Welcome to Episode 7 of Get off our lawn, the CF Masters group podcast.

This week we have a very, very, very important topic and we have a couple of great friends and members of the group joining us. We’re talking about Mental Health.

You might ask - What does that have to do with Crossfit?

And that’s a great question because, for a lot of folks, mental health has nothing to do with Crossfit. For a few of us, however, Crossfit is a part of the puzzle that keeps us healthy both mentally and physically.

This week, Angela and I were incredibly lucky to have a couple of great guests. Josh Inman and Debra Gordon.

Josh recently started CF Masters Strong group on Facebook. This group is a forum where people can share their challenges with mental health, maybe see some folks in similar situations, and just have an area to know that we are not alone.

We also have Debra Gordon, a long time member of CF Masters. Debra reached out a month or so ago to ask if we could do a Get Off Our Lawn episode on mental health and depression.

Debra has lived with depression for decades and wanted to share her story, and how Crossfit has helped her.

To be honest, it wasn’t clear if we should cover this topic because it’s very, very serious for people, and we wanted to do it justice. We hope that we did.

First off, the reason we are doing this episode is to help, even in a miniscule way, to chip away at the stigma of mental health.

If you are in the United States, and you or a person close to you needs help or needs to talk about suicide, Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at  1-800-273-8255

If you are not in the United States, and many of our listeners are not, please look for your local suicide prevention service.

Maybe a few of us grew up differently, but most of us in our age group grew up in an era where mental health was shunned, shamed, and pushed into a corner. People who were depressed needed to “suck it up” and “get over it.”

Sure, we never told a cancer patient, “it’s your fault you know. If you had taken better care of yourself you wouldn’t have gotten breast cancer.” But we did tend to think that about people with mental health issues.

Now it’s time to change that. Mental Health IS health.

Also - NOTHING in this episode is prescriptive. Josh and Debra are here to share their experiences, where they are today, and what got them here. These are their stories as they have lived them. None of this information is meant to be used as treatment or therapy.

If you have mental health issues PLEASE seek out a trained professional. If you are thinking about self-harm please call a Suicide prevention hotline.

We are here today to share that everyone can be susceptible to mental health issues just like everyone can be susceptible to being in a car crash or getting a sinus infection.

Also, please note that we are talking as friends here. We are not mental health professionals, we don’t know all the right terms, and we might say the wrong thing. Please understand that everything we talk about is said from a good place. If we mislabel a condition, or if we use a word that is no longer acceptable - we are old and set in our ways - while we are also learning. Let us know in the comments any place where we should have used different words.

For the podcast. Please share this with anyone or any group you think may be interested.

Also, please Like and give us a 5-star review on your podcast app. And don’t forget - Mental Health IS health.

---

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cf-masters/message