On Mental Health, 1

ith this blog, I try and not shy away from sensitive subjects.  An unwillingness to discuss difficult subjects is a sure-fire way to never truly change anything about those subjects.  Hopefully that has been evident from the topics thus far.

For the next few posts, I’d like to share some thoughts on mental health.  I had considered creating a post on this as it relates to guns in my last series.  However, I decided that it was bigger than that and worth dedicating more time to.  After all, mental health is a huge topic today, with as many as 40 million Americans being diagnosed with mental disorders.  To have primarily written about this as it applies to guns would have been a disservice to the broader topic.  I’ll touch on that particular connection at some point, though.

Working in a college setting, mental health is an almost daily topic.  This has been a prevalent issue at all of the schools I have worked at, all the way from the large public  the small private.  It has a broad stroke and impacts more than just the individuals directly dealing with it.

I am not a medical doctor; just an average person making sense of the world.  Over the next few days, I’ll try and look at a few areas of mental health, including:

• Insanity as an excuse for crimes (such as the Aurora Theater shooting)
• The rise of depression in today’s youth  
• Uncertainty in mental health
• The collision of morality and mental health (such as homosexuality’s shift over the years from a mental disorder to a natural way of life)
• Mental health’s rise as it relates to free will

There will be more, I’m sure, but these are the areas where my mind goes at the moment.  This is an area I look forward to writing more about.  For me, it is this kind of writing that helps me continue to solidify the things I say, do, and believe.