We need meaningful mental health reform in the United States, but we need to pick the right time to discuss it.
Mental health and gun reform do not belong in the same sentence
Tag: stigma
Why did New York yoke mental health and violence prevention together?
Thanks for reminding us that the only time you care about us is when you think we’re dangerous, New York City.
Living with misophonia
Misophonia is finally, slowly, starting to have its day in the sun — the Washington Post did a feature on it in December, for example, and there seems to be a flickering awareness of what it is. Sort of. With the exception of the people who have it, though, a lot of that awareness is rather dismissive. […]
Fat shaming works just fine
A study published last year in the journal Obesity found that fat shaming is not at all effective in terms of getting people to lose weight. In fact, the researchers found that some study subjects actually gained weight after experiencing perceived weight discrimination, and that the risk of becoming clinically obese increased for those who had been […]
Stigma Impairs Functional Sexual Education
One of my favourite sexual education resources for teens and young adults is Scarleteen, and not just because it’s extremely comprehensive and very inclusive (though it is both of those things). It’s also because the site assumes, straight up and without comment, that teens have sex. That might seem like sort of an odd thing […]
Police and Disability, Again (Still)
The City of Portland (Oregon, not Maine) has been struggling over the last few years with an epidemic of police shootings of mentally ill people so severe that it’s radically restructuring itself in an attempt to address the issue. The fact that Portland, widely regarded as a very crunchy, granola, hipster kind of place, is […]
Mental Health Parity Laws: Fighting Stigma?
Insurance companies in the United States are notorious for their poor mental health coverage. It’s gotten to the point that mental health parity laws have been passed, demanding that insurance companies handle mental health benefits in a manner consistent with benefits related to ‘medical and surgical’ needs[1. Apparently mental health is not a medical need?]. […]
Too Crazy For Clearance: The Dangers of Stigmatising Mental Health Conditions
Let’s say that you are a government employee in the United States, or an employee of a private contractor who works with government materials. If you work with sensitive material, you need a security clearance. Security clearances come at a lot of different levels for different kinds of materials, and they all require a background […]