Mental Health Education

A YouTube discussion

I spent a while last week talking to a friend for a project he's doing called "I Hear You". His medium is engaging people in respectful dialogue about their beliefs and the objective lies somewhere among assessing certainty, learning how one justifies their beliefs, and finding where and how any of that intersects with "truth".

It's stuff that's been on my mind a lot lately.

I have my view of the world, what's wrong, what's right, what's definitely a gray area. Some of it seems really straightforward - Climate change is real, the earth isn't flat, vaccines save lives.

Huge numbers of people disagree with me anyway though. These simple truths of mine are not theirs. We have some fundamental disagreements about reality. I find that hard to grapple with.

In the video linked here (it's long!), Chucky and I explore my belief about more mental health education being something good and needed in our world. It's an interesting conversation and I fully stand by my claim that there is likely benefit to be gained from teaching skills often only encountered in therapy to a broader audience.

In fact, I think some of that education would be useful in targeting the extreme fear-based rationalizations that have led to a lot of our current polarized situation. Therapy has taught me a lot about examining emotional reasoning and "thinking about your thinking".

One thing we work through at the beginning of this video is clarifying the belief I really want to put out there. What you don't see is the additional 45 minutes of set-up before this where I had even less of a claim. I told him that I don't like "Everyone should..." or "Never do..." statements because there are always exceptions. I ran him through beliefs I'd considered for our topic that hadn't felt nuanced enough for me to support. Therapy has taught me to be skeptical of the black & white.

We talked more after this was recorded about the project as a whole. I told him that the conversation we recorded had, in carefully and non-judgmentally exploring my belief, felt similar to some therapy sessions.

I greatly appreciate what Chucky is doing because I think this style of dialogue, whether out loud or with yourself in your head, is essential to being authentic in our beliefs. I feel lucky to have had so much previous exposure to it as a patient in the mental health system.

It would probably be ideal if the mental patient part weren't a prerequisite though.