A lot of brands will be making statements today about what happened at our nation's capital yesterday. Most will run the range from "insincere" to "oblivious."

We debated if we should. But as a mental health platform, we feel we have a responsibility to say a few things.

1. White supremacy is not a mental illness.

The attempted coup that happened yesterday was not the product of mental illness.

We cannot deflect the responsibility of those involved by labelling them "unhinged," "crazy," or "sick."
As a platform that is dedicated to unpacking ableism when we see it, we feel a strong responsibility to name this quite clearly: a legacy of racism, woven through and through in this country, is not the product of mental illness.
It may be unfathomable to those of us who have had the privilege of not seeing it. It may be shocking to those of us who had more faith in our democracy than this.

That does not mean we should label what we do not understand an "illness." It means we should educate ourselves.
2. Yes, what we collectively experienced is trauma. If you find yourself struggling to "go back to normal," that is understandable.

It is our hope that you will extend grace to yourself, and to those around you who are having a hard time today.
3. We understand that this trauma is not new to people of color in this nation. It is not new to Indigenous peoples, for whom history is simply repeating itself. It is not new to Black people, who live in fear of this kind of violence every day.
4. We understand this statement will feel provocative to some. But as a platform dedicated to having important conversations about mental health, we MUST acknowledge how the political and cultural climate we live in impacts the mental health of vulnerable people.
We hope you will take really good care today. If you need to step away from your newsfeed, please take the time. Your mental health is important.

If there are people you might need to check on, reach out, too. Genuine connection is so essential right now.
Thank you for trusting us as a resource for your mental health, and for the mental health of those you care for. We take this responsibility very seriously. And as such, we know that mental health doesn't exist in a vacuum — and we won't stand by and pretend that it does.

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Some thoughts on this: Firstly, it might be personal preference, but I am not keen on this kind of campaign as I feel like it trivialises cancer. Sometimes the serious message gets lost because people are sharing pics of cats or whatever and the important context is gone.


More importantly, the statistic being used in the campaign is misleading. It says 57% of women put off cervical screening if they can't get waxed. But on further investigation, that's not accurate.

The page here goes on to say "57% of women who regularly have their pubic hair professionally removed would put off attending their cervical screening appointment if they hadn’t been able to visit a beauty salon."

So the 57% represents a concern not across the whole population of women, but only those who regularly get waxed. So how big of an issue is this across the whole population? And what else is stopping people getting smears?

I think campaigns for cancer screening are really tricky because there is so much nuance that often doesn't fit into a catchy headline or hashtag. It's certainly not easy and is part of a bigger conversation.

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.