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in trouble for talking during class time, were in each other’s wedding parties, moved away after college, occasionally communicated during our middle years, traveled together  when retired, and now as seniors residing on east and west coasts, we meet monthly along with another dear childhood friend via zoom. 

Trusted Friends

One of the hardest lessons I learned came twice. The first time was when I sold my company. For years, I had worked alongside employees I considered friends. We shared victories, frustrations, and countless conversations over coffee. Yet after the sale, the new owner wanted to establish his own leadership style and discouraged staff from maintaining close contact with me. Within months, many of those relationships faded.

The second time came when I stepped down as president of a science museum. Once again, people I saw regularly disappeared from my life. It wasn’t because they disliked me. A new leader had arrived, and everyone needed to move forward. Those experiences taught me something important: many friendships are tied to circumstances, but few survive change. Those are the friendships worth cherishing.

I have met people from every walk of life—individuals who lost jobs, struggled with addiction, experienced divorce, faced illness, or made serious mistakes. The difference between those who eventually rebuilt their lives and those who remained stuck was often not intelligence, talent, or luck. It was whether they had trustworthy friends standing beside them. No one travels through life without setbacks. At some point, everyone needs someone to lean on.

Research supports what many of us know from experience. The famous Harvard Study of Adult Development, which followed participants for more than eighty years, found that strong relationships were one of the best predictors of health, happiness, and longevity. More recently, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that chronic loneliness carries health risks comparable to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. Human beings are social creatures. We are wired for connection.

What makes friendship especially important is that it is one of the few major influences in life we can choose. We cannot select our parents, our genetics, or the circumstances into which we are born. We can choose who we spend time with. The challenge is finding people who are trustworthy. Trustworthy friends keep confidences. They tell us the truth even when it is uncomfortable. They celebrate our successes without jealousy and support us during difficult times. Most importantly, they accept us as imperfect human beings. That doesn’t mean they never disappoint us.

Every friendship encounters misunderstandings. A trusted friend may say the wrong thing, forget a commitment, or accidentally reveal something private. The question is not whether mistakes will happen. The question is whether the relationship contains enough trust, goodwill, and forgiveness to survive them.

Trust is rarely all or nothing. Instead, it develops gradually. We learn, over time, how much we can depend on each person in our lives. This becomes particularly important as we age. According to research published through the National Institutes of Health, friendships become increasingly important to happiness in later life. Interestingly, the quality of friendships often matters more than the quantity. A handful of trusted friends can contribute more to life satisfaction than a large network of casual acquaintances.

Unfortunately, adulthood often works against friendship. People move away, change careers, retire, marry, divorce, or become consumed by family responsibilities. Relationships that once seemed permanent can quietly disappear. Even clergy are often encouraged not to return to former congregations after retirement so that new leaders can establish their own relationships. The result is that many older adults find themselves lonely, not because they failed socially, but because life changed around them. The solution is not to retreat. It is to begin again.

In retirement, I discovered that friendships do not simply appear; they must be cultivated. I joined a pottery class and met interesting people, though most of those relationships remained casual. Later, I joined a writers’ group. After years of meeting weekly to critique one another’s work, we realized we wanted to know one another beyond our manuscripts. We started gathering monthly for happy hour and later for Sunday brunch. Eight years later, we remain friends. We encourage one another, challenge one another, and exchange criticism without fear because we know it comes from caring hearts.

Writing environmental novels also led me to become involved with a local environmental committee. The work introduced me to new people, new ideas, and new friendships. Those connections continue to enrich my life.

Friendship does not happen by accident. It requires time, vulnerability, and effort. Yet the rewards are enormous. The people who stand beside us through life’s changes become part of the story of who we are.

If you are shy, take a small risk and introduce yourself. If you have become comfortable staying home, accept an invitation. If your social life exists mostly through screens, spend time with people face to face. The real world is still full of potential friends. Some of them may become the trustworthy companions who help carry you through whatever challenges lie ahead.

REFERENCES:

Puff, R. (2021) The Importance of Friendship. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meditation-modern-life/202107/the-importance-friendship\

Carlson, R, (2017) If They Should Remain: When Pastors Leave but Stay. The Evangelical Covenant CHurch. Retrieved from https://covchurch.org/2017/10/04/if-they-should-remain-when-pastors-leave-but-stay/

Guma,J (2023) The relative importance of friendship to happiness increases with age. NIH National Library of Medicine. Retrieved from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10343095/

Kennedy-MOooore, E (2025) How to tell if You Can trust a Friend. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/growing-friendships/202503/how-to-tell-if-you-can-trust-a-friend

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Do you have close friends? Are they recently acquired or lifelong? How have your friendship relationships changed over time?  Do share your thoughts in the comment section. https://www.eichingerfineart.com/blog/206816/trusted-friends

The painting of Elaine is not for sale, however, more than three hundred paintings are. If something on my website strikes your fancy, it is easy to purchase online https://www.eichuingerfineart.com.

Questions? contact me at marilynne@eicingerfineart.com

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The most important friendship for most people is with the one who becomes your romantic partner.  When reading Antheia in the Thorns, you cans see how trusted relationships easily dissolve when partners stop sharing activities and hide the life they are living. 

Eichinger books are available on AMAZON.  For thrillers about social justice and the environment,, turn to the Rightfully Mine series.

Truth or Consequences

Several days ago, I received a text meant for someone named Sophie. The sender asked to meet for dinner after work. I replied that she had the wrong number. She apologized, and then, unexpectedly, invited me to coffee.

That wasn’t possible, of course. She lived in New York; I live in Oregon. Still, something about the exchange felt harmless, even charming. A small mistake, a moment of connection. We began to text. I told myself I had stumbled into a modern version of a pen pal—someone to perhaps meet if I ever found myself in Manhattan.

Then I mentioned it to a friend. Her response was immediate: This is a scam. She sent me an article describing a growing scheme, one that begins exactly this way. A wrong number. A polite apology. A slow, friendly conversation. Trust is built over days or weeks. And then, eventually, comes the pivot: an investment opportunity, often involving cryptocurrency or insider access.

I went back to my messages with a different eye. The woman had told me she was a financial advisor at Citibank, working with wealthy clients. Yet when I asked for her last name or a professional email, she deflected. She preferred to keep our conversation on WhatsApp. She was friendly, attentive—and just evasive enough.  The relationship suddenly felt less like chance and more like design.

I realized I was standing at a quiet threshold: on one side, curiosity and connection; on the other, the possibility of manipulation. If she was genuine, I risked losing a budding friendship. If she wasn’t, the consequences could be far worse. 

It wasn’t a difficult decision, but it was a disappointing one. I ended the exchange. What lingered was not fear, but sadness—that something as simple as a mistaken text can no longer be taken at face value.

Scams like this are not confined to the United States; they are a global phenomenon, increasingly sophisticated and disturbingly effective. While the details vary from country to country, the underlying strategy is strikingly consistent: establish trust, then exploit it.

Older adults are particularly targeted, for reasons that cross cultures:

• The likelihood of savings or home equity
• A tendency to trust authority or extend politeness
• Less familiarity with rapidly evolving technology
• Social isolation, which makes genuine-seeming connection more powerful

The forms these scams take are familiar: impersonations of government officials or banks, frantic calls from a “grandchild in trouble,” romance scams, tech support fraud—and, increasingly, investment schemes like the one I may have narrowly avoided.

In countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, the problem is widely reported, with significant financial losses tied to phone, email, and online fraud. Public awareness campaigns have grown, and banks are becoming more proactive in flagging suspicious transactions. Still, scammers evolve just as quickly, refining their methods to match our habits.

What has changed most is not just the technology, but the emotional terrain. Scams no longer rely solely on urgency or fear—they often begin with something far more disarming: friendliness. A simple text. A small mistake. An opening.

And that may be the hardest consequence of all—not the money lost, but the uneasy realization that trust, once given freely, now comes with hesitation. It is this tension that lies at the heart of my Rightfully Mine novels. These stories explore corporate scams, hidden agendas, and the quiet deceptions carried out in the name of profit. What at first feels like a nice connection becomes “I can’t trust this anymore.” The damage is not always visible, but it is deeply felt by those caught in the fallout, people whose lives are altered not by violence, but by betrayal.

In both life and fiction, the cost of deception is the same: the erosion of trust. And trust, once lost, is not easily restored. I believe individuals, businesses, and nations are strongest when trust is honored—when leadership is grounded in integrity rather than exploitation. It is what allows people to sleep at night and wake with the clarity to face the day ahead. Without it, we are left second-guessing even the simplest human connection.

Have you ever been a victim of a scam?  Share your experience on my blog site to make other readers aware.

Art is always for sale. See All is an acrylic painting on a 24” by 48” deep canvas. For information and to purchase go to https://www.eichingerfineart.com/workszoom/5558644/see-all#/

Data collected by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, published last week in the journal Science Advances, reveals a sobering trend. Scientists investigated the impact of groundwater loss on global water availability. What they found is alarming: fresh water has been disappearing at an accelerating rate for years, and the drying of Earth is speeding up dramatically.

Nearly six billion people—three-quarters of humanity—live in the 101 countries identified in the study as facing a net decline in water supply. This portends enormous challenges for food production and increases the risk of conflict and political instability.

Their research confirms what we already see on the news daily: droughts and extreme precipitation are growing more intense. Although parts of the planet are becoming wetter, those areas are shrinking, while dry zones are expanding. The study—which excludes the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland—concludes that “Earth is suffering a pandemic of continental drying in lower latitudes.”

As the climate warms and vast swaths of land dry rapidly, humanity’s supply of fresh water is under serious threat. In the far northern Arctic regions, the loss stems from melting glaciers and drying subarctic lakes. But in southern, more densely populated regions, the primary cause is the overextraction of groundwater from aquifers, faster than nature can replenish them. Unregulated pumping by farmers, cities, and corporations accounts for a staggering 68% of total freshwater loss in areas without glaciers.

Seventy percent of the world’s fresh water is used for agriculture. As droughts intensify, more of that water comes from underground reserves. Yet only a small portion of it seeps back into aquifers. Most of the water runs off into rivers and streams, eventually reaching the oceans, where it becomes undrinkable salt water. That water can only be recovered through industrial desalination or if it returns as rainfall. But due to climate change, many of these same drying regions are receiving less and less rain.

Across the globe, regions are already suffering severe water scarcity, with devastating consequences for communities, ecosystems, and economies. In India, particularly in states like Maharashtra and Rajasthan, extracting groundwater for agriculture has caused wells to run dry, forcing entire villages to rely on water tankers. In the Middle East, countries like Jordan and Yemen face chronic shortages, with per capita water availability far below the threshold for scarcity.

California’s Central Valley, one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, has seen groundwater levels plunge due to prolonged drought and excessive pumping. Sub-Saharan Africa faces a growing crisis as erratic rainfall and high temperatures reduce the reliability of both surface and underground water sources, fueling migration and conflict. In parts of Chile and Peru, copper mining and industrial agriculture have drained aquifers, leaving Indigenous communities without reliable access to clean water. These hotspots are not isolated—they are early warnings of a global crisis that is fast becoming unmanageable.

Wake up, America. Enough with the silence. Enough with pretending that climate change isn’t affecting our daily lives. Water loss is already a major driver of poverty, displacement, and desperation. As we’ve seen in Gaza and elsewhere, water scarcity has even become a weapon of war.

If you’re not inclined to read scientific papers, read The Water Factor instead. It’s a novel with twists and turns that will keep you on the edge of your seat, while also opening your eyes to the global water crisis.

                                                        Water Depletion Worldwide

Resources:

 Buechner, (Lack of Safe Water Far Deadlier than Violence. UNICEF report. Retrieved from https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/unicef-report-lack-safe-water-far-deadlier-violence?gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=5&gad_campaignid=22789033677&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhsCaiNvsjgMVrSGtBh0uwjevEAAYASAAEgLEY_D_BwE

Website US News. (2023) Countries with the Worst Drinking Water. UNICEF report. Retrieved from: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/slideshows/countries-with-the-worst-water-supply

Website,2025.They Drying Planet. ProPublica. Retrieved from PLANET

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Art is always for sale at www.eichingerfineart.com

Start the conversation. Please comment on my blog site. Sign up for my mailing list if you have not already done so. ______________________________________________________________________________

 According to the UN, water is at the center of the climate crisis. THE WATER FACTOR, A RIGHTFULLY MINE NOVEL, is your chance to peer into the near future to a time of water scarcity controls by corporate criminals.  The story is a gripping tale of water scarcity and corporate wrongdoing. The Water Factor is a Firebird International Award winner for best dystopian novel and a Literary Titan recipient for best thriller.  It is available in ebook, paperback, and audio formats. It can be purchased on AMAZON, Barnes and Noble, and as an audiobook on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. Locally, it can be purchased at Annie Bloom’s Books and Powell’s Books.  

The Air Shouldn’t Require Purifiers

When people hear the phrase human rights, they often picture courtrooms, war zones, and political speeches. But human rights aren’t abstract. They’re practical, personal, and of everyday concern. Britannica defines human rights as rights that belong to an individual simply by virtue of being human. The United Nations took it further in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recognizing the “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace.

It’s a powerful statement. But here’s the question that haunts me: What happens when someone’s profit depends on your rights being violated? The answer lies in the details where the struggles of real-world human rights live. The first book in the Rightfully Mine series, The Water Factor, explores whether water, an essential of life, should be treated as a human right or as a commodity, bottled and traded on Wall Street.

In the newly released novel Antheia in the Thorns, the focus shifts to something we rarely think about until it’s taken from us–the air we breathe. In the novel, anthropologist-turned-housewife, Jennifer Russo, and an Antheia activist, Brian Adakai, fight a toxic threat most people have never heard of: Petroleum coke (petcoke)–a dirty byproduct of oil refining. Though rarely used in the U.S., petcoke often replaces coal in energy plants because it’s cheaper to produce and burns at a higher BTU. It’s also more polluting. Petcoke is shipped around the world, where it’s stored in dusty piles that affect air quality. U.S. refineries are the largest producers of petcoke, yet it is treated by Congress as someone else’s problem.

The damage doesn’t show up on corporate balance sheets. It shows up in smog and in people with asthma, allergies, chronic coughs, and in children who can’t run without wheezing or fall into ash piles to die while playing. It devastates communities that don’t have the political power to stop it. That is why petcoke isn’t just an environmental issue. It’s a human rights issue.

If the right to life means anything, shouldn’t it include the right to breathe air that won’t harm you? If freedom means anything, doesn’t it include freedom from pollution you never consented to? And if justice means anything, doesn’t it require environmental laws so corporations can’t hide behind loopholes and legal intimidation? Weakening the EPA and FDA is a travesty we shouldn’t allow.

In Antheia in the Thorns, Jennifer and Brian aren’t fighting a vague evil. They’re fighting against people with names. Oil entrepreneur Abdul Hammed Dillinger has built an empire on profit-first thinking. He has a legal shield in his attorneys, Amy Stuart and her lover, Jennifer’s husband, Jason Russo. They don’t need to win on truth. They only need to win by exhausting their opponents. To do so, they delay, threaten, and bury their opposition in paperwork. They manipulate the system until those fighting back are broke, discredited, or afraid.

This is how human rights are defeated in the modern world. It’s not always with violence, but more often with strategy. And that’s why I wrote this book. Because beneath the legal maneuvering and corporate shields is something more intimate: betrayal, grief, and the moment a woman realizes she has nothing more to lose. Jennifer isn’t a superhero. She’s a wife, a mother, a woman who trusted the wrong people. But when the air itself becomes dangerous, she discovers that courage isn’t about strength. It’s about the refusal to be silenced. “No! Our lungs are not negotiable.”

If you believe clean air shouldn’t require a purifier, if you’ve ever felt outmatched by systems designed to wear people down, if you’ve ever wondered what it takes to stand up when standing up costs everything, then this story is for you.

The ebook and paperback versions of Antheia in the Thorns are currently on Amazon at an introductory price. An audiobook will follow in a few months. If you decide to delve into the story, an honest review helps more than most people realize. It’s the most powerful way to help the truth reach new readers.

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Art can be purchased on my website and shipped free throughout the continental U.S. Contact me at marilynne@eichingerfineart.com with questions.

What is life?

Seventy-one percent of the Earth is covered in water, a substance that takes many forms without ever ceasing to be itself. When heated, it becomes steam; when frozen, it expands and hardens as ice. It falls as snow that children pack into snowmen, then melts and runs into rivers where fish, amphibians, and waterfowl make their homes. It rains onto fields, sinking into soil, nourishing seeds that become food for you and me.

Yet for all its abundance, very little of Earth’s water is available to us. Most freshwater is locked away in glaciers and ice caps. What remains in rivers, lakes, and accessible groundwater is a narrow margin upon which all terrestrial life depends. Water is generous, but it is not infinite.

The human body is a fragile vessel, flesh framed by bone,  holding water that makes up more than half of what we are. It carries oxygen and nutrients, regulates body temperature, and allows cells to communicate. When we die, that water does not vanish. It returns to the earth, moving into soil, plants, air, and other bodies. No matter how many times it transforms or mingles with other fluids, it does not disappear. It remains water.

This is life itself.

We are born, and we spend our days responding to pressures: loss, love, labor, illness, and joy. Each experience reshapes us, just as water reshapes stone into something inspiring or forgettable.  We move forward one step at a time, intersecting with others who are following their own paths. Sometimes those paths converge. A handful moving in the same direction becomes a stream, a stream becomes a current, and occasionally thousands move together, forming something powerful enough to alter the course of history.

Yet when we step back and look at history from a distance, there are familiar patterns. Empires rise and fall. Technologies change. Ideologies replace one another. What endures beneath it all is the same living system, still dependent on water that cycles endlessly through land, air, and body. Progress does not erase that dependency. It only disguises it.

Our mistake is believing that our actions evaporate and that what we take, pollute, or discard simply goes away. But nothing does. Like water, it changes state. Toxins settle into soil and bloodstreams. Carbon lingers in the atmosphere, trapping heat. Decisions made for convenience today resurface as a crisis tomorrow. We are not separate from the world we alter; we are one of its phases.

A single drop seems insignificant. So does a single life, or a single choice. But drops gather. They find low places. Over time, they carve valleys that create Grand Canyons. Movements are watersheds, formed by countless lives shaped by pressure and guided, consciously or not, toward a common direction.

A better future does not depend on conquering nature or outgrowing it. It depends on remembering what never retreats. How we care for water, how we care for the Earth, determines what kind of world our transformations will leave behind.

One day, the water that makes up our bodies will move on without us. It will pass through roots, clouds, rivers, and mouths we will never know. Long after our names fade, that water will still carry the imprint of how it was treated while it passed through our hands. The world will remain. 

The question is what condition we leave it in as we move through it.

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Art is always for sale. Surf’s Up can be purchased through my website at https://www.eichingerfineart.com/workszoom/2277455/surfs-up#/ and shipped to you at no cost in the continental U.S.

I look forward to your comments in English.

Companies worldwide are engaged in a high-stakes poker game around access to clean water. The Water Factor will open your mind and make you ask questions. Available in ebook, paperback, and audio formats. It can be purchased on AMAZON, Barnes and Noble, and as an audiobook on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. Invite me to tune into your book club discussion.  

Antheia in the Thorns, the second eco-thriller in the Rightfully Mine Series, has a February 20th launch date. I hope you will help me launch sales in style. More information will be shared over the following weeks.

Part of writing a book is finding the right title and cover design, and Antheia in the Thorns, going on sale at the end of February, is no exception. Its early working title was The Cave, but after discovering dozens of books with the same name, I set out to find something more distinctive.

That search led me to Antheia, the Greek goddess of gardens and love. Imagining her caught in thorns felt like the perfect metaphor for an approaching environmental reckoning. Does it make you wonder what happened?

Below are four early cover designs that didn’t make the cut. The final design, created by Streetlight Graphics, will be unveiled next week. Between now and February 22, I hope to whet your appetite for the story behind the thorns.

A Scene Behind Antheia in the Thorns:When I began writing Antheia in the Thorns, I didn’t start with a thesis. I started with a scene.

In the chapter titled “Dying Embers,” the protagonist, Bear Stanton, sits on a curb in the early morning hours, watching smoke rise from what had once been Antheia’s headquarters. Firefighters are packing up their hoses. Reporters circle, microphones extended, eager for outrage or accusation. Somewhere inside the charred building are lost hard drives, children’s artwork, handwritten notes from tribal elders—things that will never make the news crawl.

What struck me as I wrote that scene wasn’t the fire itself, but the silence afterward. The way catastrophe becomes ordinary once the cameras leave. The way destruction is framed as spectacle rather than consequence.

That moment on the curb is fictional, but its emotional truth is not.

As I mentioned in my previous post,  I watched a NOVA program detailing how warming temperatures are destabilizing the Arctic, releasing methane, sinking cities, and accelerating flooding across the globe. These aren’t distant projections or worst-case scenarios. They are unfolding now, quietly, incrementally, often out of sight. When disaster doesn’t arrive with a single dramatic explosion, it’s easier to ignore.

In Antheia in the Thorns, the fire is not just an act of violence—it’s a message. It’s meant to intimidate, to erase evidence, to remind ordinary people how fragile their work is when it challenges powerful interests. That dynamic plays out repeatedly in real life, whether through lawsuits, regulatory pressure, misinformation campaigns, or the slow erosion of public trust in science.

Fiction allows me to place a human face on those forces. To show what it feels like to lose not only a building, but a sense of safety. To ask what happens when the cost of telling the truth becomes personal—and whether it’s still worth paying.

I don’t expect novels to change the world on their own. But I do believe stories can slow us down long enough to feel what headlines encourage us to skim past. If Antheia in the Thorns does anything, I hope it helps readers connect the data we’re shown every day to the lives quietly affected by it—and to the choices still within our control.

Sometimes, the most dangerous fires aren’t the ones that burn buildings, but the ones we pretend not to see.

The Water Factor, the first book in the Rightfully Mine Series, questions whether water should be considered a commodity, as it is now, or a human right. Antheia in the Thorns raises a similar question about air quality. The novel is available in ebook, paperback, and audio formats. It can be purchased on AMAZON, Barnes and Noble, and as an audiobook on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.

Writing a book is a drawn-out process that includes searching for the right title and cover design. The following discusses a few of my blips on the way to releasing Antheia In The Thorns by February 22. https://www.eichingerfineart.com/blog/204684/countdown-to-publishing I hope you will help spread the word when it is released.

LIFE IN MOTION 

Sanity in An Era of Upheaval

Racial slurs were thrown at my grandchild while she was at summer camp last week. I was horrified knowing that the young bully had been taught to disparage people of color. You don’t grow up saying such things on your own. Foul, hateful language has no place in a peaceful society. I hope the scars from the experience won’t stay with her for the rest of her life. This child is not the only one in my family to have been victimized. Several years ago, an older granddaughter was caught in the crossfire at a Las Vegas concert. The shooter was a mentally disturbed individual who shouldn’t have had access to guns. Then, there was a son who had his car stolen from the parking space outside his business. Months later, he chased away people trying to break into the facility while he was there. He no longer feels safe there. I could share other incidents, but the point is that we are one family trying to survive in a nation with a stressed, economically fragile, mentally unstable population that is growing. 

Climate change, water scarcity, COVID-19, online bullying, international wars, drugs, and drama around the election wreak havoc on Americans. Thirty-eight percent more people are in mental health care than before the pandemic, a reflection of those who can afford treatment rather than all who need it. s. Overall, approximately 20% of inmates in jails and 15% of inmates in state prisons are now estimated to have a severe mental illness. Communities across the nation face crisis after crisis, with inadequate providers to meet demand. 

The U.N. says the problem is acute worldwide. Can you imagine what it’s like to live through twenty years of warfare in Sudan or nine months in Gaza? And what of our warming planet?  Water, at the center of the climate crisis, affects two billion people worldwide for at least a part of the year. Rising sea levels and saltwater have flooded some areas, making freshwater brackish. Others flee arid lands that can no longer be farmed. Villages are empty of residents with no choice but to migrate.  Yet these desperate families are turned away at borders throughout Europe and the Americas. Their traumatized children are left with lifetime scars. If I were them, would I become angry and thrash out or sink into clinical depression and anxiety? Unease is in the air and it is felt everywhere.

Thankfully, there are people concerned with the mental health crisis. Insurance companies were compelled to add mental health services, and Obama Care expanded it to millions more people. Some cities send social workers or psychologists rather than the police to deal with homeless populations. Professional treatment through Internet connections increased by 6,500 percent between 2020 and 2021.

One of the most significant barriers to treatment is overcoming the stigma attached to mental illness. This attitude goes back as far as the Greek and Roman days. The Greek philosopher Socrates is credited with saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Though a religious man, he continued to seek the truth, believing the love of wisdom was the most important pursuit.  It is necessary to look inward to understand the impediments to looking outward.

 The challenge is to destigmatize mental illness and provide access to appropriate care. If we don’t, we will continue to be subject to gun violence and drug abuse by people who bury their pain in antisocial ways. You and I can help by lowering the temperature of disparaging language. The media could help to reduce shame, ostracism, discrimination, and marginalization when covering mental illness. 

 Institutions like museums, schools, and libraries could foster relationships with community resources and mental health agencies. Many libraries already employ social workers who direct people to appropriate services. Museums are being asked to train staff and volunteers so they can not only deal with disruptive problems but also introduce sensitive topics and trigger issues in exhibitions around mental disorders. The Americans Alliance of Museums suggests designing safe space displays for the public to explore “challenging and potentially uncomfortable or disturbing subject matter.” These suggestions may help, but it will take a wave of understanding and compassion to turn things around. Anatole France said, “Even a little dog is the center of his own universe.” We must be sensitive to those whose vision differs from ours.  By broadening our perspectives, we benefit from having our lives enriched. 

 I look forward to your comments. Please respond below.

Art is always for sale. ART IN MOTION is a 16” x 20” acrylic painting on framed canvas. It is available for $250, including shipping in the continental U.S. Contact me at marilynne@eichingerfineart.com
According to the UN, water is at the center of the climate crisis.

THE WATER FACTOR, A RIGHTFULLY MINE NOVEL, lets you peer into the near future to a time of water scarcity controls by corporate criminals.  The story is a gripping tale of water scarcity and corporate wrongdoing. The Water Factor is a Firebird International Award winner for best dystopian novel and a Literary Titan recipient for best thriller.  It is available in ebook, paperback, and audio formats. It can be purchased on AMAZON, Barnes and Noble, and as an audiobook on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. Ask your bookstore to order a copy from Ingram. Please leave a review.