February 8, 2022

Good morning MindSite News readers. Today we bring you a series of new Guest Essays as we build a platform for the sharing of ideas, perspectives, laments and solutions related to mental health and social justice. We also share a couple of recent stories from the New York Times about eco-anxiety and overuse of the word trauma.

We share an essay from a young activist in Wichita, Kansas, about the tragic in-custody killing of Cedric Lofton, a Black teenager who had been struggling with mental health issues, and we have another from the founder of 1 Million Madly Motivated Moms – a group formed to protect Black lives and build sisterhood and solidarity at the same time. We have a delightful perspective on the Disney film Encanto by a Latinx therapist who decodes the movie’s messages about intergenerational trauma and the efforts of Latinx women in the film to break through. Read on…

Bringing Sistas Together to Protect Our Mental Health and Save Black Lives

I knew at that moment that I had to do something to protect the life of my child – and I had to do it alongside people who had the same level of vested interest in ending police violence. In short, I needed to connect moms who were motivated to act, not just stew in anger. This was the birth of 1 Million Madly Motivated Moms (aka 1M4). –Tansy McNulty

Intergenerational Trauma and Healing: Why Disney’s Encanto Resonates with Latinx First-Gens

As a Nicaraguan American, I know that most of us who identify as First-Gen often relate to “ni de aqui ni de allá” – a feeling of belonging neither here (in the US) nor there (in the country our family came from). And as a Latinx therapist, I see many of my clients come to therapy because of this struggle. Encanto offers me – y mi comunidad – some tools: empathy, compassion and understanding, while giving us powerful characters we can recognize and relate to. –Mara Sammartino, LCSW

When Does Cedric Lofton Get a Chance to Stand His Ground? 

When I heard there would be no charges in the death of Cedric Lofton, I was heartbroken, but I wasn’t surprised. Cedric, a teenager in the midst of a mental health crisis, died while being restrained at the Sedgwick County Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center here in Wichita, Kansas. –Jazmine Rogers

---

In other mental health-related news:

Too much #trauma

New York Times contributing editor Jessica Bennett made our day with a dazzling essay entitled “If Everything Is Trauma, Is Anything?” She leads off with the story of “West Elm Caleb,” a 25-year-old furniture designer in New York City who used the same come-ons and shameless flattery to jump into what the young women he found through online dating thought was a relationship, only to vanish overnight. Bennett notes that there are lots of words for a man like Caleb, such as “creep” or something less printable. But in this era, she writes, as his discarded lovers found out about his playbook through social media, Caleb “was accused of ‘love bombing’ women by showering them with interest, ‘gaslighting’ them by making them think he liked them, then abruptly ghosting them, leaving his ‘victims’ to bond over their ‘shared trauma.”

Bennett’s issue is not with the concept of trauma, which she readily acknowledges; it is the linguistic slippage of the word “trauma” (as well as “gaslighting” and “love-bombing”) that she finds troublesome. Her bracing call for clarity – and linguistic precision – is well-taken. As Vaclav Havel, the late president of the late Czechoslovakia, once said, “I feel elevated, to the point of tears, to hear things called by their proper names once more.”

---

Your climate therapist can see you now

“Ten years ago, psychologists proposed that a wide range of people would suffer anxiety and grief over climate. Skepticism about that idea is gone,” wrote New York Times reporter Ellen Barry in a story about therapy for “eco-anxiety” – or the chronic fear of environmental doom – a phenomenon that Diana Kapp investigated in a lead story for MindSite News this January. In this incisive story, Barry traces the evolution of therapy for widespread climate grief and offers portraits of those afflicted by it. Among them is a young Oregon mother who speaks for many as she confesses her guilt and worry about her own role in environmental disaster (think: Trader Joe’s ubiquitous plastic packaging). “I feel like I have developed a phobia to my way of life,” she says. As the story suggests, overwhelming anxiety should be treated, but our way of life needs to be cured.

---

Please check out all of our stories at mindsitenews.org. And did we mention you should share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues? Thanks for reading and see you next time,

The MindSite News Team

For more frequent updates, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram

---