Mental Health First Aid

Yesterday I attended a day-long training to become certified in Mental Health First Aid (MHFA). This course teaches you how to support an individual in the midst of a mental health crisis until assistance arrives from an appropriate professional. The training also teaches how, in a less emergent scenario, you can facilitate a conversation with a person who is struggling with a mental health disorder. 

I was compelled to become MHFA certified for two reasons. Primarily, I believe it is vital that anyone who works with young adults be prepared to talk to them about their mental health. Too many times I have found myself sitting across from a student who is telling me about their stress or anxiety or depression, and I have had to try and help them without knowing any strategies to make the conversation successful. Secondarily, I have anxiety and seasonal depression. I believe it is important to speak more frequently and openly about mental wellness, to combat the stigma against people who live with mental health disorders and to encourage people to seek appropriate professional treatment.

The training was immensely informative. I learned that mental health disorders compromise an individual's ability to carry out daily activities, to enjoy life, or to have satisfying relationships (which we were told to remember with the schmaltzy but helpful mnemonic of "live, laugh, love"). The course then covered the characteristics of depression, anxiety, psychosis, and substance use disorders. We practiced a process called ALGEE for assisting and supporting individuals experiencing a mental health crisis. After Assessing their risk for suicide and self harm, the best thing to do is to Listen nonjudgmentally and Give reassurance and information. This means to calmly and genuinely express your concern for their feelings, and to accept and validate their experience. The last steps are to Encourage appropriate professional help and to Encourage self-help and other support strategies. The course provides ample opportunity to review the steps of ALGEE, to observe how it can be tailored to a variety of disorders, and to practice using ALGEE in a variety of scenarios.  

Having completed the course, I feel much more prepared to discuss mental health--both disorder and wellness--with students and peers. More specifically, I feel like I now have a framework and a set of best practices that will improve the likelihood that these conversations will be effective in planting a seed of encouragement for someone to seek appropriate professional help in moments of crisis. Just as with CPR, I hope this is a set of skills that I never have to put to use, but I feel much more responsible and prepared having learned to administer Mental Health First Aid.

Weekending

I was incredibly productive this week. In addition to being well rested from vacation, I had missed the satisfaction of making consistent daily progress on a project. On Wednesday, I began writing up the research I presented in Venice into a paper for possible publication. On Friday, I drafted a research proposal for a small fellowship. I also crafted a blog post for our Venice Working Group website with my reflections on the trip. On the domestic front, I laundered and prepared healthy meals and even cleaned the bathroom!

Nonetheless, being on vacation reminded me of the importance of not just taking time away from work, but of creating emotional space away from work. I'm very practiced at limiting the leaching of my work into the evenings or weekends, but over the course of my travels I realized that I have become a lazy defender of my emotional space. By that, I mean that I've thought of every activity I've done lately in terms of how it will affect my work later--assessing if the relaxation will have a positive return on investment when I resume writing. In effect, I have been instrumentalizing relaxation rather than, you know, relaxing.

So this weekend I've done things just for the sake of doing them, because they are things I enjoy. I've caught up with the ongoing season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. I took a water bottle filled with wine to the park at sunset and devoured several chapters of The Story of a New Name. I went with friends to Picklesburgh, and ate something delicious called a Pickle Pizza Boat. Tonight, I think I will go get an ice cream cone. 

My sister found this giant bullfrog on her porch Friday morning, an ultimate omen of TGIF. He is my new weekend mascot. Live like the bullfrog. That is, if the bullfrog ate Pickle Pizza Boats. 

View fullsize

Photo Credit: Maya Oren

Solar Fuel

I have no scientific evidence on which to base this claim, but I had a superbly productive day and I attribute it to the sunshine and spring breeze. Pittsburgh has had some exceptionally beautiful weather this week--and I mean exceptional in the truest sense, this does not happen often--and I've been working outside on the stoop of my apartment building. For an hour this morning and for two this afternoon, I sat and reviewed the secondary literature I'm using to write the first section of my first chapter. It was warm enough to have my arms bare, and so even when my back and bottom began to ache from being pressed against the hard concrete steps I refused to get up and go inside. I just kept reading, leaning gingerly against the wrought iron banister that's come partially unmoored from the porch. 

The magnolia tree across the street is blooming. The playground down the block is filled with kids from the Catholic school. Everyone else is at work and so it's just me, reading, uninterrupted. 

View fullsize

Resilience

This weekend was supposed to be my tropical Puerto Rican vacation, my reward for enduring February, my chance to see my parents for the first time since September... and it was foiled by a snowstorm. Standing there in JFK's Terminal 2, all I could think was, "(wo)man plans, God laughs." We were stranded in New York City until Saturday afternoon, which was not the worst fate, but our new itinerary created logistical problems. For starters, we were wearing short sleeved shirts under our light coats and it was 27 degrees outside. I spent Friday wearing a sundress over my jeans, adding an extra layer to my (already bizarre) ensemble. We also had no place to stay, no plans, and, frankly, no extra money in our budget. 

Somehow, despite all this disappointment and uncertainty, I remained incredibly calm. We booked a hotel room using Hotel Tonight (a great app that I highly recommend), got ourselves on the AirTrain, the E train, the D train, the 1 train, and checked ourselves into the hip Nylo on the Upper West Side. I began texting friends and family, trying to arrange a dinner for Friday night. I made a plan for the day, including a visit the archive, lunch at Lombardi's, and a walk to the Lower East Side to load up on sweets at Economy Candy. Even with the looming question of whether we would actually get back to Pittsburgh on Saturday, I tried to make the best of our little adventure. We had a great time, saw some of our siblings and siblings-in-loves, and eventually made it back to this Appalachian icebox with a bag of candy and two dozen bagels. 

I confess that I did tear up once, when we got to the hotel that first night and it hit me that I wasn't going to wake up in San Juan the next morning. Yet I never broke down sobbing. I did not shake my fist at the sky and protest the injustice of it all. Even more shockingly, I did not angst over our plans or lack thereof. I embraced the variables and the messiness and all of the potential logistical failures.

Even a year ago, it was unthinkable that I could hold it together in such a situation. When I called to tell my family that we would not be joining them in Puerto Rico, father praised my "mature" response. Although I was flattered by his compliment, I think it's more accurate to say I was "resigned." Graduate school, particularly working on the dissertation, has made me more resilient. The process is inherently uncertain. You tentatively propose a topic and an argument that you suspect will be fruitful, but could lead nowhere. You dig through boxes looking for documents that might have been archived, but that just as easily were thrown away. You apply for grants and fellowships that you may or may not win, that would facilitate or limit your ability to conduct your research. You travel to archives, live out of a bag for weeks at a time, and constantly find yourself at Walgreens buying items like Q-tips and postage stamps that you believed were non-essential. And that's on top of that omnipresent and oppressive question faced by every dissertator: "Will I actually manage to pull this off?"

Apparently I have learned to roll with the punches, to shrug off the unexpected and accept that things aren't always going to break my way. That's a pretty valuable life skill, and further evidence that getting a PhD, while a questionable career decision, is the best life decision I ever made. 

Stress Dream

A few weeks ago I began having stress dreams. I was never a particularly active dreamer until last year, and I still find them disconcerting. Recently they have reflected reality to a degree they never did before. Now my anxieties follow me from wakefulness into sleep, which can be exhausting. The silver lining, I guess, is that I get up some mornings with a certain clarity about how to prioritize my work. 

For example, last night I dreamed that I was in Washington Heights. I was sitting in a swiveling desk chair at the corner of 181st St. and St. Nicholas, by the entrance to the 1 train, and I was eating cold french fries out of a plastic bag. I found the fries underneath the chair when I sat down. I swiveled the chair back and forth, to the left and to the right, watching New Yorkers walk by on their way to work and school. It was obviously morning, which makes my choice of breakfast seem even more peculiar and suspect.

All of a sudden my friend walked by and we greeted each other. I politely extended the bag I was eating from and offered him some cold fries. He wisely declined. I asked him what he planned to do on this fine day. I can't recall what he answered but he did mention it was Thursday. 

I jumped up. Thursday!? If it was Thursday it meant I had a 9 AM appointment to do a follow-up oral history interview. I demanded that my friend tell me the time. It was already 9:48 AM! I had to get uptown!

I thanked my friend and ran down into the subway station. I only had to go two stops and I silently prayed that I could get there by 10:00 AM. I saw a train in the station, but I couldn't dig my Metrocard out of my bag fast enough and so I watched it pull away. I knew that if I walked to the furthest end of the platform and got in the first car of the next train, it would get me closer to the exit at my destination. As can only happen in dreams, bookshelves and tables and racks appeared as I walked farther along. Obviously the northernmost section of the uptown platform was a bookstore. There are worse places to wait for the train, I guess. 

That's when I realized that I was going to the oral history interview without my digital audio recorder. I decided that the recorder app on my phone would suffice. Once I resolved that problem, I remembered that I had not written any questions for this interview. Why not? I hadn't finished transcribing the past one, and so had not decided on my follow-up questions. As I contemplated my situation, a train finally pulled into the station. I somehow had the gumption to get onboard, convinced that I could wing it without my interviewee noticing.

My alarm went off about then, and I immediately advanced transcription to the top of my to-do list. Unlike Dream Me, Awake Me is not denial. I cannot wing anything.