Author: End The Silent Epidemic's Nancy Cowden, LMFT aka @nanycowdenlmft This monthly educational segment is entitled “Mental Health in Real Life" and is written by End The Silent Epidemic and Friend For Life's resident volunteer Director of Clinical Mental Health Education, practicing clinical therapist to families and youth specifically, Nancy Cowden, LMFT. Nancy joined our team over a year ago and has been providing among our most popular mental health educational content ever since. We are so lucky and proud to be able to offer you, our beloved peer-support community this critical material that is informed by a most highly respected by patients and colleagues alike family and youth-specific therapist with over TWO DECADES OF CLINICAL YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH EXPERIENCE. You all seem to be equally grateful for Nancy's participation as her slideshows are amongst our most popular content offered
We are so grateful for Nancy's content and we believe it is so popular because we are currently living in a world where a lack of basic mental health education has been found to be the #1 cause of youth choosing not to seek help (professional or other forms of help), when facing mental health struggles, even those life-threatening in nature in an astonishing and deadly percentage of cases: 96%! This almost unbelievable statistic has had an undoubtedly significant impact on the reality our generation faces: a reality in which youth suicide has become a true existential threat to the global youth population with suicide officially the 2nd leading cause of death in youth 10-34 years old, more deadly than any physical disease in that same age group.
Due to a number of factors too long to list but largely due to issues of lack of access, unmatched supply of mental health professionals compared to the number of youth who need treatment, and so much else, around 80% of American youth with a DIAGNOSABLE MENTAL ILLNESS GO WITHOUT PROPER TREATMENT, meaning only 20% of American youth have the means and access to professional treatment (and that's only if they can manage to overcome the first barrier of realizing that they need help and are able and willing to ask for it, which as mentioned above is only about 4% of youth in some instances). This lack of access combined with the fact that youth are not seeking out help in the first place are two of the factors that make Nancy's original educational material so particularly priceless and popular*. Most of all, we are so proud and grateful to be able to disseminate Nancy's unparalleled content because we believe it is among the most practically and tangibly helpful of the resources we offer. As the title suggests, it helps readers understand how their mental health struggles might manifest "in real life," with each slideshow providing insight into tools, coping skills and or resources that can make these "real life" manifestation so much more manageable!
For the purposes of this forum post we hope you will engage peer-support and engage in social interaction by commenting below with thoughts, feedback and we encourage you to strike up your own conversations pertaining to this or a related subjects that will help each of you to become more familiar with one another with each new post! If there is a particular "Mental Health In Real Life" clinical topic you would like Nancy to consider covering in a future segment, comment below so that Nancy can consider if and how she may be able to help!*
*NANCY IS NOT YOUR THERAPIST, you should never consider these evidenced-based general recommendations as personal and/or clinical recommendations, NOR CONSIDER THIS MATERIAL AS A PROPER SUBSTITUTE FOR THERAPY IN ANYWAY (we obviously highly promote therapy as the gold-standard for anyone who can access it).