Writing to Spur Mentally Healthy Families

Institute of Mental Health 4, Nov 06 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Commentary

You don't have to be a social worker, counselor, psychologist, or psychiatrist to have something to say about mental health. Most mental health issues do not relate to serious illness like schizophrenia but to problems that develop within human contexts.

     Events over time, like multiple divorces or short-term relationships where one's basic identity is shared intimately, to whatever degree, can include a range of carry-over emotions. There are the related feelings of rejection or dissatisfaction that go with estrangement and that can build mental problems for adults over time. Distrust, suspicion, doubt, deeply hurt feelings, chronic misjudgments or misunderstandings, and other matters can become ingrained in the mind. They include feelings that go unexpressed over a long period of time or are not expressed in a safe, mutually respectful environment. 

     One of the main incubators for healthy or unhealthy minds (and, therefore, emotions) is the family. Adults that carry good disagreement or anger management skills, plus healthy identity awareness, into marriage offer more of the same to everyone, including any children they may have. The opposite is true, as well: aggression, demeaning words, neglect, and divorce are home experiences that can mar the emotional and mental health of children of any age. 

    You do not need to be a mental health professional to write about good family practices. If you grew up in a good family, or if you have worked through issues of a painful family environment, you can help others through your writing, without even mentioning "mental health." 

     Author Joyce Meyer comes to mind. She is a Christian who speaks to large audiences about healthy living, by biblical principles. She has helped many people through her books, having confronted major issues of a painful home-life when she was growing up. A loving home is an immeasurably important part of the development of a strong, healthy mind. For the Christian, the book of Philippians includes excellent truths for having "a protected mind."  

     Every good book about marriage or life together is, after all, showing what a healthy family life looks like. It is not perfect. It allows free expression under parenting boundaries set for the children and set by the adults for themselves. Good families do have disagreements, which they deal with in healthy ways. 

    I am not an expert, any more than are most of us who observe, experience, and acknowledge our own behavior and thought-patterns, without excuses. Yet I know, as I suspect that you do, that kindness and respect in the home, especially between the parents, set a beneficial tone at home that helps build healthy thinking reasoning, and emotions. Children of parents who provide a safe, dependable, and loving home become adults who are immeasurably better prepared for direct, honest lives than most.   
     As a writer, if others have commented positively on your help in such matters, then your words can continue to help readers. Writers, seeking to inform and reveal, need renewal in their thinking. We apply ourselves to what scripture calls "the renewal of your minds," a work helped by faith in God. As a Christian, I continue to seek to renew my thinking to embed God-given and inspired beliefs, attitudes, and reasoning...for a healthy mind. That kind of living is a life's work and we need not wait for perfection, which we do not have, to share what we know and have learned, up to today.   

Related articles to evaluate for yourself regarding healthy minds

• mental health and families
• Blog for Mental Health 2013 Badges
• Revisiting mental health?
• Write about mental health Day 21 *NHBPM*
• How To Find A Good Mental Health Counselor

Write about Mental Health and Guns

Official seal of Newtown, Connecticut (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Jean Purcell

When I began this posting, it was the Sunday after the Friday tragedies in Sandy Hook Elementary of Newtown, Connecticut. The principal, school counselor, four teachers, and 20 six- and seven-year-olds in the school...killed by a 20-year-old. 
    In church this Sunday, we prayed for them and for the rapid response people who tried to help them and who did save others who might have been shot if they had not arrived when they did, at the school set in a quiet part of a small town in beautiful Connecticut. 

    We are thankful that we can turn to God, the Creator of all that is good, who is ready to hear our cries of distress over tragedies and able to help. We are thankful that He holds onto the suffering when horror targets little ones and the adults who have devoted themselves to teach and to protect them during school. We pray for their sweet souls and for their parents,siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, doctors, pets, yes, even pets. The list goes on.  

    I am thankful that God is just. He will do as promised, to avenge, in His way, every evil of this world, every evil since the beginning.

   Someone grappling years ago with another tragedy that hit a co-worker's family agonized over the realities of evil and reached a point of realizing that evil does get into people. Sometimes such realization of evil is the first step to deal with its outcomes.
     Evil, in that situation, got into a father and husband's mind and emotions so firmly that he killed his family rather than have mother and children together after a divorce. Nothing good was accomplished, no resolutions were reached. Jealousy, bitterness, and selfishness fed each other and grew into murder. 

This is a time for writers who focus on gun laws that allow assault weapons and rapid-fire firearms to work harder to effect change. The same goes for writers about mental health issues. It is time to call upon others, including lawyers and jurists, to help the mental health profession find ways to get around privacy laws and gun laws, if they are the main hindrances to stopping anything that enables killers. Lawyers, jurists, and law-makers must find ways to relieve parents of responsibility for managing out of control teens and live-in adult children so that they can get help or be isolated where they cannot threaten or harm others. 

     If you are a writer interested in these matters, there is a great need for writers to learn more and to write about possible solutions, or at least possible aids. You can do this as a citizen, not necessarily someone in law enforcement or psychiatry/psychology/counseling professions. Research, study, write...and continue to pray.  

The President spoke this evening to the mourning and shocked community of Newtown, in the high school that 20 children might have attended later on, if not in the first classrooms that day. Friday. The President is calling for action, as yet undetermined, to address issues of legal ownership of certain kinds of guns, and to address mental health needs. Who could not support him in those efforts in light of what has happened, again?