It's finally a morning where I feel awake; insomnia and my body did not wake me up in the middle of the night. I feel asleep at a normal time instead of incredibly early. And I am thankful as this means work cam be accomplished today. 

It's been a time of "outings" lately, so maybe I'll write about it here. Two good friends "outed" that they dealt with mental health issues on facebook recently. I was proud of them for doing so, but will not do this on facebook myself.  But this has me wondering about why we have to "out" our identities, thinking of how the term generally is associated with LGBT identified folks. We know it's  about stigma and the related issues of protecting our selves and the like.  But I'm really thinking about mental health here (I do care about LGBT issues, worked in this area for a short while, but also don't feel that I can speak for others on this. It's complicated). 

So back to mental health and outing. If you are reading this blog, I probably have told you about it, so you know me in some fashion. So, if you do know me, I've probably already told you I struggle with depression and anxiety.  I could go into specific and possible diagnoses given to me in my life lifetime, but as someone trained in mental health from social work perspective, these are labels that are not always helpful and can hurt more than help for different reasons.  But even if you didn't know this and you know me, you probably could have guessed this about me.  I'm a crier. I worry excessively at times.  I try to be positive, but yet sometimes end up sounding pessimistic. I could list so many other things, but my point isn't about symptoms.

I thought I wold write this about why we have shame about exposing what we struggle with in terms of mental health. But most people I have "outed" myself to are understanding and I learn that many people struggle with issues. Or they have been supportive. Yet, these are the people I wold suspect to be supportive and understanding though there could be risks in telling people in different parts of your life (i.e. colleagues, friends, family, members, etc).  I intend to write more about this later and decisions I have made about my own mental health that were hard for me, but for now something else is on my mind.

Alas, finally a post that I am connecting to my future research. I am trying to start research on maternal mental health and also am prepping to teach a sociology of health care course in the fall. I obtained a sociology of mental health textbook as a primer for myself for the project.  Though trained originally as a sociologist, my training in mental health is from social work in which we read and learned from many different fields. So, yes, we learned about society, patterns, and the so forth in relation to mental health that would be considered more of a sociological perspective. Yet, we also were being trained to practice (and did practice), so to say we had to learn how to help people. And sociology, I do love you as my field, but what I am reading on mental health from the sociological perspective makes me question if I am really a sociologist, but also makes me think about how some of the authors or perspectives I read  almost make mental illness as something that doesn't truly exist. 

So, a few thoughts on trying to connect this and end this post.  We need interdisciplinary work on issues such as these. Not all sociologists are macro and looking at the experience of an issue, such as experiencing mental illness and how people deal with and construct it, is still sociological. We need to take lessons from women's studies and other critical studies. The experience is real for people. Some of us may prefer to study the issues from different aspects, which I argue is needed. And this also relates to my concern about doing research that does matter to help people.