Everyone has a role in supporting better mental health care – St. Cloud Times

Times Editorial Board | St. Cloud Times

Mental health care in Central Minnesota is not what it should be. Just like everywhere else in the United States.

The gaps in the system that leave people untreated, unacknowledged and unsupported during a crisis, much less when struggling at a lower alert level, are wide. They've been around for decades and the solutions are not simple, easy or inexpensive.

That's the bad news. The good news is how far the efforts to narrow that gaps have come recently in Central Minnesota.

Community leaders, both individuals and organizations, have taken on the challenge, putting more pieces in place to help people when hope wanes. The efforts have been impressive, including the subject of these stories and others that Times reporters have been privileged to tell in the recent past:

Gaps in access, affordability and timely treatment options still exist. But it's hard to say the St. Cloud community is ignoring the need.

Building on that organizational progress is vital.

More vital, however, is continuing to normalize mental health struggles. Stigmatization of mental health issues, which happens routinely in all cultures, is unhelpful. Put more pointedly, by discouraging treatmentshamingcan lead to suffering and potentialtragedy: lost lives, suicides, broken relationships, shattered work records, poverty, self-harm, substance abuseand physical illness.

Just as we've become moreable to talkopenly about devastating physical diagnoses (didn't we all have that one relative who could only utter the word "cancer" in a strained whisper?) it's vital that people with mental health issues are allowed to be "out" about them. They need to know that their job won't be at risk if they need an hour off to see a therapist, just like the would to see an orthopedist. They need to know they won't be whispered about in the other room at family gatherings if someone finds out they take prescribed antidepressants. They need to believe that they will continue to be trusted to do important things like care for their children or perform their work.

This is a call to action for the rest of us, those who haven't been helping with all the forward steps Central Minnesota is taking toward providingbetter mental health care. It's a call to understanding and grace for people going through a hard thing, and acknowledging that mental health struggles are no more or less shameful than physical health problems.

That basic approach, which boils down to "do unto others as you'd have done to you," is a social solution that supports the organizational fixesbeing built and strengthened to help Central Minnesotans. It's what we can all do: Be aware, be helpful and most of all, be nonjudgmental.

Because staying in the closet about psychological struggles carries too high a price: nontreatment, which leads inevitably to ruined lives.

This is the opinion of the St. Cloud Times Editorial Board, which includes News Director Lisa Schwarz and Content Coach Anna Haecherl.

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Everyone has a role in supporting better mental health care - St. Cloud Times