On a serious note

Seeing as I am (almost) in the mental health profession there are many times when people ask me questions that I wish there were answers to. Yesterday, I gave a 3 hour midterm presentation on school violence which included a role play in which we asked class members to take on select student roles (ie student who called 911, friend of the shooter, student who froze). It was amazing to me that every student with a role, whether it required them to be empowered, demeaned or severely traumatized, had those emotions within them and displayed them with no reservations (making my role as the clinician doing the debriefing more powerful than I had anticipated). We all know what it is like to feel weak, inferior, betrayed, angry or immobilized.

When we let them break, we found out about the shooting at Ft. Hood and that the shooter is a psychiatrist. In the presentation, I learned that the shooter at Northern Illionois University had been a graduate student in Social Work, a chilling thing to think as I'm presenting to a class he very well may have also taken. So often we spend so much time and energy caring for others that we forget to care for ourselves. Or, we project to others that everything is fine when really we are in grave need of help, even if we can't immediately accept it. So when people ask me why others go crazy, my only answer is that we are all varying degrees of crazy, but the lucky ones have received a (possibly unspoken) psychoeducation on how to manage our anger, stress and disappointments without lashing out at a world we've decided is out to get us.

In the aftermath of the school shooting in Santee, CA a San Diego news channel canceled its scheduled programming and displayed only a message telling people to turn off the TV and spend time with their children. This is what I'm doing now. Stop reading your blogs. Forget about your Farm on Farmville. Ignore Dr. Grey and her dark and twisty issues. Take some time and do something for yourself. Then, go see or call someone who is consistently there for you when you need someone and just check in with them. In this moment, the only thing we can do to prevent such horrific tragedies from occurring is to provide support and recognize that everybody needs somebody sometimes.