Categorie: Teamwork

In the wake of the unspeakable tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, we are all grieving. We grieve for those who lost children, parents, friends and colleagues. We don’t know what prompted the man responsible for the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting or what caused gunmen to open fire on an Oregon mall, a Colorado movie theater, or an Arizona Senator. But here is what we do know: A fraction of people who are in need of mental health treatment seek it; and those who do seek it – including those who are victims of or at risk of being perpetrators of violent crime – find that access to mental healthcare is limited and unpredictable.
We also know that, despite misperceptions, mental illness is not just treatable; it can be curable. We need more research to expand on what is known and delve further into what is not. As a leader in mental health research, CRI has been compelled to respond in three ways that give individuals an opportunity to take a more active role in strengthening the mental health system:

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Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we’ve waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We’ve created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.
That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend—think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we’ve managed to damage and degrade. We can’t rely on old habits any longer.
Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change—fundamental change—is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.

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