Please join me and my co-host, Dawn Helmrich, for the eighth episode of “Shining Light on Shadows: A Candid Conversation About Mental Health.” May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Our guest will be Tiffany Westerfield.
Our conversation will focus on the question of whether there is still a stigma around mental health. The goal of this show, of course, is to reduce the stigma. The question is, how big is the challenge? How prevalent is the stigma, and how does it play out in different demographics and with different mental health challenges?
We’ll be live Thursday, May 23 at 7pm ET / 6pm CT. If you can’t watch the show live, you can watch the recording at your convenience on this website or the links below.
You can watch the show and the recording here
or watch and comment on social media:
*We won’t know the exact urls for Twitter and Instagram until we go live. These links go to Neil and Dawn’s accounts respectively.
Tiffany wrote a great blog post for this episode, “A Lifetime of Being Judged.” In describing the post, she wrote, “I’ve dealt with Dyslexia, ADHD, PTSD, Family addiction issues, I really just wanted to be an ichthyologist. How did I end up here?” If you don’t look it up, you’ll have to watch to see how ichthyologist plays into her story.
Dawn wrote about how she’s been dealing with stigma her whole life. In part, she wrote, “The idea that people who have mental health concerns struggle to get out of bed, work, go places, get normal things done, often doesn’t make sense to people with no mental health concerns.”
Dawn and I launched this twice a month show (the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of the month) in order to help reduce the stigma associated with mental health. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be joined by friends and colleagues who are working through or have worked through their own challenges, practitioners who can speak to some of the issues faced by their clients and advocates who can talk about a range of different issues.
The show is produced by Digimentors on a pro bono basis.
Resources / Relevant Links
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Helpline
800-950-6264 Or text "HelpLine" to 6264; nami.org
Mental Health America Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org; mhanational.org Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) National Sexual Assault Hotline 800-656-HOPE (4673); rainn.org
Comments