There is a growing awareness in the Drupal Community around mental health issues and the need to better manage it on a personal level. Issues such as how to avoid burnout and better understand those of us that battle with ourselves to overcome anxiety, depression, imposter syndrome and other mental problems have raised the need for improved people management as the community grows and takes on new levels of challenges.
At DrupalCon Barcelona several sessions touched this and delivered fantastic examples as stories about how this is already happening. Such as:
- Keynote: Mike Bell on Mental Health (Video starts 48:55 in). See also Steve Purkiss follow up blog post to Mike's talk.
- Gábor Hojtsy: Open source project management in the Drupal community
Together these form a compelling argument and a working foundation for the Drupal Community to continue improve from. They also show that learning to handle these often very personal issues is an important and natural part of open source work, particularly when it comes to making people feel welcomed and included.
The goal with this group is to:
- Share and learn from experiences dealing with mental health problems
- Help improve our processes and ways we collaborate, both online and offline
Wiki page:
- Online resources - contains information and links to great online resources.
Imposter Syndrome is difficult to grokk in self
Heather Rodriguez (Engineer at CivicActions) and Kat Kuhl (Director of Technology at CHIEF) gave a very good talk at BADCamp:
Coming from a similar background, self educated in everything tech, it was easy to see myself in all the great examples they discussed.
Read moreRemember to think - I am the real expert about myself!
Not about anyone else, about yourself.
No one else have your knowledge about what is going on, how you feel, how you want to feel, how you react when faced with challenges to overcome and so on.
Same is true about what you want to accomplish, where you want to go, what is really important for you to understand and so on.
What everyone else can do is to offer help and guidance that can be degrees of either usable or useless.
Read moreWiki-page with online resources
I've just created a wiki-page with a few links to online resource that have been very useful for me to turn things around.
Especially I would like to point you to the MOOC - Learning How to Learn - listed there. I enrolled in it just a few days ago and are can only say it is absolutely fantastic. Arguable one of the best resources I have ever seen to explain just how far science have come in understanding how the human brain works, how we learn and also keep a healthy mind.
Read moreGreat online-resources
The understanding that mental health problems not always is an illness that can be medicated away or treated based on multi-decade old psychotherapy is growing at the same rate as science learn to understand more about how the human brain actually works.
This wiki-page will list great resources that explain and teaches based on new knowledge and that are openly available online.
MOOC - Learning How to Learn
Read moreI am not alone
When I created this group, soon three years ago, I had yet to hit rock bottom. That happened a year ago and since then things have become increasingly better.
Now when I am getting back to normal life and after having watched many of the sessions coming out from DrupalCon Barcelona, this feels like a good place for me to restart contribute back in a for me meaningful way.
Read moreWhat sweetener to you use in your tea?
Tea Party BoF at DrupalCon Portland
Alright, looks like there is quite an interest for a tea party at DrupalCon Portland. Lots of users have promised to bring samples of their favorite brew. I will bring a Swedish specialty to snack on, maybe a tea too. Lisa Rex promised to organize a kettle so we get hot water.
Lets see how many eager tea drinkers we can get together.
Read more