Who’s Lovin’ You?

Our broken mental health infrastructure keeps people from getting the care they need. We need to be the experts in caring for ourselves.

There’s a Jackson Five song called “Who’s Lovin’ You” and one of the lines goes like this:

I sit around with my head hangin’ down

And I wonder

Who’s lovin’ you

Of course, the answer to that question “Who’s lovin’ you?” should always be “Me!” at the very least. After all, who is with us if we aren’t with ourselves? Years ago, a friend of mine said to me “Logan, you know better than anyone else how to take care of yourself.” We live in a society where we aren’t really encouraged to look after ourselves in any meaningful way. It doesn’t matter if you’re a college student or an investment banker on Wall Street — sacrificing our well-being for the sake of work and productivity is glorified in our culture. And when it comes to the unpredictable things in life — heartbreak, death, illness, loss — we’re expected to bounce back as quickly as possible.

In an ideal world, every person would be able to handle all of these things with the help of someone who is trained and paid to listen to them meaning a psychiatrist, social worker, or mental health counselor. When I was growing up, there was no shortage of trauma that therapy could have addressed, but it was cost-prohibitive without health insurance or the means to pay out-of-pocket. We don’t live in anything close to that ideal world I dream about.

Cost is just one symptom of a broken approach to mental health in which vital and life-saving services are inaccessible to the average American. It’s one reason I decided to join Crisis Text Line as a volunteer crisis counselor. It’s also a reason why over the years, I’ve tried everything to work through the trauma I’ve experienced in my life. Self-medication, burying myself in my academic and professional work to the point of isolation and depression, going to church. Good or bad, you name it and I’ve tried it.

I know I’m not alone in having struggled to find a path forward without the help of doctors and professionals. The lack of parity between services for mental and physical health is one contributor to the massive opioid/heroin crisis, particularly where I live in New England, that first ravaged Black communities but now is reaching far beyond. It is also a reason suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15–24 year olds. In fact, gun violence and suicide each take the lives of over 30,000 people every year with 54% of suicides completed by firearm (http://www.emorycaresforyou.emory.edu/resources/suicidestatistics.html)

Ultimately, drug addiction and suicide are among the many destructive by-products of a society where people end up trapped by the high cost of getting help and trapped by the stigma that discourages people from getting that help in the first place.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there is a disparity in both our attitudes and availability of services for mental and physical health. For my entire life, I’ve heard therapy and mental health services derided as “indulgent” or “only for the weak.” When I was a kid, the word in my family for someone who was in therapy or getting treatment for mental health issues was “cuckoo.” For too many, the cost of care is financially and socially cost-prohibitive and the consequence is that people flail about with remedies that often make the problem harder to solve.

I’ve made it my mission in the last few months and going forward to get others to see mental health as equal in importance to physical health. I want people to feel comfortable talking about mental health, comfortable with getting help, and comfortable with the idea that it’s important to focus on taking care of yourself. There may be huge obstacles on the path to a future where mental health services are universally affordable and embraced by society. But that only makes it more urgent to care for ourselves which matters as much as anything a mental health professional can do.

Life is inherently traumatic. Large and small stresses tax our reserves every single day. Casual racism and sexist comments can knock you out for a day or two. Losing a spouse or parent can knock you down for a year. Childhood trauma can hobble you for a lifetime. These are all areas where self-care can make a big difference in our ability to keep going.

After my last bout of major depression last fall, I took an inventory of the way I deal with stress and with crisis in my life. I saw that I had developed a habit of drinking when I felt like things were going wrong, shutting out my friends, and casting aside activities that give me a sense of purpose and make me feel good. Finishing my graduate program really freed up a lot of time and mental space for me to decide what sorts of things would help me keep my balance on a daily basis and what things would help me keep my cool in the heat of a future crisis.