Josh Goldberg on Mental Health

What is beautiful about Posttraumatic Growth is it comes from bereaved parents. It comes from people who lost limbs and were paralyzed in adulthood. It comes from the voices of the people who went through hell and came back to share what they learned.

That’s what Tedeschi and Calhoun harnessed at UNC Charlotte. They simply harnessed the power of lived experience into a framework that allows other people to struggle well, and it’s democratic, inherently democratic.

Unfortunately, our mental health system is incredibly autocratic. It’s incredibly dictatorial. It’s someone walking into a room being told what to do, where to sit, how to be, and what we’re going to do each session. It’s very inorganic.

I think what we’ve created here—leveraging, of course, these beautiful settings—is exactly what people have told us they require when they’re struggling.

We know that because all of us who sit in these chairs have been on that same journey. We had to struggle and grapple with figuring out: what is it? What book should we read? What person should we talk to? What videos should we watch? What is it that’s going to help us get to a better place?

I get worried when we leave people in dire straits to figure that out on their own. Even though the internet’s a vast resource pool, it’s very dangerous to leave people in dire straits on their own to figure this out.

That is why what BrainLine does is so important. It creates a world where we’re consolidating and aggregating information for people so they can figure out, “Okay, I’m struggling. These are some of the things I can do to not get stuck, to not stay here, and to move forward with my life in a meaningful way.”