The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Asking for a friend. Well, literally, asking for advice in helping out a friend, although I am being a bit loose on the details for privacy reasons.
I have a longstanding friend from childhood who is still part of my regular friend group. We play games regularly, and despite having scattered to the winds after high school, we still see each other a few times a year in person. The rest of us have gotten jobs and established ourselves, but this friend is probably best described as somewhat Bohemian in comparison. I know he's used alcohol (not unusual) and marijuana (I'm less familiar with, personally) off and on, but nothing too much harder to my knowledge.
There have been a couple of minor incidents in the last couple years that I've considered cause for concern. I know he's been checked into a hospital for mental health reasons (I haven't asked for specific details), and I've heard him make some comments that seem, at least from my perspective, somewhat paranoid: it's not impossible he rubs people the wrong way sometimes, but I don't think a bartender somewhere he's not a regular has it out for him.
Given my own (IMO quite fortunate) lack of experience with modern mental health care, what should I be doing as a friend to encourage positive outcomes here? This isn't an acute concern with a specific incident, just a recognition that I'm pretty far outside of my expertise here and I value my friends' long-term success and happiness.
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