The company I work for now have Mental Health Care First Aiders and I have put my name forward to be one. Two recent quotes from Twitter:
“More and more schoolchildren are struggling to cope with their mental health. We are launching our new #MakeItCount campaign, because mental health is not extracurricular”
“More unequal societies have a wider gap between the richest and poorest. That leads to worse mental health for everyone in that society.”
It really scares me how many people struggle with low self esteem and how often that is associated with their weight and how they look upon their own bodies. Please remember that you are loved and were created to be YOU. No one in the world is more qualified at being you than YOU. No one can be!
So this week’s song I chose for two reasons YOU are important and Bohemian Rhapsody, telling the story of Freddy Mercury, opens at the Cinema this week. What a reason to go and indulge yourself in a “good-feel” film. I have been told I must go and see this on my own, since no-one else will enjoy my singing … we will see.
Can anybody find me somebody to love
Ooh, each morning I get up I die a little
Can barely stand on my feet
(Take a look at yourself) Take a look in the mirror and cry (and cry)
Lord what you're doing to me (yeah yeah)
I have spent all my years in believing you
But I just can't get no relief, Lord!
Somebody (somebody) ooh somebody (somebody)
Can anybody find me somebody to love?
I work hard (he works hard) every day of my life
I work till I ache in my bones
At the end (at the end of the day)
I take home my hard earned pay all on my own
I get down (down) on my knees (knees)
And I start to pray
Till the tears run down from my eyes
Lord somebody (somebody), ooh somebody
(Please) can anybody find me somebody to love?
Everyday (everyday) I try and I try and I try
But everybody wants to put me down
They say I'm going crazy
They say I got a lot of water in my brain
Ah, got no common sense
I got nobody left to believe in
Yeah yeah yeah yeah
Oh Lord
Ooh somebody, ooh somebody
Can anybody find me somebody to love?
(Can anybody find me someone to love)
Got no feel, I got no rhythm
I just keep losing my beat (you just keep losing and losing)
I'm OK, I'm alright (he's alright, he's alright)
I ain't gonna face no defeat (yeah yeah)
I just gotta get out of this prison cell
One day (someday) I'm gonna be free, Lord!
Find me somebody to love
Find me somebody to love
Please do love yourselves … what you eat and how you look is secondary. You are still loved, irrespective.
Have a great week.
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Johnny-One
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Hmmm ... I'm certainly looking forward to the release of Bohemian Rhapsody, but I don't think the UK's current mental-health issues have any simple solutions. This statement is typical of the sort of muddled, unscientific thinking that's causing massive problems, IMO:
“More unequal societies have a wider gap between the richest and poorest. That leads to worse mental health for everyone in that society."
The connection between condition A and condition B is purely in the mind of the speaker (cum hoc ergo propter hoc). While it's true that unequal societies do (crudely speaking) have a higher rate of mental illness, dissatisfaction, crime, etc., it's a bit of a leap of faith to suggest that the causality flows one way. It's equally likely that societies with a high rate of mental-health problems will generate widespread inequality, or that there's a circular relationship between the two.
It really scares me how many people struggle with low self esteem and how often that is associated with their weight and how they look upon their own bodies. Please remember that you are loved and were created to be YOU.
It is not a good thing to encourage people to gaslight themselves: in other words, to maintain an incorrect assessment of themselves or their appearance. Two reasons:
- Humans have a whole raft of cognitive biases as it is. In a well-balanced individual, these are recognised and controlled for. Probably the most well-known is the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people who are incompetent have an over-inflated view of their own competence, while the highly-trained underestimate their skill. Encouraging this sort of bias (instead of teaching people to recognise it and do something about it) will result in social alienation: a person's inability to accurately assess his own personality will make him appear strange, arrogant, or deluded to others.
- Humans take great pleasure in personal achievement. Just look at how chuffed people are when they report a few stones of weight loss. They're on a huge high. If everyone is encouraged to "love yourself as you are", a critical motivation has been taken away from them. In addition, a person who neglects his personal development - on the basis that he's already lovable - is going to be endlessly disappointed when others don't agree with his generous assessment of himself. He's going to be bitter and miserable that others can't recognise what a great person he is.
Low self-esteem is certainly a thing, but the most effective way to improve self-esteem is to set achievable and enjoyable targets for oneself: in other words, to become a person who merits esteem. In the context of weight-loss, there's a fairly obvious conclusion here: if you are unhappy with your appearance, change it. You will then not be unhappy with your appearance.
what you eat and how you look is secondary.
No. Sorry. It's incredibly important. Your life literally depends upon getting this right. Of course we're all born with certain limitations - not everyone can look like a catwalk model - but most humans can be beautiful, in their own unique way. The thing is, that takes work; physical and mental effort. And it's a lifetime project. It is a terribly dangerous thing to tell people that it's OK to be unhealthy and unattractive, especially since eating well is inherently enjoyable, whereas chronic ill-health is not.
I’d never heard of Dunning Kruger effect, ( surely invented for Donald Trump! 🤣) Going to look it up now.
Has to be a good thing that businesses, schools, companies, etc are much more mental health aware, and hopefully this will eventually remove the stigma attached to mental illness.
Interesting, some of the debates that come up on this forum. 😊
I (cautiously) agree that it's a good thing that organisations are becoming more aware of mental-health problems and (definitely) agree that it's important to avoid stigmatizing people who do. I'm just not convinced that the "Mental First Aid" thing is a going to be of much use.
First problem is that common mental health problems are quite hard to spot, even if you've had some training. People who are suicidally depressed, for example, can often "go through the motions" with few indications of their true condition until it's too late. People who are positively dangerous can appear quite charming, or at worst just a bit odd or hard-to-deal-with. Even the professional instruments developed to assess mental heath are a bit hit-and-miss.
Second problem is that psychiatric care is, frankly, in its infancy. Even when a condition is correctly identified, the success rate for treatment isn't great.
Third: even if the First Aider identifies that someone has a problem, what are they going to do about it? It would probably feel quite intrusive to have Someone From The Company take you aside and suggest maybe you need to see a head doctor.
Fourth: it's going to result in over-diagnosis. Depression is already massively over-diagnosed (partly because the DSM-V definition has been broadened to a ridiculous degree). What used to be called "sadness" - that is, something with a definite underlying reason that can be addressed, or which will pass in time - is now called "depression" and medicated.
What bothers me most is that that we're not allowed to talk about what might be causing all this. It isn't "inequality". Regarding the mental-illness epidemic in children, for example, we don't really need to look any further than Harlow for explanations. Vile as they were, those experiments confirmed in great detail what everyone instinctively knows: the natural result of an entire generation growing up in childcare from their earliest years, with minimal connection to their parents, is eminently predictable. However, herding parents (primarily women) into soul-destroying jobs to feed the tax machine was a government imperative, so here we are.
The authorities deal with this uncomfortable reality in the only way they know how: by rewriting history. It's fashionable today to discredit Harlow - either to imply that he lied about his results, or to suggest that because they were unethical they were also invalid. Orwell in his wildest nightmares could have never guessed that it wouldn't be a jackboot "stamping on a human face — forever", but a hemp sandal.
Oh - Donald Trump. Slightly different cognitive bias, whereby people who are highly skilled in one domain think that their competence automatically translates to competence in an unrelated one.
Ivan the people who work with Military veterans run the same mhfa courses and the feedback is that they are very useful. They are also being taught to young people - again great feedback. 😊
Different circumstances, I suspect. Vets are going to have very specific problems with well-understood causes and treatment protocols. In that context, probably a good idea. The general public ... not so much. You've got a whole range of ill-defined issues that often boil down to alienation, loneliness, and metaphysical crises ("what's it all about, Alfie?"). I suspect a lot of mental illness is actually caused by (or exacerbated by) disastrously bad diets, possibly via mechanisms we haven't discovered yet.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try out new ideas to see if they help. I'm just pointing out that big, tangly problems don't usually have easy solutions.
I assume it's a variation of the Dunning-Kruger effect when I can answer a quiz question and think it must, therefore, be an easy one, whereas when I can't answer and other people can, it's because they're clever.
Men's ability/tendency to over-inflate their competence is widely cited as a factor in their success in the job market and greater earning power. It would be interesting to see an analysis
I'll do a bit of Googling and see if it's been done. What you suggest sounds plausible.
I read today that only 25% of people with an enduring mental health condition are in full time work. Whilst the article didn't define enduring mental health conditon, or for that matter, full time work, it is a shocking statistic. Good on you both, Jonny-One and Brightfeather anything which supports mental wellbeing and a sence of acceptance can only be good. ☺
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Losing weight on my face, neck, legs and waist, but not my stomach??? (Dents) 
Please help me
Week 35
The long, long, looooong journey. 
AA Fresh Start
