This week, 6-12 October, is Mental Illness Awareness Week. As I have stated before, I started this project for mental health reasons, and I would like to draw attention to what this week signifies.
While people are more opened to talking about mental illness and mental health, there is still stigma surrounding the issue. I don’t think this helps anyone and more discussion should be had.
I was listening to this TED talk the other week and I found truth to this:
I don’t know what the answer is or what the answers are, but hopefully the more people blog or talk about their stories, the more comfortable the collective society will be comfortable with sharing their stories. When we accept people as they are, beautiful things happen.
The Happiness Box Project 
Hi, Jessica Marie!
Thanks for letting me know this is Mental Illness Awareness Week. Once again the TED talk you posted takes me back to the early 80s when I got into the human potential movement and attended all those est and NLP seminars. It was during those years of working on my own life that I learned about Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Jackson Hole was and still is a mecca for people seeking self improvement, awareness and enlightenment through forums of this kind. I very much appreciated listening to guest speaker Keely Herron whose life has been impacted by abuse and loss, the types of trauma that have stigma attached. In her earlier years, the fear and shame associated with that stigma forced her to keep the pain bottled up and to suffer alone. I agree with her concept of “the cult of happiness” and her Robert Frost quote, “The best way out is always through.” By opening up and sharing her story with the public, Keely transformed herself from victim to hero in the battle to defeat stigma. I also agree with her that we are all broken and that people need to listen and not judge or offer platitudes.
Thanks for posting another excellent TED talk, dear friend JM, and have a great week!
LikeLike