There was a time in the USA when "Who are you being treated by?" was a fashion statement as much as a mental health statement.
The silence surrounding mental health is just not fair and now the world has lost Kate Spade. We should all be ashamed of ourselves and the lack of truth that exists in our society and on social media. There are a go-zillion support groups on social media, so why aren't we having talks face to face?
Someone like Kate, an accomplished woman, would not turn to social media for support and why not? Her fans were in the real world and she was missing them as much as they were missing her. Perhaps neither knew how deeply they were committed to each other.
Back in the 1960s there was a trend among women that took them to a "shrink's office" every week. It was when they would put their feet up on a couch and talk about everything that bothers them, including the old washer and dryer and how much they deserved a new pair.
Everyone who was anybody had a Shrink story to talk about when they met for coffee. The topics included the kids, the house, the car, but, also their husbands and immediately after talking about "him" they would talk about their psychiatrists.
In the 60's it was the duty of the psychiatrist to assign a dose of Valium to the "One A Day" vitamin pills. We don't need the Valium dependency anymore, but, we do need to be able to harness the expertise of psychiatrists that will let women talk about themselves and their lives all they want.
I think there is a built in "sore spot" in every woman's life whereby they are shorter, lighter and the world an edge more dangerous because of their beauty and sexuality; so the reasons to be on a "Shrink's couch" once a week are valid for anyone feeling their life is not what they wanted it to be.
The reasons a successful woman such as Kate Spade would slip off the edge without saying a word, are many. Success brings all kinds of complications to a woman's life. Considering how successful women are given their presence in the work place compared to that of 1950s or early 1960s, women are extremely successful at mastering life. As a matter of fact, when women put their minds to a social task, the society needs to pay attention because a paradigm is about to change.
Kate Spade will be missed and that is not fair. Women need to address depression, the need for excellent psychiatric or psychological care with a possible need for medication. And make the entire idea social. Bring it up among friends and family and let the world know how great she feels while taking Celexa or Amitriptyline. There is NO EXCUSE, when girlfriends get together it needs to include the last happenings in mental health and the treatment for it. It may just open a window that is shut to sharing and that is definitely not fair.
Depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain and it is treatable. It is not some kind of side effect because she hates her boyfriend or has a really disappointing job. Depression is an illness or which there is very successful treatment, including, regular visits to a qualified doctor or councilor. And there is no excuse for the idea "it is too expensive." It doesn't have to be.
Mental health has to come out of the HMO paradigm and enter the COMMUNITY paradigm. There are community clinics all across the country with highly skilled and dedicated professionals. They love people, their problems and the solutions for them. Most community mental health clinics work on a sliding scale depending on income. This is important and a woman can seek help because she believes she needs it, NOT because they have a stamp of approval by some idiot insurance assessor.
Go, and don't think twice. Find your Shrink, sit on the couch and complain about how miserable life can be to satisfaction. The outcome is a woman that better understands herself and her world. It is amazing what happens when ideas from deep within the heart take flight in words. Please, don't let us down.
And. Talk to men about it, too.
June 5, 2018By Vanessa Friedman
There is a lot of talk (click here) these days about the lack of women at the top of fashion brands — the statistics are terrible, the gender imbalance striking. It is one of the reasons Kate Spade, the designer who was found dead in her home on Tuesday morning, was so important to so many of us.
She represented not just a terrific talent who built an idea about handbags into what became a billion dollar brand, but a critical figure in the continuum of women who have defined fashion in the United States: designers who thought about what other women (like her) would want in their closets (and later, their homes) and who solved that problem without elitism.
That’s why, in so many profiles over the years, Ms. Spade — or her brand, which she personified — was put in the same cultural bucket as everyone from Dorothy Parker and Nora Ephron to the fictional heroines Nora Charles and Holly Golightly. I always thought of her a bit as Mary Richards throwing her hat up in the air with joy at taking on the big city at the start of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” not because they had the same style, but because they seemed to have the same approach....
