Mental Health Awareness Month
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I’m grateful to share about this conversation we’re having as a team at CHOOSE 180, and to invite you to reflect with us. In March of 2020, we launched our Counseling Program at CHOOSE 180 to address this essential community need. At that point, we didn’t know the severity of the pandemic or how timely it would prove to be able to offer access to this support. As with many opportunities, we recognized a need and took a leap.
Since the beginning of our counseling services, we’ve served 40 youth and young adults with individual counseling sessions, strength-building support groups, and short-term mental health consultations. In this time, we’ve been able to address trauma, build coping skills, provide an outlet to connect with community, to strengthen individuals’ awareness of needs and to advocate for self-care and self-worth. Our counseling staff is trauma-informed and relational, and we work from a strengths-based and anti-oppression lens, focusing on care that is individualized, because every person’s story is important.
As for me, I’ve been drawn into this work because I have had people cross my path who have taken my pain and my story seriously and offered me space to find myself and my strength; and some of those people have been gifted therapists who’ve walked alongside me. I included in our “What to Expect” with CHOOSE 180 counseling document that it’s a strength to ask for support and not a weakness or a sign that “something is wrong with you.” It’s actually very brave to share that life is difficult or unmanageable and that more resources are needed to keep going. Our counseling participants at CHOOSE 180 each have a unique history and have already carved out a resilient path even before meeting with us. I wish that so much resilience wasn’t demanded, because that could have only come from enduring some very heavy things, and that’s why it’s such an honor to share some of the intricate story, some of the winding path, and some of the weighty load that has been carried.
Everywhere we look, we can see signs that people are suffering and surviving–war, sickness, isolation, social pressures from school to work to family while navigating racist and exploiting systems. It’s a LOT. And there are also so many signs of hope–plants springing to life after dormancy, stories of our own participants learning to love themselves so well, and new pathways of how to bridge the gap between pain and possibility. One participant shared in our group setting: “it is important to tell ourselves our strengths and not let outside influences define us.” And another participant stated “A strength can be anything we perceive it to be. No one can take it from you!” It isn’t easy to grow, and in fact, it’s almost always uncomfortable, but it’s also incredibly rewarding, and always worthwhile.
One way that we seek to make growth and healing more accessible and less restrictive is that our counseling services are free of charge for our participants–they don’t need to have insurance, and they never see a bill. That is because of our funding from supportive organizations like the Seattle Mariners, and the City of Seattle and some of our other partners. We’ve offered care primarily through a telehealth platform because of public health concerns, and we are open to providing more care in person in the future, but also recognize that telehealth also allows us to provide more participants with care in a week because we aren’t traveling from site to site. We are currently able to receive community referrals (for services for youth and young adults from age 13-24) from individuals, schools, and community partners, and will serve as many people as our staffing capacity allows. We offer case load priority to participants who have been involved in our other programs at CHOOSE 180 and we consider it an absolute honor to serve in this role.
If you’d like to learn more, feel free to check out the Counseling page on our website, and if you have a referral you’d like us to follow up with, please use this form. Thank you for following along on this journey, we’ll be sharing about Mental Health all month, and I can’t wait for you to hear from our gifted new therapist, Daicia Mestas next week. Then the following week, stay tuned for an article on the pandemic’s impact on mental health, and a list of resources of support. And finally, Daicia and I will share some practical tips, tools and activities for you to try out for yourself.
With deep gratitude for you and hope for brighter days ahead,
Jana Detrick, MA, LMHC
Therapist
CHOOSE 180 Counseling
