I know this is going to come off as a political post, but that’s not the intention at all. I steer clear of taking sides on these posts almost exclusively, in favor of advocating for MH generally. This is directed at our government leaders, no matter who is in office.
It took two years into this mess, for the MH of our children to be addressed by a govt official, formally? The address cited massive rises in 2020 of ER visits for suicide attempts, depression & anxiety, as the reasons for the alarm to go off.
So let’s get this straight – now, almost a full year after 2020, going mostly on the # of ER visits attributed to specific disorders, this gets addressed??
There is no pretty way to say this, but the timing of this is scary, dysfunctional, wrong, & may even be purposeful (as awful as that sounds).
Why do we wait for the previous year’s ER visit stats, to issue something like this?
We have Board members who sit on committees for the White House on things like the op!o!d crisis who have been sounding the alarm on what they have been seeing in their practices since day one of this thing (let alone before the pand&m!c even began).
As a government you wait till the previous year’s most drastic stats are released? Do they not listen to the docs on their committees as to what’s happening? Do they not listen to the teachers & professionals in schools who see this daily? To the parents who are watching their kids not be able to get out of bed bc of debilitating MH symptoms?
I don’t know if it’s dysfunction…& I’ll let you decide if it’s purposeful (bc addressing these things earlier would lose momentum on other “decisions” the govt has been telling us are in our best interests). But I’ll say this – this better not be: all talk, no action.
Those crisis numbers are blips on a radar vs what we are abt to see over the nxt few yrs. MH is cumulative. What our kids have gone through is trauma. That doesn’t go away when we return to school “normally.” Our govt better wake up – & if not, that’s why we gotta keep educating, together, on a grassroots level, like there is no tomorrow.
