LOOK AT WHERE WE HAVE COM

By Andrew Malekoff

If you haven’t been initiated just yet, the twitterspere is a fascinating place on the Internet populated by all kinds of people, from your neighbors to local shopkeepers to your long lost cousin to your favorite film actress to world leaders.

By Twittersphere or Twitterverse I refer to postings made on the social media website Twitter, considered collectively.

At any given moment in time postings might include news of the day, personal reflections, political leanings and gleanings, conspiracy theories, calls for social action, fond memories, jokes and riddles, aphorisms, recipes, links to music, film and book reviews, humorous gifs (animated or static images) and much more.

Some posters have millions of followers. Others have less than 10. Anyone can participate by posting or just by scrolling and reading.

If you wish you can respond to posts. You can approve or disapprove of what someone else wrote. Or simply add your own voice to a discussion.

If you do decide to post, beware: there are trolls in the twittersphere. Wikipedia defines a troll as “a person who starts quarrels or upsets people on the Internet to distract and sow discord by posting inflammatory and digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses whether for the troll's amusement or a specific gain.”

Fortunately, not every person who responds is a troll. Many are thoughtful and respectful and only interested in expanding a conversation.

Just the other day I was on Twitter and found a discussion about the beginning of the school year. The opening tweet was written on August 22 by a mom from Las Vegas who goes by the handle, @CandaceToddLV: “It’s the 8th day of the school year & I just received a call from my daughters high school informing me they arrested a child with a loaded 9mm gun on campus this morning. I am now standing in my kitchen sobbing. I should not have to live like this. @MomsDemand ”

Candace’s post drew a significant response. Almost 90,000 people “liked” her post and more than 1,700 people responded. One response was written by @marci6687 from Florida who replied, “While absolutely not as scary as your situation, in our 8th day as well we are on our 4th written threat and 5th day of controlled or alert campus.”

Another response was sent by @rememberpink1: “My heart bleeds for you. I had two nephews & a niece at Sandy Hook. As an aunt the pain & fear & anger was unexplainable. It STILL is. And I wasn’t their mother. I stand strong w/ you. I fear every day my kids are in school. We shouldn’t have to fear. THEY shouldn’t have to fear.”

Many of the responses, which I will not share here fed into a debate on gun control, politics and the NRA.

One guy @joe1lane1 wrote, “My wife (school teacher) was in bed when I got home. Asked, “rough day?”  She said they had to do training on stopping wounds, suicides and other things. It wears her out emotionally. Educators are true “Heroes” in this country and get nowhere near the credit they deserve!”

My wife is a teacher as well. As I’m writing this she is on her way to her second day of school. She too will be participating in a similar training today. This has become the new normal.

In a few weeks at my agency North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center our staff members will be participating in an “active shooter” training.

Look at where we have come.

Andrew Malekoff is the Executive Director of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, which provides comprehensive mental health services for children from birth through 24 and their families. To find out more, visitwww.northshorechildguidance.org. You can also visit: momsdemandaction.org, a grassroots movement of Americans demand reasonable solutions to address our nation’s culture of gun violence, that Candace tagged @MomsDemand in her opening tweet.

Published in TheIslandNow.com August 31, 2018 - https://theislandnow.com/opinions-100/kids-first-look-at-where-we-have-come/

PARKLAND YOUTH, ACTIVISM AND TRIUMPH OVER HELPLESSNESS AND DESPAIR

By Andrew Malekoff© February 19, 2018

The 2018 Valentine’s Day massacre at Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida has elevated beyond cliché status the oft-stated sentiment about a loss of innocence in childhood. For many, the events of that day evoked painful memories of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and scores more in recent decades. Schools, movie theaters, concert venues and more have become American killing fields.

After “thoughts and prayers” are paraded around by politicians from all sides, what happens next? 

Many gun rights advocates, refusing to allow for the fact that our forefathers were talking about the right to bear arms such as muskets and had no conception of guns that could shoot down dozens in an instant, stand in the position that it’s not about guns but rather mental illness.

As the Executive Director of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, which serves children and their families facing issues such as depression, anxiety and substance use disorders, I have seen the many faces of mental illness and addictions for more than 40 years. It is incredibly rare for those who are labeled as mentally ill to be violent. In fact, they are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

Nevertheless, we do need to have a discussion about mental illness at times like these. That discussion, however, needs to be about how health insurance companies and the elected officials who count on their donations are failing miserably at having adequate numbers of providers on their lists who take insurance.

Over and over again, we hear that, before they found North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, which never turns anyone away for inability to pay, they made numerous calls to the mental health providers on their insurer’s list and found that they no longer take insurance or are booked for months.

Aside from receiving emotional first-aid, the surviving students from Douglas High are demonstrating that they need to take action; action that represents triumph over the demoralization of helplessness and despair. 

Noted trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk said that “talking about the trauma is rarely if ever enough.”  Survivors have a need to create symbols such as memorials or participate in action that “enable them to mourn the dead and establish the historical and cultural meaning of the traumatic events.”

The surviving students from Parkland are turning their heartbreak and rage into activism by demanding a new look into America’s gun laws, as Emily Witt wrote in the New Yorker (Feb. 17). In her encounters with some of the surviving students she reported that “Their grief was raw, their rage palpable.”

“Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Douglas, had the most searing indictment:

“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S.

“Companies, trying to make caricatures of the teen-agers nowadays, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submissions when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call B.S.

“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the N.R.A., telling us nothing could ever be done to prevent this: we call B.S.

“They say that tougher gun laws do not prevent gun violence: we call B.S.”

From Columbine to Parkland, there have been so many shocking events in between. Too many have faded from consciousness.

As Journalist Gary Smith, who wrote about a lesser known 2012 shooting at Chardon High School in Ohio, stated: "The clock is already ticking in the land of amnesia."

How long before Parkland, too, is gone? If it is up to the young activists in Parkland, never.

Published in Blank Slate media February 2018       

IN THE WAKE OF SANDY HOOK - SIX MONTHS LATER

In the Wake of Sandy Hook - Six Months Later

by Andrew Malekoff

On June 3, 2013, at a White House conference on mental health, President Obama urged Americans to “help bring mental illness out of the shadows” and pledged that his administration will provide new resources to support the effort. He called for an open dialogue on mental illness. He said a lack of public understanding about mental illness leads to a lack of treatment. These are timely and encouraging words.

On April 3, 2013, I participated as a panelist in a National Public Health Week event, organized by Hofstra University School Health Sciences and Human Services, on mental health issues in the wake of Sandy Hook. My emphasis was on eradicating stigma and improving access to quality mental health care and child care.

The American reality today is one out of five children has a serious emotional disturbance and more children suffer from psychiatric illness than from autism, leukemia, diabetes and AIDS combined. Yet, we continue to treat illnesses above the neck differently than those below the neck. 

People with mental health problems, and their families, often feel a sense of shame and suffer in silence; while people with physical health problems evoke the sympathy, support and comfort of others. It is shameful that the editors of major metropolitan newspapers exploit and discredit people suffering with mental illnesses with malicious name-calling that reinforces fear, mistrust and stigma, causing labeled persons to lose status and experience discrimination.

We know that the most violent acts are not committed by people with mental illness. In fact, people with mental illness are disproportionately the victims of violence. New gun laws require that the names of designated individuals with severe mental illness be recorded in a national data-base. Whether this will improve public safety or generate a witch hunt that further stigmatizes the mentally ill remains to be seen. In any case, what it does not do is address the problem of better access to quality mental health care.

Here are the facts: seventy-five percent of all serious mental illness occurs before the age of 24; and 50% before the age of 14. Yet, only one out of five children who have emotional disturbances receive treatment from a mental health specialist. We must do more to identify mental health problems early and then, when indicated, provide ready access to quality community-based mental health care.

Early screening by schools and pediatricians is a promising development. Yet, New York State has implemented a "clinic reform" plan that assures continued access to care only to children and families with Medicaid insurance coverage. This leaves a significant number of children and adults in the lurch. 

What’s more, New York State does not support universal access to quality child care, which is critical to a child’s healthy emotional development. By lowering income-eligibility levels for child-care subsidies, thousands of Long Island children are now being denied quality child care, leaving parents to either curtail work or leave their children in unlicensed child-care settings.

When elected representatives and appointed officials champion early mental health screening in schools and pediatrician’s offices, while denying universal access to child care and community-based mental health care, there is only the illusion of caring, political sleight of hand and insult to the children and adults who died at Sandy Hook.