Some of this year's topic tuesdays have been really good, and I wouldn't say that a topic being covered this year should preclude it from being re-visited again next year.
A few ideas:
* How To Talk To People About Your Mental Health, ect.
Sort of like a reverse to the RUOK Day approach. RUOK puts out heaps of tutorials for acquaintances of mentally ill/struggling/unhappy/ect. on how to approach & talk to the suffering people they know. But what always frustrates me is that there's barely any information provided to the other side of the table; if you are the person suffering, how do you get the people around you to listen to you and to understand what your saying - including the importance of what your saying. So it might be helpful to have a seminar on how to talk to outsiders about these sorts of things.
* Harmful Therapy
I'm sure that trauma has been discussed extensively before, but IMHO, harmful therapy is a very unique brand of trauma, because normally, one of the main perscribed remedies for trauma is to go to therapy. But for people who have suffered harmful therapy, this means returning to the very entity that abused them, which can make that reccommendation difficult, if not impossible to follow.
Making it worse are the numerous shallow "acknowledgements" of harmful therapy that you can see all over the place that basically tells therapy victims that they ought to "just get back on the horse", because "you can't let one bad experiance turn you away from therapy forever."
So maybe it might be helpful to have a three-pronged discussion about this subject:
1. To enlighten others as to why harmful therapy is such a big deal for the people who have suffered it, and why we can't "just move on to another therapist."
2. To give harmed patients a bit of information about where we go next, after bad therapy as turned us off of therapy.
3. To talk about ways to remove the bias/judgementalism that grows out of our bitterness towards therapy; so that we can guage mental health, ect. topics clearly and fairly.
I've made no secret of the fact that I was harmed in therapy, and I've encountered numerous other users on here who have been harmed by their therapists, as well. So I think a topic like this would have some real interest.
* Exploitation, Manipulation, Abuse (specifically from "trusted" individuals) and Betrayal
Probably overlaps a bit with Harmful Therapy, but it is also very relevant outside the therapy sphere. Good sub-topics might be:
1. How to recognize if you are being exploited or covertly abused.
2. How to stop people from exploiting you.
3. How to build new relationships when previous abuse or exploitation has made you suspicious and distrustful of everybody.
4. What prudent and fair measures to take to protect yourself from entering new exploitive/abusive relationships in the future. (Very important, as I've heard that abuse/exploitation victims often have a tendency to fall right back into an abusive relationship, after escaping a previous one).
The major hurdle I can see for this topic is that it will probably be triggering for a lot of members
, so it mightn't be workable.
* Non-Therapy Facilities For Suffering People
Therapy has long been pushed as the main remedy for people suffering problems. But for many of us, it's a dead-end. I think people might be interested in getting some insight into what other forms of "help" are out there for them.
But I don't know, this may be too broad a topic to condense into a stable discussion.
* Veterans
Seems pretty timely with the Royal Inquiry into Veteran Suicides going on right now. I'm not a vet myself, and I don't know how many vets we have on here, but I'm betting that there's enough material in that subject to fill out a full tuesday conversation.
Maybe we could open it up to civilian jobs like cops, paramedics, and firemen/women, too? I know that, much like the military, many people in those professions struggle a lot with the things they've endured on the job. Or maybe that would belittle the vets' experiance and the civilian responders should have a day of their own? I really don't know - I'm talking well outside my own realm of experiance here. I'm just putting out ideas.
Maybe it would be a good discussion for the tuesday closest to Anzac Day?