PTSD,ABUSE, SHAME, HURT, HUMILITY, GUILT, FORGIVENESS
It all hurts, we have different ways of dealing with it, we use relationships, drugs, alcohol, work, food, religion…
Don’t shame us for our pain…
PTSD,ABUSE, SHAME, HURT, HUMILITY, GUILT, FORGIVENESS
It all hurts, we have different ways of dealing with it, we use relationships, drugs, alcohol, work, food, religion…
Don’t shame us for our pain…
I applaud her!!!!!!!
Good for her (horrible yes indeed) but to have the courage to admit she acted on what her thoughts suggested I applaud her.
Listen white women have been killing their babies since forever.
Black women have rejected taking care of their mental health since forever.
They don’t want to be thought of as crazy…
They don’t know they have issues…
They can’t afford a therapist…
They self medicate with alcohol, cocaine, heroine, sex, food…
They cover it up with the next man, the next job…
Dysfunctional family behavior rarely addresses mental health…
That misinformed uneducated Steve gets a fuckin garbage that’s some bullshyt instead of addressing it with a Wise mind he got all fucking emotional!
Now we must rely on God that some will see this and offers her some help!
Shouting love, peace, joy, and good health to all of the women touched by breast cancer
National Suicide Hot Line 800-273-8255
Veterans Crisis Line 800-273-8255
Understanding the issues concerning suicide and mental health is an important way to take part in suicide prevention, help others in crisis, and change the conversation around suicide.
Stress and depression can look and feel very similar to each other. Some of the common symptoms for both include issues with sleeping, eating, concentration, and mood, as well as difficulties performing daily tasks. Physically, there’s a lot of overlap between stress and depression, as both affect the immune system, leading to an increase in certain inflammatory markers.
For depressed patients, the changes in their brain are similar to what is observed in chronic stress. And chronic stress, when left untreated, can lead to depression. For example, adults who experienced a high level of adversity during their childhood, which results in toxic stress, have much higher rates of depression.
The biology is not the same, but they share a lot of similarities.
Here’s how to tell the difference between stress and depression.
Stress is phasic
When it comes to stress versus depression, there are distinct differences, especially when it comes to effective treatment options. One of the primary ways stress and depression differ is that stress can come and go.
Stress is something that is phasic for most people. You have a stressful period and you come out of it. Depression is not like that. Depression goes on for years in some people. It can spontaneously remit in some people, but not everybody.”
For example, if a happy event happens, such as friends or loved ones coming for a visit, a stressed person will be able to feel happy in that moment, although the stress will probably return once they have left. For a depressed person, they will not be able to feel happiness in that moment, even when they know they should.
If you can get home from work and still recharge, that’s not major, clinical depression, depression does not come and go.
So, what is the treatment for stress? Reducing it, through measures like exercise, meditation, and mindfulness, as well as reducing the source of the stress.
Depression is an illness
For a depressed person, although stress-reducing measures—such as exercise or going out into nature—can help, it will not cure them.
At certain levels of depression, nothing but medication will help.
Depression is, at its core, an illness of the brain. Just like we treat an infection with antibiotics, depression often requires medication. For someone with severe depression, no amount of “mind over matter” or “willing it away” will work. Instead, a person with depression needs medical treatment.
Depression is no different than any other illness, It is a medical illness.
If you are experiencing either stress or depression, the most important thing to know is that help is available, and that it can get better. For stress, that involves reducing the source of stress and finding ways to cope. For depression, that involves treatment, such as therapy and medication.
Whatever the right solution may be, know that there is one, and that taking the first step to getting the help you need may be the most important one of them all.
African American Prisoners/Healthcare for COVID-19
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
A Personal Story
I think there are great deal of folk that have had the experience of have a male family member incarcerated only to find out that they were not the same young man they knew before the incarceration. I don’t know that we all can identify when trying to reconnect that not only are they different, but we too have evolved this makes for strange bedfellows. Personally, I have interacted with a family member only to find myself more frustrated at the behavior of said individual than realizing he is different. I don’t know what it is like to be incarcerate (in jail) albeit I have my own struggles where I voluntarily opted for incarceration metaphorically. Non-the-less, I don’t know what it’s like to wake up in the same cage day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and/or decade after decade. I haven’t got a clue what it must be like to be controlled i.e. told what to wear, when to get up when to lay down, when I can shower, when I can a make a phone call. I don’t know what it’s like to be locked up with nothing but men/women without any freedoms that you and I take for granted on any given day. I don’t know why the history of Black men has positioned a person to fall into the category of inmate, jail bird, or felon. I’ve heard the idea that the construction of prisons were/are constructed based on 3rd grade scores – Experts often cite third grade as a decisive year for students and schools. In fact, there is common folklore that asserts that public officials will forecast prison construction based on a state’s third-grade literacy rates. An article in The Atlantic called this phenomenon “An Urban Myth That Should Be True.” The article goes on to say, “U.S. prison planners don’t use local third-grade reading scores to predict future inmate populations. But maybe they should.” This is a two topic writing on the healthcare of the inmate and that of the Black American and Covid-19.
The persistent and pervasive notion of African American male criminality which was injected into the American consciousness during the post Reconstruction period persists steadfastly today in the United States. It is a driving force behind the nation ’ s post-1970 mass incarceration binge for which economically disadvantaged Black males are the primary victims. It also serves as fuel for insensitive comments, unwarranted surveillance, and other microaggressions such as those now in the media glare. Few African American males, regardless of their achievement, social standing or economic status, are immune to the stress associated with these subtle forms of hostility
Healthcare and the Inmate
Imprisonment, homicide, non-lethal assault and other crime, chronic and infectious disease, substance abuse, suicide, and accidents all contribute to the much wider gap in the community-level sex ratios found among African Americans compared to those observed found among other ethnic and racial groups in the United States. This wide array of causes and correlates of African American male mortality, disability, and confinement suggests that one area in need of interdisciplinary inquiry that examines the intersection between public health and public safety. These lines of inquiry must situate and contextualize the lived experiences of the African American male. Health analysts and social scientists across many disciplines have all studied African Americans and their communities extensively over the past decades because this population has disproportionately high levels of disease, disability, premature death, and exposure to the criminal justice system.
A large body of research has documented black, white disparities in health and mortality in the United States ( Adler & Rehkopf, 2008 ; Frisbie, Song, Powers, & Street, 2004 ; Geruso, 2012 ; Pampel, Krueger, & Denney, 2010 ; Williams & Jackson, 2005 ; Williams & Mohammed, 2009 ). Racial differences in socioeconomic status (e.g., income, education) largely account for these gaps with individual and institutional discrimination, residential segregation, and bias in healthcare settings also explaining some of the variation in black, white disparities (Braveman et al., 2011 ; Williams, 1999 ; Williams & Jackson, 2005 ).
Afro-American Healthcare & COVID-19
Speaking of the disparities in health care among Blacks and Whites brings me to another topic – Covid-19. As most people in the world are now acutely aware, an outbreak of COVID-19 was detected in mainland China in December of 2019. Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that can cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory tract illnesses such as the common cold, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). When an infected person coughs or sneezes, the new coronavirus may be transmitted through expelled droplets. These droplets can enter a person’s system through “contact routes,” such as the mouth, eyes, or nose. It is also possible for the droplets to be inhaled into the lungs.
The concept of COVID-19 hit the news airways like the plague. Folk ran out and emptied the grocery story of every roll of tissue paper, alcohol and contamination cleaning products. Addictions rose, folks died, both individuals and establishments lost their lives, and the country was shut down. This would cause the sanest person to question the reason for living.
Statistical data document that African Americans have a worse health profile and higher rate of death than White Americans for practically every illness. Broader surveys of self-assessed health using a comparative framework have found that African Americans are nearly twice as likely as White Americans to rate their health as “fair” or “poor,” and twice as likely as White Americans to rate their health as “fair” or “poor,” and that self-rated health is a strong predictor of sickness and early death (Bratter and Gorman, 2011). Middle-class African Americans have a better health profile than their less affluent counterparts, but many report serious health challenges as common in their families.
Much like the prisoner many Black Americans suffer the same inequalities of healthcare whether locked up or free. With that said how will Black Americans come out as the victor during these turbulent times?
What We Know
Black communities share common social and economic factors, already in place before the pandemic, that increase their risk for COVID-19. Those factors include:
Distrust
Why is that the Black American holds on to memories of years gone by when it comes to their health. The now infamous Tuskegee Syphilis study is perhaps the most widely known study exclusive to African Americans males. Yet in present day the number of references to this experiment in conjunction with the COVID-19 vaccine are astronomical. African Americans have experienced something that others have not: the unique combination of racism, slavery and segregation. It has caused African Americans to develop not only different behavioral patterns, values, and beliefs but also different definitions, standards, and differences in value systems and perspectives(Randall, 1996). Distrust of the health care system by African Americans runs from the feelings or ill gains for participation in clinical trials to being used only as guinea pigs. In addition, there are feelings by African Americans whether the physician, intentional or not, do treat minority patients differently than White patients (Lake, Snell, Perry, & Associates 2004). If that is true then the reluctance to take the vaccine is valid. Additionally many Americans feel that the vaccine was rushed and not enough due diligence has been put forth.
This is like something from a movie…more than half a dozen doctors and nurses at New York area hospitals said they were upset at how the vaccine was being distributed at their institutions. They described what had happened to The New York Times but asked that their names not be used because hospitals have shown a willingness to fire or punish employees for speaking to the news media during the pandemic.
At some major hospitals in Manhattan, doctors and nurses have recalled scrolling through social media and pausing to make a snap judgment each time they saw a selfie one of their colleagues had posted of getting vaccinated: Did that person deserve to be vaccinated before they were?
“We feel disrespected and underappreciated due to our second-tier priority for vaccination,” a group of anesthesiologists at Mount Sinai Hospital wrote to administrators over the weekend.
Health care workers said rumors were proliferating in WhatsApp groups and amid the banter of the operating room. Stories have begun to circulate of a plastic surgeon who managed to get vaccinated early, of doses being thrown out at one Manhattan hospital because of poor planning. On group chats, doctors debate how — and whether to — try to get vaccinated ahead of schedule.
At Mount Sinai Hospital, some doctors told others that you could talk your way into receiving a vaccine just by getting in line and repeating that you do “COVID-related procedures,” one Mount Sinai doctor, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, recalled.
Pastor Todd Dunn had been urging “Faith over fear!” since the COVID-19 pandemic started in March. Just before Thanksgiving, he posted a message on Facebook dismissing precautionary measures advised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to keep wearing masks and avoid gatherings with family members who don’t live in the same house.
“I’m not wearing a mask when around my family like the CDC requests and we are traveling so we’ll take our chances,” Dunn’s Facebook post read. “And to top it off we are huggers so there you go! There will be no social distancing CDC. Faith over fear!!”
A few weeks later, both of Dunn’s parents were dead after entering the hospital with COVID-19 symptoms. Charles and Shirley Dunn died within hours of one another at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth.
Henry Wolf sat hunched over a table last week, meticulously trying to dissect a plush stuffed pig.
“I’ve been playing with this for like 20 minutes now and the furthest I’ve gotten is getting the screws out,” he said.
His workspace at North Dakota State University was littered with tools, well past the time that classes had ended.
Wolf is a grad student in electrical engineering at NDSU. He was trying to expose the little pink pig’s circuit board, tucked away inside a plastic case that’s glued, sewed and zip-tied into its fluffy guts. He needed to hack the circuit that makes the pig’s tail move when a tiny switch on its foot is pressed.
“We’re basically bypassing that on/off switch,” he said. “The trick is kind of undoing what they did at the factory.”