“The Gesture”
by jinterwas @flickr.com
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/jinterwas/5644740254/)
Biting the Trolls Back
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To Empower without Condescension
There is a habit I have witnessed within a multitude of places in the perinatal support realm. It is the habit of treating women who are struggling as if they were instead their infants. The habit of “Oh, she’s not well enough to do this yet, tell her to do x,y, or z instead” or “What is she THINKING” when a mother attempts to regain her foothold in the world at large as a normal human being.
It disgusts me.
Mothers with mental health issues are still adults.
They have a sense of self, intelligence, a sense of the way life is meant to be lived, and they know how to do what needs to be done. Right now, however, they may need a little bit of support. That does not mean, however, that we lay them down, swaddle them, stick a pacifier in their mouths, and treat them as if they are infants who need every thing done for them.
Why on earth is it that we do this to those who are suffering and struggling?
Their very fight is one dedicated to returning to the person they once were and want to be again. When you treat them as an infant, you decry their struggle. You strip the person they once were completely out of the equation, turning it into a pointless battle. In fact, when you treat them this way, you are doing more harm than good.
I would not want to be demeaned when I reached out for support – would you?
When a mother reaches out for help, she has managed to gather enough courage to say “I can’t do this on my own.” Respect her strength and audacity.
When a mother reaches out for help, she expects to be heard. Hear her voice, her adult voice, and respond in kind.
When a mother reaches out for help, she expects to be met with compassion and respect. Do that. Do not belittle her behaviour or her requests. Guide her, refer her, but dear God, do NOT tear her down any more than she has already been torn down.
One of my primary goals when women reach out to me for support is to respect them as adults, as humans, as independent women who are temporarily scared shitless by the dark hole surrounding them. They do not need me to baby them any more than a soldier needs to be babied after being injured during war. They don’t need me yelling at them either, but you get what I mean.
Strike a balance. Be compassionate, respectful, firm, and guiding, but do NOT demean, belittle, or treat a woman as incapable of participating in her own recovery. The second you deem a woman as incapable of participating in her own recovery, you have opened the door to defeat.
If we expect to help others recover, we must empower them without condescension. If we cannot do this, we absolutely should not be in the field of helping others because we are only harming.
Hear, respect, respond, guide, empower, let go.
These are the basic rules by which I operate. Simple. Straightforward. Rooted in compassion.
The next time someone reaches out to you with a mental health issue -postpartum or not- keep these words in mind. You might be surprised at how far it will get you – and how many lives it will save.
Dear Sting, Postpartum Depression is No Joking Matter
Sting played a small venue in Chicago last night to promote ‘Last Ship’, according to this article written by Scott C. Morgan.
The article discusses the process Sting went through to bring ‘Last Ship’, a Broadway musical, to life.
Then at the end, is the kicker.
Though Sting is writing the score for “The Last Ship,” he won’t be appearing in the show. So Seller asked the singer how it will be for him to see other people performing his songs onstage.
“I imagine I’m going to have postpartum depression,” Sting joked.
Oh, Sting.
I have been a fan since I was a pre-teen and had to sneak off at my grandmother’s house to watch videos on MTV. Yanno, back when MTV actually showed videos.
You’ve been a source of solace for me in my dark times. I used one of your songs in a playlist of mine as I healed from my own bout of severe Postpartum OCD. The rhythm was just right and I liked the emotion it evoked within me.
But now?
I can’t do that.
Because you’ve said this.
In eight words, you have managed to completely undermine the seriousness of what I experienced. What millions of women experience every year. In eight words.
Do you see how easy it is to marginalize someone else’s experience? How easy it is to compare the hell that is a Perinatal Mood Disorder by saying you’ll go through the same thing as you watch other people perform your songs? While it may not be easy to see other people perform your art, I guarantee you that it is a hell of a lot easier than the depths of hell I and millions of other women witness as survivors and warriors in the trenches against PMADs.
We fight, Sting, for our fields of gold, fragile as we are. We fight because maybe, just maybe, tomorrow we’ll see a brand new day filled with hope. We don’t want to be the shadows in the rain, never coming home.
Please, think about what you are saying before you say it. Because when you do not think before you speak, you end up hurting people, minimizing their experiences, and comparing their hell to something which is not even close to their experience.
For now, I am gonna have to do the opposite of Rick Astley and give you up because you let me down.
Celebrating by Giving Back: Pregnancy & Postpartum Support MN
I’m excited to share with you about Pregnancy & Postpartum Support MN. I’m even more excited to tell you that their Associate Director, Crystal Clancy, will be our guest on Monday evening. We will be discussing how a Postpartum Helpline functions and what goes into getting it up and running.
According to Crystal, here’s a bit about the organization:
How we started:
We started in 2006 as a small group of mental health practitioners with a desire to support new /expectant parents who are struggling with mental health difficulties. Our goal was to provide resources and education to professionals and new/expectant parents.
What we do: What PPSM offers that is unique are two things:
1) The resource list for practitioners and parents. This is a list of vetted mental health practitioners and psychiatrists who specialize in perinatal mental health. We also list support groups, classes, and are working on adding alternative options.
2) The HelpLine, which is a call in line for parents and providers who are looking for resources and ongoing support. They can be paired with a trained peer volunteer, most of whom have survived their own experience with a PMAD, or know someone very close to them who has. The peer volunteer offers phone support, and we make it clear that it is NOT a substitute for therapy, but more of a “am I going to get through this?” helping hand.
Planned events:
The annual Beyond the Baby Blues Conference in June, sponsored by NAMI; we are also hoping to pull together a 5K for next fall! In addition, we try to have “Meet and Greets” 3-4 times per year for people who would like to know more about PPSM and how they can get involved.
How people can donate/volunteer:
On our website (which should be back up and running soon), or they can contact us through our Facebook page and we can find a workaround that they can donate to Paypal for PPSM or find out how they can volunteer.
Here’s the link to PPSM’s FB page. Click there to find out more about them and nose around their social media presence. As Crystal shared, the website is under construction at this time and they hope to have it up and running soon.
I hope y’all have a great weekend! Crystal and I are looking forward to chatting with you on Twitter on Monday night at 8:30pm ET, 7:30pm CT, and 5:30pm PT. Just follow the hashtag #PPDChat. See you there!
Green Shoes, The NFL, and Mental Health Stigma
The NFL is making a “Crucial Catch” this month but it has nothing to do with Mental Health. Instead, they have been partnered with various breast cancer organizations to raise awareness and funds for battling breast cancer.
Participation started back in 2008 with a myriad of events as evidenced in this article, “NFL Supports Breast Cancer Awareness Month”. This year, the awareness campaign continues. Not only do players wear pink gear, but it is also auctioned off to raise funds for research. Which, in theory, is a great idea, and as someone who has lost a family member to breast cancer, I understand the desire to increase awareness and provide funds for research.
As a football fan, however, I hate the month of October. I cannot stand pink. I have hated the colour ever since I brilliantly decided at age 7 that Pepto Bismol Pink was a terrific colour for my walls and I lived in that Pepto “Abismol” Pink room for nearly 5 years before escaping it into a soothing forest green room with merlot trim.
My point here is not about the colour. It’s about the NFL ignoring an awareness week which occurs during the month of October.
In case you do not follow mental health news OR the NFL, there has been a lot of discussion regarding Brandon Marshall’s desire to wear green cleats during tonight’s Bears v. Giants (don’t get me started on the Giants’ 0-5 giddyup to the season because that’s a whole ‘nother post) game. The NFL flat out told Marshall he couldn’t do it. Then they said he could but that he would be fined. Marshall plans to pay the fine and match it with a charity donation. A donation most articles make clear will go to a cancer-care organization with the mention that he is also trying to work out details of donating to an organization making a difference in the Mental Health World.
Here’s the thing, though, from my perspective – with the big brouhaha the NFL has made regarding Marshall’s desire to wear green cleats, it seems to the casual observer as if they do not want to raise any awareness regarding Mental Health issues. On the other hand, however, their very refusal and the back and forth with Marshall does have people talking about his condition and desire to raise awareness. The NFL’s aversion to Marshall’s desire to raise awareness on the field also makes it seem, to me, that the NFL cares more about the state of a woman’s breasts vs. the state of her mind.
Marshall struggles with Borderline Personality Disorder, something an article in SI from May 2012 describes as evidence of the strides the NFL has made in making the mental health of players matter:
The hope is to create a stigma-free environment in which players feel more comfortable working through their mental health issues. Bears receiver Brandon Marshall reached a breakthrough of sorts last July, when he announced that he had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder; the moment hints at the strides engagement programs are making behind the scenes.
The NFL also runs a Life Line specifically for players, former players, and their families, accessible on the web and via phone. The Life Line was launched in 2012. I wasn’t aware of it until today as I was Googling for this piece.
In addition, the NFL has been adding more and more psychologists to behind the scenes team rosters, something the previously mentioned SI article details.
With this internal attention to the mental health of their players and families, isn’t it time the NFL brought some of their powerful presence in the psyche of the American male to the table and made mental health awareness an issue? With the loss of Junior Seau, last year’s incident with Kansas City’s Jovan Belcher, Paul Oliver’s recent suicide and the loss of several other players in the same manner, the NFL needs to do more than just support mental health behind the scenes because without public action, it is all too easy to assume that nothing is being done. It is also extremely easy to assume there is no support when you have the NFL threatening a player wanting to do something as simple as wear a different colour cleat to raise awareness for Mental Health issues, something said player struggles with himself.
I get that October is taken for Breast Cancer Awareness.
All I’m asking for is one weekend where the players wear Green, as Brandon Marshall wants to do tonight, to raise awareness for Mental Health Issues. If they can do it for Breast Cancer and raise millions of dollars for research and awareness campaigns, imagine what they could do if they dedicated the same amount of energy to Mental Health research and awareness, particularly in a sport with a hard-core dedicated male audience taught by society NOT to talk about their emotions.
For now, though, I guess we will suffer through the month o’pink and hope everyone has healthy boobs instead of healthy minds.
WAY TO GO, NFL.