Raising Mental Health Awareness

With DeV's recent fantastic thread in After Hours and this topic cropping up across many forums (from Clearasil & Hormones to Personal Issues to After Hours and Long Term Illness), I wonder if boards.ie should contribute somehow to raise awareness of mental health issues. Whether it be some form of charity drive (akin to the SSF, but with the proceeds going to a mental health organization) to raise funds.

What are other people's opinions on this? Is it something boards.ie would be willing to do?

darraghdoyle

Other than providing a platform for discussion about the issues and a resource for people to find help from qualified professionals, or advice from peers (like in PI), I'm not sure what more a site like Boards.ie could do?

I think the cause is noble and the time has never been better but it's limited in what it can do as well.

Sarky

One could perhaps look for a mental health professional or two to come along and answer questions like all those politicians did when they were scrabbling for votes?

<shrug>

Wibbs

Problem is Sarky you have all sorts of moral issues, never mind legal ones. Best we could hope for is an office authenticated professional making informational style posts, but no direct advice. IIRC they're duty bound to not do that except within very strict clinical guidelines and that's a good thing IMHO. As Darragh said there are limitations.

darraghdoyle

Wibbs wrote: »

Problem is Sarky you have all sorts of moral issues, never mind legal ones. Best we could hope for is an office authenticated professional making informational style posts, but no direct advice. IIRC they're duty bound to not do that except within very strict clinical guidelines and that's a good thing IMHO. As Darragh said there are limitations.

Aye. Having worked with Dav to get Verified/Official representatives onto the site, I know what a legal and murky mire Boards.ie could be drawn into, especially when one person disagrees with a representative and so on.

I love the fact that Google does this when you google anything to do with "suicide"



While I know the moderators do this too, if there was a technical way of highlighting useful information like this and where people can actually go, it would be a win. If people knew that they could go to Boards.ie for good, practical advice it would be a great win for the site and the person looking.

darraghdoyle

As if by magic http://www.thejournal.ie/facebook-aims-to-help-prevent-suicide-303433-Dec2011

nesf

I think some good work has been done by the community with respect to peer support in Long Term Illness. But it can't stretch further than that really, you badly need to look at trained professionals or trained volunteers (as in the Samaritans) for further help.

The thing is, even hearing good stories about people getting help and support from such helplines when in a crisis can push people into making that call so I'd strongly encourage such peer activity on this site and honestly I've been trying my best to generate it for years on here at this stage and I'm quite pleasantly surprised by how well it's doing (especially for depression) these days.

later12

nesf wrote: »

I'm quite pleasantly surprised by how well it's doing (especially for depression) these days.

Me too, but I would say it's only for depression.

I think we are moving in a direction where depression is rapidly shedding its stigma, but the same cannot be said for other mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, the latter of whose teutonic name, reminiscent of electro-convulsion and village outcasts, is in itself rather forbidding.

Most people feel as though they can relate to the symptoms that characterise depression (like a lack of interest in pleasure, or low self esteem) but not so many feel this way about a man suffering from paranoid delusions.

In fact, (and this is by no means peculiar to boards.ie) i would say permissibility of derogatory references to madness in polite conversation is one part of the problem. An example might be popular references to tinfoil hats, or terms like schizo as a casual term of abuse.

gpjordanf1 wrote: »

Oh so you do have Dyno proof??? Coming across a bit schizo there? Which is it? you have proof or not?????

Confusing???

we'llallhavetea wrote: »

I trust people straight off. it's when they **** me over that I turn into a paranoid fcuking schizo

Podge_irl wrote: »

Then the players must be fairly schizo. Ireland are all over the place in terms of style and gameplan at the moment.

gatecrash wrote: »

oh I get it.

You are a raging schizo and are now going to blame the ranty post on the voices in your head.

ArtSmart wrote: »

brains?

thought he was a bit schizo

I don't know what boards.ie's position is on terms like these and nobody realistically expects the site to make an impression on public misconceptions of mental illness, but as nesf said it would be wise to encourage peer activity, i.e. families and sufferers talking about their experiences with these disorders, not just depression.

nesf

later10 wrote: »

Me too, but I would say it's only for depression.

I think we are moving in a direction where depression is rapidly shedding its stigma, but the same cannot be said for other mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, the latter of whose teutonic name, reminiscent of electro-convulsion and village outcasts, is in itself rather forbidding.

Most people feel as though they can relate to the symptoms that characterise depression (like a lack of interest in pleasure, or low self esteem) but not so many feel this way about a man suffering from paranoid delusions.

In fact, (and this is by no means peculiar to boards.ie) i would say permissibility of derogatory references to madness in polite conversation is one part of the problem. An example might be popular references to tinfoil hats, or terms like schizo as a casual term of abuse.

Well the problem is depression is at least 5 times as prevalent as bipolar and 10 times as prevalent as schizophrenia. The respective communities will be far, far smaller than the depression one and both bipolar and schizophrenia tend to be more severe on average (not that you don't get extremely severe depression cases!) so you'll get less people well enough to post on here as a %. That and a lot of people will just go to schizophrenia.com (which is rather excellent) and similar.

That, and I've found that most people who use the term schizo don't actually know what it means, a bit like cretin (or to a lesser extent spaz). I'm not convinced that the abuse is actually directed at people with mental illness rather than just being ignorance.

Cardinal Richelieu

Perhaps tone down the drink culture on boards. Instead of going for beers change it to drinks. I know AH functions in a haze of alcohol but perhaps tone down alcohol references in the other forums except the beer sub forum of course.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2009)

A statistical modeling study suggests that problems with alcohol abuse may lead to an increased risk of depression, as opposed to the reverse model in which individuals with depression self-medicate with alcohol, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry,