Straight To The Point

Compassion Is Directly Related to Experience

You can't be compassionate without experience.  You also can't be compassionate if you have experience but feel shame.  I am talking about mental health.

Nearly 1 in 4 Americans has experienced mental health issues ranging from easily overlooked social anxiety to nationally reported psychosis. It may have occurred once, during a short period or over a lifetime.  It follows that all of us have been affected by it.

It is amazing that while mental health professionals have been talking about it for years, decades really, lay people can't seem to have the same conversation.  Having a family member with more severe forms of illness is extremely isolating. That once a month support group can't begin to make up for the loneliness of not feeling comfortable talking to friends or extended family. Yet, like the sick person, families need ongoing care and support.

Lesser forms can be just as debilitating.  Anxiety can lead to depression or substance abuse.  Brilliant ideas cannot be turned into brilliant products or services if the fear of being in a crowd overcomes the desire to let the world know.

We need to re-brand mental health.  I commit to use a chunk of my time in 2009 gathering information, putting it into articles and blogs and spreading the word that we must use our collective networks to address these issues so that - at the very least - we will become compassionate. 

There's No Relapse Without Recovery

I have spent more time than I would have ever dreamed sitting in a group with parents of kids who abuse alcohol and other drugs over the last year. I am so very lucky because my daughter didn't veer off into the deep ditch of addiction but she sure could have and we both needed support. 

I've learned a lot. Enough to know danger when I see it. My oldest daughter's sister-in-law has had a chronic drug problem for years.  Finally, Becky and a couple other family members confronted their sister today with the bottom line that her 16 and 5 year old daughters would be taken from her if she didn't do enter rehab. They had an inpatient drug rehab facility picked out and her insurance would take care of it. 

The s-i-l was furious.  It didn't take long for the inpatient to become outpatient and the girls would stay with her when she was working (as a nurse!) and with others when she attended treatment on her days off.

Sigh.

Why is it so hard for us to stick to our guns even when we know children are being harmed or neglected? Why do we worry about someone keeping a job?  Why are we so concerned that by naming the addiction that we expose them to others - as if everyone doesn't already know?

We are losing our teenagers to a drug culture that most parents don't even know exists. The bottles of Boone's Farm and bags of Mexican we remember from high school and college are so far from the prescription pills and doped up pot kids use now it makes your head spin. 

Other important things I learned:

In general people who do not have someone close to them affected still mix up the words recovered and reformed.   

Nutmeg is an hallucinogen and mimics LSD - most often mixed with marijuana.

Relapse is a part of recovery. Four times in rehab is not unusual.

Heroin is cheaper than oxycontin.  The creepy addiction is necessary when the cool addiction becomes out of reach financially.

Water pills and lots of water can often prevent marijuana from showing up on a tox screen.

Drug use is progressive.  So is the rotten behavior of the person using it.

Denial is a warm fuzzy place. I know.  But it doesn't serve us and it sure doesn't serve the user.

Borrow It Forward

Too much and not enough information is available. I have been talking about the economy since early last summer. My 17 year old Ashley didn't seem overly interested until gas started dropping like a rock.  A recent conversation...

 

Ashley: Will gas drop to $1 a gallon?

 

Victoria: God I hope not! The price is dropping because people aren't working.

Ashley: Who isn't working? The autoworkers? Aren't they getting a bailout? 

 

Victoria: Hopefully. The companies say they just need to borrow money to keep day to day operations moving along until they can get their companies efficient.  On the other hand there are 1,000,000 cars on lots right now so people will be laid off and companies will not be able to hold out until they do get efficient.

Ashley: Why aren't they efficient?

Victoria: They are owned by millions of people so short term profits are more important than long term plans. Easy credit allowed them to borrow money without being sure they could pay it back.  So they kept on doing what they were doing and not looking into the future.

Ashley: I thought they were too big to fail.

Victoria: It's funny. The ones who will suffer the most, the middle class, says no. Most of them still don't get that global business means global wages. The politicians and executives in the top 10% of all income earners say yes.  They get it. 

Ashley: Where will the money come from?

Victoria: From you and your children and maybe your children's children.

Ashley: It's not fair that I have to pay for for that!

 

Victoria: Sorry Honey. It's not. I don't want this for you.  Grandpa got what he had by saving and getting loans he could afford to repay.  I'm at the tail end of a generation that didn't have to look more than a couple days for a job or worry about health care or take care of parents and children at the same time.  Nobody believed it could end.  Plus Social Security guarantees a minimum payment every month and a little bit of health care so there seemed to be a safety net.

 

Ashley: So you're saying that you really don't care what happens to my generation!

Victoria: Of course I care. But most people have taken the same short term approach public companies have.    

 

"I want it now. I will pay later."  When all our buying and paying take place only on paper as opposed to handing over actual money we lose our sense of its realness.  Kind of like buying a house and then borrowing against its value to get more stuff and then finding out we owe more than its worth.  People are always astounded about that but it happens whenever owning a house is considered a form of savings.  It's not.  

 

My generation has believed in borrowing every dime we can, hoping we go to heaven just one day before the reverse mortgage has run out.

Ashley: But you always say all sins come due.

Victoria:  The people putting all this together consider that the beauty of their strategy. Their borrowing sins come due on your watch.  

 

Ashley: Are you serious?

 

Victoria: Completely.

 

She walked away and I'm not sure she believed me. That's okay.  I really can't believe it myself.