Hopefully the question I wrote in the pic, shakes us a little to think through a different lens.
If you grew up in the US, & are 50ish or younger, your first introduction to one of the largest charities in our country, dealing w one of the most important organs in our body & one of the largest risk factors to our overall health, probably took place in around 2nd grade.
The American Heart Association is in schools all over, doing programs like Jump Rope for Heart & Hoops for Heart. Yes these are fundraisers, but they teach kids & parents about the importance of heart health – strengthening the heart muscle, preventing plaque build up, well in advance of the avg age when heart disease strikes.
I remember losing family members at a young age, where heart complications were involved, & thinking to what could have been worked on at a younger age to not have gotten to that point of being sick, specifically bc of what the AHA preached. It’s made me, as an adult, want to go to the gym & get my cardio up, often.
Just ask yourself then – why do SO MANY charities in the MH space, focus on the labels & the disorders, & not the prevention & proactivity? Lots of motivations as to why, that I won’t get into, but I’ll stick w this: We HAVE the game plan for how to get in front of these health issues, from orgs like the AHA, & we aren’t following that plan as a collective movement!
I’m hoping that by sharing these analogies, often, we can shake this space into shifting some/a lot of the focus to proactivity & prevention. I see the shift with individuals & health coaches way more than I see on the institutional level, & that needs to change. We all face challenges that impact our MH…whether we’ve gotten to the point of disorder yet or not. Let’s get in front of it.
