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Mental Health America Blog
Mental Health America Blog - Chiming In
By Jennifer Cheang, MHA Associate Director of Digital Marketing
Happy International Women’s Day!
Today is a day to celebrate women and we are highlighting women who are living in recovery with mental health conditions and choose to use their platforms to spread awareness.
1. Lady Gaga – PTSD
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By Joseph Gervasi, Board Member of MHA of Essex and Morris County
The forecasted weather motivated a change of plans that sent me and my wife south on the Garden State Parkway to salvage as much time as possible on the quiet Belmar beach before we were shut down for winter. As we combed the shoreline gathering shells that had washed up after the weekend's nor'easter, I noticed a young woman sitting alone on the sand staring out over the ocean. Her total and...
By Kelly Davis, MHA Director of Peer Advocacy, Supports, and Services
Health care is increasingly focused on the quadruple aim of better outcomes, lower costs, healthier populations, and happier providers. The drive to provide services that promote these goals means decisionmakers must be creative in supporting the people they serve.
In behavioral health, peer support specialists are key to meeting this aim. Research has...
by Kelly Davis, Director of Peer Advocacy, Supports, and Services at Mental Health America
New research from Pew Research Center confirmed what many have known: young people are struggling and see mental health as a challenge. Seventy percent of the teens surveyed reported that depression and anxiety were...
By Olivia Lubarsky, Student-Athlete, Towson University
Imagine a common scenario, two athletes on the bench. One struggling with depression, and one recovering from surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles tendon. Which seems more severe? Glaring social stigma points to the athlete with the physical injury. But mental illnesses are just as detrimental to performance. After battling depression my freshman year, and rupturing my Achilles during my...
By Colleen M. Werner
My eating disorder first started to develop when I was still a child. I heard negative comments about my body from several trusted adults for most of my early childhood, including my pediatrician telling me that I needed to eat more salads and my grandfather telling me that I was built like a linebacker. I watched countless people around me immerse themselves in diet culture and hate their bodies. At 10 years old, I...
By Martha Neary, PsyberGuide.org
The last decade has seen an increased emphasis on workplace wellness with many workplaces introducing initiatives to support and improve employee health and wellbeing. These initiatives serve multiple goals.
Better employee wellness:
- increases productivity;
- decreases absenteeism;
- promotes employee satisfaction;
- creates a more positive work environment; and
- reduces...
By Taylor Adams, MHA Programs and Operations Manager
There are few choice words I would use describe myself: I am a daughter. I am a sister. I am a friend, a Pinterest enthusiast, a well-intentioned but awful plant mom. And I am a frequent client to my therapist because I have depression. Sometimes it feels like that last descriptor overshadows the other parts of my identity. Without the appropriate help, it consumed me as a young person who had lacked a real...
By Marcie Timmerman, CEO of MHA Kentucky
A growing trend in state and federal Medicaid policy is the establishment of “work requirements” or “community engagement requirements”. Essentially, these involve requiring recipients to report a certain amount of work, education, or volunteer hours or they lose health care coverage.
Everyone agrees people who can work should do so. In 2017, the Kaiser Family Foundation found...
By America Paredes, MHA Associate Vice President of Partnerships and Community Outreach
Photo courtesy of Netflix
At Mental Health America (MHA), we’ve explored the larger connection between media and mental health in the past - how some shows and movies can perpetuate the misinformation about mental illness, and how others are getting it right by talking about mental health and substance use in real and...
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