Pam Ebert

This week I found myself mulling over the connection between counseling, culture and guns. Recently, a situation arose in our local elementary school where fifth grade student threatened to shoot another fifth grader with his gun. The child who issued the threat, aged 10, owned a gun. The gun was a present for his ninth birthday and was happily shown off to friends at his birthday party, much as a tech-savvy adult might show off their newest gadget.

I recently became aware of a new study, published last month in Health Affairs and reported on September 20 in the New York Times that discussed the decrease in life-spans for the least-educated whites in the United States. The journal article, which was written by Olshansky et al. (2012), posits that the disparity in life expectancy is becoming larger in respect to race and educational attainment. This all means that poor and/or uneducated white people are catching up with other minorities in terms of early death.

You have all heard about the Arab Spring, right, and how revolution started with the people and spread to other countries? Well, this Appalachian girl is calling for a revolution in how we view mental health. Why it is that in 2012 we still can’t quite talk openly about mental illness and people still think “crazy” is an official term for a person who lives with or suffers from a mental or emotional disorder? Maybe this Fall could be the one that makes the difference, the turn of the tides for those of us who live with mental illness.

Recently I began a new part-time job working as part of a team of crisis clinicians in a local ER. I am going to be working inside of Trumbull Memorial Hospital which is located in Warren, Ohio. Trumbull County is located in the northern region of Appalachia and has around 225,000 residents, including both urban and rural areas. In the past, many Trumbull county workers were employed in the steel and automobile industries and when those industries went downhill, so did most of the region, including notable cities like nearby Youngstown and Akron.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about social justice and how the concept can be applied to our region. According to Chung & Bemak (2012) Social justice can be defined as issues that involve the individual, the family, the community, the wider society, and even the international community. It refers to unfair treatment or inequities that have resulted from racism, sexism, socioeconomics, sexual orientation, religion, ableism and other “isms” all o which affect quality of life.