Mental health thread

The outspokeness of Osaka, Ben Simmons, Kyrie Irving, and Taylor Lorenz, the never-ending stress of us vs. them of social media, and the Great Resignation shows that maybe, little by little, we need to turn the corner on mental health as an open discussion and not as a taboo subject. My father used to say life is grim at best. The struggle is real but life doesn't have to be short, nasty and brutish all the time.

Does it?

 

I'll post links to each episode as this thread progresses, if it does.

In his one season production of Horace and Pete's, Louis CK captured mental health, the brain, and the human condition better than anyone I've ever seen.

Episode 1 of Horace and Pete's

You know, I would subscribe to your dad's newsletter. Getting through one day is a real fucking exercise.

 

We needed to turn that corner a long time ago, decades ago. The stigma attached to mental illness in this country is very real and it does real damage. There has been progress, but not nearly enough. I wonder why more people don't realize that. I doubt there are many people who haven't known someone they cared about who was touched by mental illness. My grandfather suffered from PTSD after World War II which led to the drug abuse that eventually killed him. He died from an overdose when I was very young. Most of the family came to believe it was his way of committing suicide. He never got any help. My father-in-law was medicated for depression most of his life. At least one of my living family members is in the same boat. I wouldn't be shocked if there are more. I've seen the damage mental illness can do, but I've also seen how effective the proper help can be, but the stigma often gets in the way.

 

We dismantled our old mental health apparatus in the 1970s.

But didn't fund its promised replacement in the 1980s.

We've been without one since.

 

My dad's business partner used to say "Disaster lurks around every corner."

He doesn't have a newsletter.

 

After Jan 81 to be more precise.

"We don't wanna pay no taxes for nothin."

 

I admit I had no idea how scarce those resources are until I needed them for my son and lived a nightmare (and spent a fortune) trying to access them.

I live in a densely populated region. There’s a McDonald’s or a 7-11 every 500 feet for 75 miles in every direction, but we had to wait eight months for an appointment with a therapist — ANY therapist. And forget having it covered by “insurance.”

And trying to get help from the school is just another lengthy and costly battle.

Fuck ‘em all.

 

Ronald Reagan busted the Cali looney bins open in 1967-1975.

The lesson of "Watch what they do, not what they say" applied then and it applies today.

 

Fatfuck Engler upset highly favored two-term incumbent Jim Blanchard in Michigan in 1990 mainly because he promised to cut off money for pretty much everything.
Then he went ahead and did it.
Nobody could figure out why the roads and schools went to hell and the streets were filled with homeless mental patients.

 

Probably we could do without the term "looney bin".

Unless you're talking about Joe Don Looney, in which case it is totally appropriate.

 

My dad used to have a T-shirt that, in two lines over the breast pocket, read, "Life is hard, then you die."

We always laughed at it, but it was always sort of an awkward, uncomfortable laugh, and I always hated that T-shirt. I found it incredibly depressing, and not something I'd want to have plastered on my clothes.