During the past two years of upheaval, many of us have learned a lot about the importance of our mental health. It was a lot easier to ignore our emotional ups and downs when we could go out all the time without fear for our lives, blissfully repressing our issues. A lot of us learned that we needed therapy, but because therapy is expensive and not always covered by insurance, it can be hard access — at least as often as we’d like to go. Could mutual aid self and social therapy (MAST) be an addition to the tools we need to achieve emotional fitness?
In case you haven’t heard of it, MAST is a set of techniques that evolved in psychological circles to help people counsel themselves and others to make healthy emotional changes without the aid of a professional counselor. It’s for the kinds of things that you might think of as emotional roadblocks, but not major obstacles, like mental illness. In other words, MAST is meant to help you think or talk out your problems and process them so that you can make behavioral changes.
