Yesterday, Scott Huler was taught that it was wrong to talk about how you feel. Today, things are different for him. He wouldn’t raise his kids that way.
“Emotions were considered a feminine thing, and I’m a boy,” he said. “I’m not supposed to feel anything, and that’s how most people were raised in the 1960s.” That made me mad. As a child, I knew it was wrong.
Huler, who is 65 years old, talked to ABC11 in downtown Durham. He said that the changes he’s made over the years have made his kids emotionally healthy. The people who work in mental health think that more people are like him and are willing to talk about their feelings.
Ten million calls have been received since the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline opened two years ago. Crisis advisers are put in touch with people who need help. Most of the time, the calls last 14 minutes.
“There’s trouble in society. There is political division. “There’s social media,” Hannah Wesolowski, Chief Advocacy Officer for the National Alliance on Mental Health, said. “Just like we have 911 for a car accident or heart attack, we have 988 as a nationwide network that people can dial when they are in mental health or substance abuse crisis.”
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services says that crisis counselors have answered almost 190,000 calls, texts, and chats and put people in touch with services for mental health and substance use.
Representative Mark Simon of NAMI Wake County said, “We are seeing people struggling to find housing, like what to do next after getting out of jail.”
Simon says that the calls he gets in his area are for a wide range of needs. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise to Huler, who knows how hard it is for people to deal with mental health problems these days.
Huler said, “The truth is we’ve needed this for a long time.”
