental health days: Washington, California, Illinois, Maine, Virginia, Colorado, Oregon, Connecticut, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Kentucky. Additionally, there are five states where bills for mental health days have been proposed, including Florida, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
988 is live but complicated
It’s a great thing that 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, is up and running. People can reach out in the worst of times and get help or at least get heard. The fact that it’s now a government operation, however, is causing some discomfort among some people in groups that have historically been abused by the U.S. government. And alternatives are available:
Black people who call BlackLine co-founder Vanessa Green often do not consider dialing the national hotline to avoid possible law enforcement interactions, she said.
Police encounters with historically marginalized people can “create unintended harms including violence, traumatization and criminalization,” according to minutes from a meeting of the Individuals and Families with Lived Experience Committee the national lifeline assembled. A 2020 Prison Policy Initiative study and survey found police threatened or used force against Black and Latinx people twice as often as white people.
BlackLine’s national team of volunteer “listeners” connects Black, brown and Indigenous callers to local services whether they need housing, domestic violence shelters or medical attention.
What? Gross! What??
Maybe I should list the headline here so you could say What? also:
OC Spends a Third of Mental Health Outreach Money on Sports Teams: Is It Working?
I know nothing about Orange County, California but I think I can answer that question anyway:
No!
In the last five months, OC Supervisors have signed contracts that brought the total spent on the Anaheim Ducks’ and Los Angeles Angels’ sports advertising campaigns to just under $14.5 million.
Those contracts are set up to highlight the OC Health Care Agency’s mental health programs offered to residents struggling with mental illness and to raise awareness on the issue according to Dr. Veronica Kelley, the agency’s chief of Mental Health and Recovery Services.
But Kelley also said they’re not sure how effective the ad campaign will be.
This is ridiculous and bad and also ridiculous.
I know Colin Hanks a little bit and I asked him if he ever gets together with Peter Scolari’s kids to do a Bosom Buddies dress-up evening and he said no and I think it annoyed him because how could it not?