Category: mental health
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This Holiday Season, Can We Heal The Relationship Wounds of Politics?
The euphoria was contagious. Car horns clamored through Brooklyn. Under the arch in Grand Army Plaza, brass bands spontaneously serenaded dancing crowds. My neighbors shrieked, and from building to building, the city echoed with cheers: Joe Biden had been elected President. I was happy — most of all, to see others’ joy. But I was also…
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Investing in Community Well-Being On World Mental Health Day
“That was an old joke you hear in some communities: I’m going to go to jail to get my tooth fixed,” said Lorenzo Jones. Jones is Co-Executive Director of the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice, a New York- and Connecticut-based nonprofit that advocates for public health solutions to end mass incarceration and the drug…
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The COVID-19 Eviction Wave Is a Mental Health Crisis
When Chelsea Swift showed up to the crisis call, the man was sobbing. Swift is a counselor and emergency medical technician with Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS), a health and homelessness response service based out of White Bird Clinic in Eugene, Oregon. When the county’s residents make a 911 or a non-emergency call…
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Why You Shouldn’t Call the Police When Someone Is Having a Mental Health Crisis
Vinnie Cervantes, Organizing Director of the Denver Alliance for Street Health Response, noticed something strange about Denver’s famous 16th Street Mall. While public officials and police encouraged tourists to “linger” on the street, they often cracked down on unhoused people “loitering” there. “The only distinction between those two things is whether or not people have…
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Supporting a Partner With Mental Illness (And When It’s Okay to Leave)
From anxiety and depression to bipolar disorder and addiction, mental illness shapes the daily lives and loves of those who experience it. This includes the symptoms of the illness themselves, but it also includes pervasive ableist discrimination against people with mental illness—including stigma within intimate relationships. If we don’t experience mental illness, but are in a relationship with…
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How to Stay Resilient in The Long-Term Fight For Racial Justice
“I am my politics,” says Barbara Herring. A Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and the proprietor of Los Angeles’s JustBTherapy clinic, Herring specializes in working with people of color, LBGTQ+ people, and white allies as they grow. As part of the minority of therapists who are people of color — as of 2015, 66% of psychology…
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Why Are Bisexual Women At A Higher Risk Of Substance Abuse?
It took me a decade after coming out to learn that there was a reason I and other bi women were experiencing so much sexual and intimate partner violence. In reality, we are at higher risk of gender-based violence than both straight women and other LGBTQ+ people. That’s not the only increased risk bi women face relative to…
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Mental Wellness and the Black Lives Matter Movement
“I felt a little guilty about not being on the front lines,” said Ammie K. Brooks, LSW, a therapist with the Black women-centered Sista Afya Community Mental Wellness. When we spoke, the uprising against racist police violence, sparked by the killing of George Floyd, had been raging for more than a week. Brooks had been…
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Black Lives Matter: How White People Can Get Educated and Stay Grounded
As Black Americans’ righteous resistance to racism and police brutality fills social media and the streets, many white Americans are in a period of reevaluation. We may find ourselves wondering what our role is in perpetuating systemic, anti-Black racism, and how we can take action that is actively anti-racist. This self-introspection is a fundamental starting…
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The State of Our Work
In early March, word started buzzing across Cambridge: things were about to change. It was more than two months after the novel coronavirus had begun to spread through Asia, and mere weeks after the first community transmission in the U.S. For Yiran He and her peers, graduating seniors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it…
Reina Gattuso 