Mental Health

Silent River Kung Fu supports Rotary's Run For Life every year to help raise funds for suicide awareness and prevention. Odds are that we all will be touched by mental illness in our lifetime yet finding help when you need it can be difficult. As a society we are quick to address obvious physical ailments but we tend to sweep mental issues into the closet and cloak them in a shroud of stigma.

I have witnessed loved ones suffer unspeakable mental anguish while I feel alone and helpless, unable to help or fully empathize. There is no greater feeling of guilt than the guilt of letting down those you are responsible to protect.

Rotary's Run For Life is a big step in the right direction. Mental illness needs to be brought out of he shadows and acknowledged as an important health issue that deserves proper attention and funding.

“If there were a physical disease that manifested itself in some particularly ugly way, such as postulating sores or a sloughing off of the flesh accompanied by pain of an intense and chronic nature, readily visible to everyone, and if that disease affected fifteen million people in our country, and further, if there were virtually no help or succour for most of these persons, and they were forced to walk among us in their obvious agony, we would rise up as one social body in sympathy and anger. There isn’t such a physical disease, but there is such a disease of the mind, and about fifteen million people around us are suffering from it. But we have not risen in anger and sympathy, although they are walking among us in their pain and anguish.” - Russell Hampton - The Far Side of Despair