Tag Archives: Judgments

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The Excuses Of Not Talking About Abuse……Because PART TWO

Excuses messin cover

To Continue the conversation started in post yesterday……THE EXCUSES OF NOT TALKING ABOUT ABUSE…..BECAUSE let’s keep on talking.

We don’t talk about abuse as much as we should…..Because

  • Because nobody else is talking about it and I’ll feel like the only one
  • Because I don’t want anyone else to know my dirty secret
  • Because I didn’t think about talking about it until now
  • Because I am afraid
  • Because I don’t want to get low
  • Because it’s overwhelming….. there’s too much and if I start talking will I ever stop talking?
  • Because I want to still be me and not a victim
  • Because I don’t want people feeling sorry for me
  • Because I don’t want my batterer or abuser to win by letting it affect my life now
  • Because I’ve moved on and don’t want to go back
  • Because I don’t want counseling…..only weak people need counseling
  • Because I might get so angry that I would do something I’ll regret
  • Because I don’t want to think about it or remember the details
  • Because I let it happen…..I didn’t stop it
  • Because people will think I’m unlovable
  • Because people will think I’m promiscuous
  • Because I don’t know what words to say…..I don’t know where to start
  • Because my abuser is still alive and I couldn’t face having to go to court
  • Because my partner would literally kill my abuser
  • Because I am too busy and I don’t have time to sort it all out and get on with the rest of my commitments
  • Because people are too busy to listen
  • Because people have their own problems…..they don’t want to hear mine
  • Because the last time I talked about it I wasn’t helped

Let’s end the silence. Talk about abuse. Instead of propagating Post Traumatic Stress…..let’s start a movement of Post Traumatic Growth!

Stop Family Violence!

Stop Family Violence! (Photo credit: Krisztina Tordai)

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The Excuses Of Not Talking About Abuse…..Because PART ONE

If we aren’t alone…..if staggering statistics clearly show that abuse is a worldwide problem that does not discriminate……affecting people of all races, gender, financial status, religion, sexual orientation, background, etc……then why don’t we talk about it more. Well…..Because

  • Because it’s difficult
  • Because of the repercussions
  • Because of what other people will think of us
  • Because I don’t want to hurt anybody
  • Because no-one will believe me
  • Because there is nothing they can do about it
  • Because I’m an adult now…..so i have moved on
  • Because I’m trying to forget it happened
  • Because it’s not a big deal…..I got over it
  • Because it happened a long time ago
  • Because the family would be torn apart
  • Because they will think I am crazy
  • Because I don’t want to be a burden
  • Because I will called a liar and labelled mentally ill
  • Because I feel embarrassed
  • Because I feel ashamed
  • Because it would upset my family, my children
  • Because it’s no big deal….nothing much happened anyway
  • Because nobody will do anything about it now
  • Because the abuser won’t be brought to justice….so what is the point
  • Because the facts in my head are a bit fuzzy so I don’t want to say anything that isn’t 100% true
  • Because everyone else seems to have it all together and i don’t want to stand out as the weak one
  • Because I don’t want to look like an attention seeker
  • Because I don’t want to draw attention to myself
  • Because I don’t like being vulnerable to me vulnerable means victim
  • Because I might get so low that I won’t be able to pull myself out of the black pit of depression

Let’s work on getting past the excuses and getting help. Let’s raise awareness to create change. Let’s end the silence on abuse.

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Breaking News! This Just In…..

To all of us who are concerned with the state of mental health recovery in this world, what follows is important and amazing news. I just found this as reported at http://www.mindhacks.com. I am shocked and saddened that this is not international news being reported by every media station worldwide.  I want more people to know about this, so I am reporting it and hope that others will follow.

National Institute of Mental Health abandoning the DSM

In a potentially seismic move, the National Institute of Mental Health – the world’s biggest mental health research funder, has announced only two weeks before the launch of the DSM-5diagnostic manual that it will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories”.

In the announcement, NIMH Director Thomas Insel says the DSM lacks validity and that “patients with mental disorders deserve better”.

This is something that will make very uncomfortable reading for the American Psychiatric Association as they trumpet what they claim is the ‘future of psychiatric diagnosis’ only two weeks before it hits the shelves.

As a result the NIMH will now be preferentially funding research that does not stick to DSM categories:

Going forward, we will be supporting research projects that look across current categories – or sub-divide current categories – to begin to develop a better system. What does this mean for applicants? Clinical trials might study all patients in a mood clinic rather than those meeting strict major depressive disorder criteria. Studies of biomarkers for “depression” might begin by looking across many disorders with anhedonia or emotional appraisal bias or psychomotor retardation to understand the circuitry underlying these symptoms. What does this mean for patients? We are committed to new and better treatments, but we feel this will only happen by developing a more precise diagnostic system.

As an alternative approach, Insel suggests the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project, which aims to uncover what it sees as the ‘component parts’ of psychological dysregulation by understanding difficulties in terms of cognitive, neural and genetic differences.

For example, difficulties with regulating the arousal system might be equally as involved in generating anxiety in PTSD as generating manic states in bipolar disorder.

Of course, this ‘component part’ approach is already a large part of mental health research but the RDoC project aims to combine this into a system that allows these to be mapped out and integrated.

It’s worth saying that this won’t be changing how psychiatrists treat their patients any time soon. DSM-style disorders will still be the order of the day, not least because a great deal of the evidence for the effectiveness of medication is based on giving people standard diagnoses.

It is also true to say that RDoC is currently little more than a plan at the moment – a bit like the Mars mission: you can see how it would be feasible but actually getting there seems a long way off. In fact, until now, the RDoC project has largely been considered to be an experimental project in thinking up alternative approaches.

The project was partly thought to be radical because it has many similarities to the approach taken by scientific critics of mainstream psychiatry who have argued for a symptom-based approach to understanding mental health difficulties that has often been rejected by the ‘diagnoses represent distinct diseases’ camp.

The NIMH has often been one of the most staunch supporters of the latter view, so the fact that it has put the RDoC front and centre is not only a slap in the face for the American Psychiatric Association and the DSM, it also heralds a massive change in how we might think of mental disorders in decades to come.
Link to NIMH announcement ‘Transforming Diagnosis’.

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Movie Alert! Tune Your TV Or DVR Now!

Lifetime television channel here in the US is debuting a fantastic movie at 8 PM EST entitled “Call Me Crazy”! I am so very excited to watch it….and admit that I am totally biased with the title they chose. It  follows five families trying to survive, recover, and thrive in the face of mental illness diagnoses. Check it out!

call me crazy movie

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