Mental Health Matters

Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being.

It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.

Over the course of your life, if you experience mental health problems, your thinking, mood, and behavior could be affected. Many factors contribute to mental health problems, including:

• Biological factors, such as genes or brain chemistry
• Life experiences, such as trauma or abuse
• Family history of mental health problems

Mental Health Month (MHM) raises awareness of trauma and the impact it can have on the physical, emotional, and mental well-being of children, families, and communities.

MHM was established in 1949 to increase awareness of the importance of mental health and wellness in Americans’ lives, and to celebrate recovery from mental illness. Most importantly, mental health is essential for a person’s overall health. Prevention works, treatment is effective, and people can recover from mental disorders and live full and productive lives.

In May, MHM gives all of us a valuable opportunity to celebrate the tremendous strides this Nation has made in promoting mental health and increasing the public’s knowledge that effective services and support are available.

Source: youth.gov

Where the Watermelon Grows by Cindy Baldwin

Twelve-year-old Della Kelly has lived her whole life in Maryville, North Carolina.

She knows how to pick the softest butter beans and the sweetest watermelons on her daddy’s farm and knows ways to keep her spitfire baby sister out of trouble (most of the time). Della knows everyone in Maryville, from her best friend, Arden, to kind newcomer Miss Lorena to the mysterious Bee Lady.

And Della knows what to do when the sickness that landed her mama in the hospital four years ago spirals out of control again and Mama starts hearing people who aren’t there, scrubbing the kitchen floor until her hands are raw, and waking up at night to cut the black seeds from all the watermelons in the house. With Daddy struggling to save the farm from a record-breaking drought, Della decides it’s up to her to heal Mama for good.

Della knows just how she’ll do it: with a jar of the Bee Lady’s magic honey, which has mended the wounds and woes of Maryville for generations. She doesn’t want to hear the Bee Lady’s truth: that the solution might have less to do with fixing Mama’s brain than with healing Della’s own heart. But as the sweltering summer stretches on, Della must learn – with the help of her family and friends, plus a fingerful of watermelon honey – that love means accepting her mama just as she is.

Mosquitoland by David Arnold

After the sudden collapse of her family, Mim Malone is dragged from her home in northern Ohio to the “wastelands” of Mississippi, where she lives in a medicated milieu with her dad and new stepmom. Before the dust has a chance to settle, she learns her mother is sick back in Cleveland.

So she ditches her new life and hops aboard a northbound Greyhound bus to her real home and her real mother, meeting a quirky cast of fellow travelers along the way. But when her thousand-mile journey takes a few turns she could never see coming, Mim must confront her own demons, redefining her notions of love, loyalty, and what it means to be sane.

Long Bright River by Liz Moore

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds.

One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don’t speak anymore, and the police department has no idea of their connection, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey’s district, and Mickey panics over her sister’s safety. Risking her job, and maybe even the welfare of her four-year-old son, Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit – and her sister – before it’s too late.