Telling someone how we feel can be daunting. Getting to a place where we feel able to speak to someone can take an awful lot of courage. It’s so important that when we do share, we’re believed.

As a parent or guardian, it can be frustrating to watch your child struggle at school with behavioral, emotional, learning or attention issues and not know how to help them.

Mental Health Awareness Month. A poem for those who know this winding road…

I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of getting into a work tunnel while running on adrenaline and caffeine, only to come up for air at dinner time and realize that you missed breakfast and lunch.

Check out this simple mental health hack!

Loneliness can only occur when you don’t know how to be alone, though. Loneliness presupposes that you need the company, attention, validation, acceptance, and love of anyone other than yourself.

These truths reveal themselves to you once you get on your path and stay on it

I guess it’s good that self-care is back in the conversation. I might be biased since I am a mental health advocate and run a non-profit to help people in the day to day battle with their mental health, but I hear about self-care now more than I ever have before. Awesome, right? I mean, yeah but….I need to be honest when I tell you even now when I think about self-care it USUALLY comes from someone who sees themselves with influence (think boss, teacher, parent, social media influencer, whatever) and sometimes has an undertone of “I need you to not let your personal issues get in the way of your productivity.” Ugh, @#&%! am I right? And usually the self-care they offer is cliche or inaccessible:

There’s this weird idea that’s been sold to us - everything is supposed to get better and better every day, however life operates less like a straight line of ever-increasing happiness and more like a toddler driving a sports car.

THE MENTAL HEALTH community needs you! It doesn't matter whether or not you have struggled with your mental health in the past, are still fighting today, or have watched someone close to you struggle. We are in a battle, and it's us versus the stigma that surrounds mental health. While there has been some progress in this area, we have a long way to go.

By providing supportive environments and teaching children and teens to recognize their emotions and address them in healthy ways, we can change and save lives.

For some young people, school is the only place in their lives where they know they are safe and can form trusted, long-lasting relationships. It is, therefore, a cruel irony that many students who are affected by trauma also have trouble engaging at school. They may attend school with the best of intentions, hoping to form friendships, feel connected to their teachers, and succeed at the day’s tasks. Yet they can find themselves defiant, demanding, and disengaged—unable to learn and confused about why they can’t relate and bond with others.

As a former athlete and long time coach I am aware that it is essential that we push an athlete to find their limitations. But what happens if we push too far? How do we respond if and athlete is injured as a result of that pushing?

More than ever before, high school and college students are tackling their own mental illnesses. Unfortunately, many…

“You sometimes think you want to disappear, but all you really want is to be found.” – Kid Cudi

My mental illness is exactly that, an illness. It doesn’t suddenly disappear because you say it’s time to get over it or because it makes you uncomfortable. If that’s how it worked, I would have said goodbye to it a long time ago.

Sure, pretty much everyone could benefit from therapy. But not everyone can afford it. Thankfully, there’s a whole world of free or affordable mental health care out there designed to help you with just about every issue.

An honest entry from the journal of someone with PTSD this morning…

WARNING!!

This is not going to be a typical If You Don’t Quit You Win blog post.