Talking About Mental Health: Should We Actually Cut It Out a Bit?
Also, Shanti Das, prisons as really shitty hospitals, and our mental health comfort levels
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Shanti Das on the podcast
Shanti Das of the nonprofit Silence the Shame is on the podcast today.
Unless you’re a music industry insider, you might not know the name Shanti Das, but chances are you know names like Usher, OutKast, and TLC. Those are just a few of the acts that Shanti helped bring to fame in her long and successful career as a recording industry bigwig. Her departure from that business might have seemed abrupt at the time but her mental health had been in decline for a while and Shanti had to put on the brakes. For a while after that, things got worse as tragic events in her personal life drove her to consider suicide. She tells that story and the story of her path to feeling better.
Shanti is a religious person and she talks about finding help with her pastor, Raphael Warnock, now a U.S. Senator from Georgia. He tells her, sure, I’ll pray with you but you’re also going to need some help from mental health professionals. Prayer can be a great supplement to care but it’s not a great substitute.
Are schools talking about mental health… too much?
Here’s an article in the NYT that seems destined to get a lot of push back. I, for instance, audibly yelled NO! at my computer screen when I saw the headline “Are we talking too much about mental health?” Because talking about it a LOT is kind of my whole deal. And especially among young people, where the statistics and trends around mental illness and suicide are pretty thoroughly freaky-outy.
The gist of the article is that young folks are now hearing so much about mental health problems in school that they are self-diagnosing with problems that they might not otherwise have.
Further, schools that talked a lot about mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy weren’t any better off in terms of mental health than schools that didn’t teach those things.
In a paper published last year, two research psychologists at the University of Oxford, Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews, coined the term “prevalence inflation” — driven by the reporting of mild or transient symptoms as mental health disorders — and suggested that awareness campaigns were contributing to it.
“It’s creating this message that teenagers are vulnerable, they’re likely to have problems, and the solution is to outsource them to a professional,” said Dr. Foulkes, a Prudence Trust Research Fellow in Oxford’s department of experimental psychology, who has written two books on mental health and adolescence.
Point:
Counterpoint:
Bleak portrait of mental illness behind bars.
Imagine a hospital but with ten times as many patients but little to no actual medical care taking place. And the patients can’t leave so lots of them die. That’s the American prison system for you, as written about by Glenn Thrush of the New York Times in an article that took a year of reporting and writing.
The country’s jails and prisons have become its largest provider of inpatient mental health treatment, with 10 times as many seriously mentally ill people now held behind bars as in hospitals. Estimating the population of incarcerated people with major psychological problems is difficult, but the number is likely 200,000 to 300,000, experts say.
Many of these institutions remain ill-equipped to handle such a task, and the burden often falls on prison staff and health care personnel who struggle with the dual roles of jailer and caregiver in a high-stress, dangerous, often dehumanizing environment.
Who you’re comfortable talking with about mental health
Pew Research Center did some research, because that’s what they do, about comfort levels around mental health discussions. The leading vote getters probably won’t be all that surprising.
Half of Americans or more say they are extremely or very comfortable talking about their mental health with a close friend (57%), an immediate family member (52%) or a mental health therapist (50%).
That’s the “glass half full” perspective on the research, anyway. The other side of that perspective shows that silence/shame/stigma are still going super strong.
About three-in-ten U.S. adults (31%) say they would be only somewhat comfortable talking with a close friend about their mental health, and an additional 12% would be not too or not at all comfortable with this. Similar shares say this about discussing mental health with an immediate family member or a therapist.
I do wonder about the question, though. I think there has to be a non-zero number of people who are willing to talk about a mental health problem, who see it as a necessity, without necessarily being comfortable with it. These can be hard but valuable conversations.
Julia Duffy on Sleeping with Celebrities
I geeked out on this one. I was a massive fan of Newhart and I’ve been enjoying seeing Julia Duffy on Palm Royale, where she plays a very complicated and hilarious member of Florida high society.
When Julia Duffy is not filming something to entertain and delight you, chances are she’s reading a book. It’s generally non-fiction, often historical, and in one notable recent case, it was all about a tiger. Don’t worry, there isn’t enough action in her detailed descriptions of these books to keep you awake at night. It’s more like Julia, who starred as Stephanie on Newhart and as Mary Jones Davidsoul on Palm Royale, is doing your bedtime reading for you, so you can just shut your eyes and drift away for the evening. Julia even matches John Moe’s mellow dulcet tones to get you extra tuckered out.