OSMH Blog

Board member Gary Hockin is giving the Opening Keynote, titled Using Open Source for Fun and Profit (Friday @ 9am in the Main Ballroom)

Founder Ed Finkler is here to give his talk Graph Databases Will Change Your Freakin Life (Friday @ 11am in Ballroom C)

Board member Joe Ferguson is teaching a session on DevOps For Small Teams (Saturday @ 9am in Ballroom D)

Many of the other speakers are longtime supporters as well. If you're attending Midwest PHP, be sure to look for our booth, where we'll be available to talk all things OSMH.

A couple of months ago, we announced that OSMH is an approved charity on AmazonSmile. AmazonSmile is a program where Amazon donates 0.5% of every eligible sale to a non-profit organization of your choice. There is no extra cost to you! 

Today only (March 16, 2017), Amazon is holding a special promotion where instead of donating 0.5% of all sales, they'll donate 5% instead! So now is a great time to make that Amazon purchase you've been putting off. Buy what you need (or just want 😉) and help out OSMH in the process. Just remember to shop Amazon from our AmazonSmile link!

In this excellent article on the Harvard Health Blog, Dr. Eva Selhub discusses the burgeoning field of nutritional psychiatry, where new studies are constantly finding links between diet and mental wellness. She encourages her patients to try the following technique:

Start paying attention to how eating different foods makes you feel — not just in the moment, but the next day. Try eating a “clean” diet for two to three weeks — that means cutting out all processed foods and sugar. Add fermented foods like kimchi, miso, sauerkraut, pickles, or kombucha. You also might want to try going dairy-free — and some people even feel that they feel better when their diets are grain-free. See how you feel. Then slowly introduce foods back into your diet, one by one, and see how you feel.

Have you made any changes to your diet to support your self-care strategy? What did you try? How well did it work for you?

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This Saturday, OSMH founder Ed Finkler will be representing our organization's work at a free workshop called "Prioritize Your Mental Health" at the MatchBOX coworking space in Lafayette, IN. He will be joined by Erin Walker of Mental Health America, who will give an overview of stress management and coping skills. If you're located in or near Lafayette, definitely come check out this workshop! More details on Facebook.

• Approximately 12 million women in the United States experience clinical depression each year.
• About one in every eight women can expect to develop clinical depression during their lifetime.
• Depression occurs most frequently in women aged 25 to 44.
• Women experience depression at roughly twice the rate of men.
• Girls 14-18 years of age have consistently higher rates of depression than boys in this age group.
  
• Approximately 10%-15% of all new mothers get postpartum depression, which most frequently occurs within the first year after the birth of a child.
  
• Research shows a strong relationship between eating disorders (anorexia and bulimia nervosa) and depression in women. About 90-95% of cases of anorexia occur in young females. Reported rates of bulimia nervosa vary from one to three out of 100 people.
• Research shows that one out of three depressed people also suffers from some form of substance abuse or dependence.
  
• Depression in women is misdiagnosed approximately 30 to 50 percent of the time.
• Fewer than half of the women who experience clinical depression will ever seek care.
  

Here at Open Sourcing Mental Health, we are dedicated to raising awareness, educating, and providing resources to support mental wellness in the tech and open source communities. Some of the most active volunteers in our organization are women, and one of our new projects this year is having some sort of presence at the 2017 Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, exact details still TBD. If you have other ideas for how we can even better support the women in our communities, please reach out; we're always open to exploring new initiatives.

Last fall, we took over management of the Devpressed forums by Greg Baugues; they can now be found at forums.osmhhelp.org. It's a great resource if you have a mental illness and want to talk to fellow developers, or even if you don't but just want to help support your peers. (All credit to Greg for kicking things off; we're just helping him out by keeping it going.)

And if you have any ideas for how to make the forums better, please let us know! In keeping with our "open source" approach to all things, we're always open to suggestions for improvement.

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