Mental Health Awareness Month: Our Introduction

Bwahaha, funny, right?! *sigh*

Please note, unless specified, all links provided are to internal pages only, except where they redirect you to our other blog that contains more information on us and concentration of life stories, unless specified.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, before we get started with what we hope to be our first Mental Illness Monday for the Month of May (this is just an intro though - obviously our post next Monday will be all about the mental disorder we live with), we'd like you to watch/read this short video about Mental Health Stigma, tolerance, education and acceptance...and love...

Mental Health Awareness Month is celebrated in the United States, Canada observes it for a week; we're not sure about Europe, though we are aware that they recognize this important cause.

Many of you know us from Twitter, we've been living on Twitter for almost this entire year so far. Our stories have been shared through this website, and sent out into the Tweet-o-sphere in attempt to raise awareness and reach out people like us, and people with similar struggles.  The things that have happened to us in the last few years have no been written yet; stories of what had happened to make us decide to finally deal with out mental health issues, rather than run away to another place, yet again. It's all here if you choose to read. This website also contains stories of abuse from our past, as a child, as a teen and as an adult.

We guess before we get to far we should explain who We are. We are a singular body with multiple personalities. Our reasons for this blog, and finally coming forward about what we deal with are numerous, and many have been explained around here in our writing.

When we first started sharing the stories of our past, and the mental health issues of our life in this blog back in January, the National Institute of Mental Health - Massachusetts (NIHM) landed here, after a post we had placed on Twitter (follow them, if you like: @NIHMMass). They asked us if we would be interested in sharing our stories for an upcoming project on stamping out mental health stigma in the media. 

We took this offer under consideration for a week. We discussed it, and the specifications they had given us, and ultimately decided not to do it. We wrote about why we made that decision in a blog post: When All We Have Is Hope.

We've written a lot about mental health over the last few months, we started with Birds of A Feather, on Twitter, CAN Flock Together to discuss the legitimacy of social media as an outlet for people who felt isolated from society due to mental health struggles. Later this past month we wrote, For Us, It's All About Team Awesome...and Twitter, to gives tips on using Twitter, how we use it, and also explains the who and why our #TeamAwesome. We really do appreciate all of our followers, even the ones we don't interact with on a daily, or even weekly basis. We'd love to say we are all in agreement, the We...but, we'll be honest. Not every single one of us likes Twitter. 

We want to make sure you also understand that We use humour to deal with our life, always have; and that's probably the only reason we have been able to survive. We are okay with poking fun at ourselves when we have to - but we also don't all do it; some of us are sensitive.

It feels like, if you are new to our blog today, that there is a lot to explain. There has been so much written by us; we write every day. The reasons we write are outlined throughout many of our entries. Writing therapy, a legitimate form of therapy, used by people who do not have as much success with the types of therapy we have undergone in the many years of our life, is one of those reasons.

[ A SECTION HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO A MASSIVE UPDATE IN LINKS THAT WERE PROVIDED. PLEASE SEE: TBA 

If you have any questions for us we are very open and will answer to our best ability - this is totally the month to ask us questions. You can either ask us on Twitter, in the comment section of a blog entry here, or e-mail us at justcallmefrank2010 (at) gmail.com.

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Resources for You - facts, figures and personal stories of other people can be found on these sites:

National Institute of Mental Health: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml

American Psychological Association: http://www.apa.org/index.aspx

Canadian Mental Health Association: http://www.cmha.ca/bins/index.asp

Mental Health Europe: http://www.mhe-sme.org/

World Health Organization - Mental Health: http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/noncommunicable-diseases/mental-health

Mental Health America: http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/go/may

World Psychiatric Association: http://www.wpanet.org/