In my last entry I did a brief 2018 year in review. Now, I want to look ahead to 2019.
Although personally I felt like we did a lot of great things in 2018, I know we still have a lot more work to do. There is still a lack of education, support, empathy, and advocacy out there, and there is also a lot of discrimination against the mentally ill. We must keep going until the day that discrimination is completely gone. We need to continue educating others and working with policy makers to make impactful changes in our society, and we need to continue to use the current momentum we already have for advocating for mental health change.
Next, my hope is that 2019 brings more effective and safe treatment options. Last year I mentioned treatments such as TMS, ketamine, psychedelics, and EMDR, and it would be great to see more research on these and many other options. As I have said before, I am very excited about all of the work that is being done to try to understand mental illness and start looking at ways that we can better treat it. Even more exciting is the work being done to determine how we might be able to prevent these illnesses from occurring in the first place. Wouldn’t it be amazing to get to a place where we know what to do (or not do) to prevent a mental illness from happening? My wish is that 2019 will be a year that takes us closer to that reality.
Overall, I think 2019 will hold some interesting and promising new information when it comes to mental health. Assuming all goes as I plan, I want to continue to explore those topics on my blog. I hope that you will continue to join with me.
How about you? What are you looking forward to in 2019?