Today, I’m Blogging for Mental Health.

Today is Mental Health Month Blog Day and I wanted to do something to participate. Many of you may be aware that, while my personal mental health issue is ADHD, my personal challenge is to battle mental health stigma. I’m not alone, many bloggers work hard to minimize the effects of stigma with every post they write.

One of my favourite bloggers, Melanie Knapp, writer of Psychology Discussions, also believes in reducing stigma. Her voice is softer and gentler than mine, but her message is no less powerful.

She and I have decided to share a title for Mental Health Month Blog Day. And that title is the one you see at the top of this post. Here is her post.
And I mean it!

Well, maybe not these shoes …

Don’t judge me. That’s really all I want to say. Don’t judge me and I won’t judge you. The part about walking a mile in my shoes is somewhat irrelevant. If you truly do know what it’s like to walk a mile in my shoes, I know you aren’t about to judge me.

But if you don’t know what it’s like to walk a mile in my shoes, if you don’t know what it’s like to have ADHD, let me make it easy for you. You already have all the symptoms. Well, if you don’t have all of them, you have most of them.

• Do you ever start doing one thing and end up doing something else?
• Do you ever walk into a room and wonder what you went in there for?
• Do you ever say something and, possibly while you are saying it, start to think you shouldn’t be saying it? And then know you shouldn’t?
• Do you ever make an appointment and then forget about it, completely?
• Do you ever find that you need intense activity to jump start …
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In school, I didn’t learn no art real good.

When I was a young lad in school, as you will know if you have parents or grandparents, I had to walk twenty miles to school each day and twenty miles back again, up hill both ways, and it always snowed while I was walking. And often times, that was the good part of my day.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But I am not lying when I tell you that I went to one room schools, as in “Little House On The Prairie.” Grade one and grade two were spent in a school with grades one through eight all being taught by one teacher. How did I learn anything you ask? I learned everything. If the teacher was talking I was listening, struggling to comprehend lessons meant for people who ranged from a year older than I was to people twice my age. But I couldn’t do my own work.

Been there, Done that, Got the T-shirt!

Are you tired? Are you bored? Have you had enough of ADHD? Do you want a cure? Do you want a way to fix it? End it? Leave it in the past?

Join the club. That’s what we all want.

That’s why the people with the latest therapy or herbal remedy or book or diet will always have customers.

Don’t misunderstand me, some of the books outline plans that help some of us, maybe even many of us. And many of the books available do the great service of reminding us that we are not alone in this insidious disorder. But we are as diverse a group as there could be. Even the things we have in common aren’t common to each and every one of us.

Coping and recovery start within

I mostly write about ADHD. I write about the quirks of the thing. I write about how those quirks might be used to our advantage. If there is no way of that happening, I write about ways of coping with those quirks, overcoming them.

Sometimes I get indignant, I climb up on a soap box and I write about being marginalized, talked about, labelled by people who have a degree in the dual majors of blithering and stereotyping.

I’m sorry if my getting upset about this leaves anyone else upset, but stigma is such a huge issue to me. I see it as the biggest barrier to betterment. And stigma originates without.

And stigma is, to some extent, the issue I’m discussing again today, but only partially. Today my focus is on self esteem. Self esteem originates within, but is affected greatly by stigma.

Knowing one of us doesn’t mean you know all of us

They’re out there. You know they’re out there. Those people who think they know all about us ADHDers.

And what makes them such experts? Why do they think they know about us? I don’t know. Maybe they hear things in coffee shops. Maybe they read misleading internet information (I know! I too was recently shocked to discover that not everything published online is true).

Or maybe they make assumptions about all of us based on one or two of us.

I would guess you’re tired of hearing me say that ADHD is a collection of symptoms. But it is, and no two of us have the same set to the same extent, so how could one or two of us be used to define the description of all of us? Well, they couldn’t, that’s how.

All right, back to work, all of you. (By Rodw via Wikimedia Commons)

A while ago, I received an email from a reader discussing ADHD in the workplace. Her situation was that she was rejoining the outside workforce after having put in more than two decades in the service of running a household.

Further to this, she had only recently been diagnosed with ADHD.

She had started out in an entry level position, working cash in a big box store. But as is often the case with ADHDers, her performance in this structured position attracted attention and she was suddenly being cultivated for bigger and better things.

During her training for the new position, she was given the benefit of an evaluation. She heard the areas she had problems in were time management and focus.

Are you on the spectrum?

I’ll tell you why I might consider it though.

A few months ago, a tragic event occurred. There was a shooting in a school in Connecticut.

And then, because tragedy isn’t apparently enough for some, there were comments made about the mental health of the alleged shooter. I took the stance that his mental health was secondary to the issue, and only played a part in so much as societies treatment, marginalization and stigmatization of him would have played a far greater role in the events under scrutiny.

I have not changed my mind. But in a post entitled Asperger’s, ADHD, Autism and Violence: Is There A Connection … I suggested that ADHD was on the Autism Spectrum.

You’d think I’d said God was dead. I was questioned about my stance. I was abused about it. I was insulted, called names, and lectured.

Clara Hughes and Bell Canada say “Lets Talk”

As marketing schemes go, this was a good one. Bell, Canada’s telecommunications giant, has been ramping up to February 12th, choosing that day to put mental health in the limelight.

I know this brought them a great deal of publicity, but I don’t have a problem with that. The money they spent on this campaign could easily have gone to slick commercials and a cadre of spin doctors figuring out how to make saving a nickle look like something worth the money and effort needed to invest in getting signed up for that “save a nickle” program.