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If I felt like it was hard to share my issues with my friends and family, at least I had public role models I could look to. This article talks about how much harder it is to be a person of color who’s struggling with mental health issues:
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It’s very powerful, and heartening, to look at those photos and to see myself represented. It is also necessary because, often, in communities of color, there isn’t a vocabulary for mental illness or mental health discussions. It’s almost never talked about, for a number of reasons, making the stigma faced by people of color who suffer even worse. There’s also the widespread belief among many of those communities that mental illness is something that happens to non-black people, the corollary being that it is a show of weakness.
Articles like the above help shatter those stereotypes.
I’ve also been reading a lot about the changing face of drug usage. Over the past few years, there’s been quite a bit of press on the explosion of heroin usage in places like Vermont and Wyoming, places many would not have expected. What gives me hope is that people in power like the Governor mentioned in the Rolling Stone article are advocating a treatment-based strategy that emphasizes treatment over making arrests and throwing people in jail. The strategy seems to be gaining popularity, so there’s hope that the conversation is beginning to change.