2 Blogs 1 Wednesday

Yesterday the fight between blogging and napping was a first round KO in favor of napping so today as a special treat we will run down everything that's been everything over the past 48 hours

Yesterday we were joined by Bhula Gosh and Chris Harrow to discuss the importance of reading

And if your looking for something to read might I suggest this beauty coming soon to a bookstore near you! (This is just a prototype but you should be warned... Patent Pending)

Also yesterday was #BellLetsTalk day where money from every tweet with the aforementioned hashtag would earn 5 cents to Mental Health initiatives... Which the Eagle's twitter account helped out with (as well as a lot of our followers).  As much as I do love the idea of spreading awareness on Mental Health problems in modern society (where most everyone experiences depression at one point or another)... The whole time I was retweeting I was thinking what @willardjon put into a text himself

That tweet made me think that yes more work is needed on the subject of people struggling with invisible illness so I decided to take some time today to play Dr. Phil (just a heads up I am in no way a trained medical professional and any advice given should be taken with a grain of salt)

That above tweet was just one of many tweets, facebook posts, memes (if that's how you spell it), and inspirational pictures with words I saw on the subject yesterday via social media.  The problem is very similar to what we see with bullying.  Bullying will never go away (it's been around since the birth of man with cavemen fighting for supremecy).  Depression and Mental Illness will also never go away in a world where you can't escape other people's words (cyber bullying being an obvious case, but also stuff like seeing other people post vacation pics while your stuck in the cold and snow can lead to depression just as an example).  Much like bullying, solving the issue, IN MY OPINION (again just one man's opinion), lays more with the victims.  Teach a person being bullied to ignore verbal assault rather than to let it eat them up inside.  There were a lot of posts talking about how everyone should help everyone with a Mental Illness or Depression, and basically what I saw with these types of posts was that someone with Depression should be viewed as fragile and protected and blah blah blah... This is what might happen in an ideal world (which we don't live in to be to the point).  Anyone dealing with depression has to be the one to help themselves.  Has to learn to value their own opinion over others, has to see themselves as empowered.  It's a long road for some and in a lot of cases getting help just means having someone to sort your thoughts out with which can be a huge help. In some cases medicine is needed, but the road to recovery can only be acheived internally... Which makes facebook posts about everyone being a shoulder to cry on and an ear to listen completly irrelevant.  As with bullying, you are never going to teach people not affected by  it to be compassionate... That's just not the way the world works nowadays.  All you can do is empower those who ARE affected and hope that they eventually see the light at the end of the road

Anyways that got a little bit rambly and disjointed, but it goes to show the complexity of the issue... I just don't personally believe that the solution is to hope that everyone starts caring about everyone else, when the only path to regaining mental stability is by doing it yourself itself.

This morning was a little less hectic, but we were still joined by Lyla Cooper from Great Plains College to talk about their upcoming safety breaky