[Music] Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for north central Minnesota.

Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information available at bemidjiairport.org Welcome to Lakeland Currents.

I'm your host Todd Haugen.

Our show is about Hope House of Bemidji.

We have the director here, Robin Wold, and Certified Peer Support Specialist Brenda Epenter is here as well.

Welcome to Lakeland Currents you both.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hope House of Bemidji has been in existence for a long time hasn't it Robin.

Yes, since 1980.

Wow.

Right, we just celebrated 44 years of service to the community.

And what is that service?

So we're providing a community support program for adults with long-term mental health concerns to help them live in the community, stay out of the hospital, and live the life that they would like to live.

Do people that the Hope House serves live there or they just stop in?

No it's all outpatient.

So they can stop in for our drop-in center activities or we just might meet them at their home or out in the community.

It's all up to the individual and what they need.

How many people are we talking about that Hope House serves?

On any given year we're serving about a 100 people, that can vary depending on staffing and sometimes less sometimes more, just depends on the staffing.

And are there some commonalities in the types of mental illness that some of the people that use Hope House have?

Yes we serve people who have schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, borderline personality disorder, schizo affective disorder or related conditions.

And they have to have had a serious enough illness that they have been in a hospital or a supervised living facility or they're likely to go to one of those settings if they should have more difficulty.

And how do you know that they've had these services, are you able to access that information?

Yes, so typically when a person needs our service, when they call in we do some screening and one of the things that we do is check to see if they have been in other locations and obtain some records.

In some cases people don't need our service and so the records help for us to find what they might need and to help them get that service as soon as possible.

And where is Hope House?

We are located in Nymore, not far from the Sanford Event Center, not far from Lakeland.

Not far from where we are right now.

And we are located at 2014 7th Street Southeast.

And is it open 24 hours a day?

No, it's open 8 to 4:30 Monday through Friday.

The key purpose of our program is to help people learn skills and then the remainder of their day they can do things in their lives and so we don't need to be there all the time.

However if there's a crisis we could go out in the evening or access the crisis line and the crisis mobile crisis team as needed.

We should get those numbers in just a little while, the mobile crisis line you said .Yes this is the 1-800-422-0045 is the mobile crisis line, and the mobile crisis team will come out and assist people if they are in need of going to a facility for more intensive service.

Okay we're going to repeat that number a little later in the show again so just so in case somebody heard it just now and maybe missed it and there's a text you can do as well, right?

Not for the mobile crisis team, that is for the crisis suicide crisis line.

Okay, all right.

So Brenda you are a Certified Peer Support Specialist.

Yes.

Now what's that?

Basically the main difference between myself and a coworker of mine that may be just a community mental health professional is that I myself also have the lived experience of mental health issues as well.

So I have a diagnosis of Bipolar 1 disorder and it is known not only to my co-workers and staff at Hope House but also to my clients as well and that is to give me a little bit of an advantage in trying to relate and understand how they may be feeling or struggling with their mental health as well.

Bipolar 1, there's different levels?

There's Bipolar 1 and there's Bipolar 2 and the difference between the two is the frequency of how many times you have mania or depression, so mine is more that I have mania than I do depression but the depression part is also in there as well.

So two has more depression.

Yep.

So I'm really glad you're here on our show to talk about this.

Did you feel Brenda you had this problem from when you were really little?

Now that I've been diagnosed since I've been about 24, 25, prior to that, you know, hindsight is 20/20 and looking back at my life prior to that I can see it back when I was a teenager but I was just misdiagnosed at that time, just any form of depression or mild depression those kinds of things and not the bipolar until I was more in my mid 20's going through school.

Kind of understandable, I mean that depression is the most prevalent mental illness that we seem to suffer from.

Yes.

And what has your experience been like since you were first diagnosed with bipolar 1?

Actually it's been a little bit of a roller coaster.

The last about 10,12 years have been pretty stable for me which is great.

When I was first diagnosed back in my 20's there was a lot of trying to find out what medication works correctly with me and I really did feel more like a guinea pig than anything else, but the last about 12 years now I've been pretty stable.

I've been out of the hospital since, I'm going on 12 or 13 years now, since January of 2013 and things are pretty stable.

I take medication daily, morning and night, and that seems to keep me pretty even, and my symptoms and triggers are pretty well controlled with medication and just doing some self-care and other things that I do for myself throughout any part of my day.

Were you hospitalized more than once?

Yes I've been.

The first hospitalization I had I was 17 years old, I was a junior in high school, and at that point I felt, now that it was more attention seeking at the time.

Since then I've been hospitalized I think an additional five or six times, and it wasn't really until the last hospitalization in January of 2013 that we really found the right combination of medication to really help my symptoms be at bay.

So you take more than one medication?

Yes I do take more than one medication, I take about two in the morning that are psychotropic meds and then I take some at night as well.

And the difficulty there is that different medications work differently for different people right?

Right, exactly.

So if, for instance, if Robin and I have the same symptoms the fact that I take, you know, medicine A and B does not necessarily mean that it's going to work as well for Robin or it might work more better for Robin than it would for me.

So each person with their own chemistry is made up differently so what works for me may not work for the next person.

So there's probably quite a few patients that feel like, to use your term from earlier a guinea pig, in figuring out the treatment, the med, the prescription treatment.

Yes, exactly, and you know we do have some clients that choose not to take medication and have been able to maintain a fairly stable life without medication and, you know, that's great as well but I would say the majority of our clientele take some form of medication of one form or another.

How long have you been working at Hope House?

I'm going on just a little over four years now.

I started, my journey is a little interesting, I started as a volunteer there for a class in my social work department at BSU and so I worked with the activity director at the time that was there and then as my time got towards the end and Covid started to hit, Robin asked me if I would be interested in answering the phones one day a week between in the morning hours and I said that would be fine, that gave me a little extra spending money, you know, and so when that time started to end they made another position for me which is called the CSP worker position and so I worked with a select group of individuals that were in a certain program and that's just because I did not have my full education done yet at the time and so I was working towards that and so I stayed on there and worked through the summer and did that for just over a year until I graduated and then just as I was about to graduate, Robin had told me about the peer support specialist position and what that would entail and so I chose to kind of go down that path instead of the normal community mental health path that most of my co-workers do.

So that must mean a lot to your clients.

And what has that meant to you being a peer support specialist?

It just helps me with my like if I had a mission my mission was if I can help somebody, if that's for 5 seconds, 5 minutes, or 5 days then my job is done.

Right.

And so the fact that I have a mental health condition that is becoming more and more prominent and more and more people are having and if that's going to help them in some way understand their mental health better, understand how their symptoms work, what triggers them and what kind of coping skills they can use then more power to me I guess.

And as I read just a little bit about mental illness preparing for the show and scratched the surface only, but I was struck by how many times I read that people suffering from mental illness usually feel like they're the only ones suffering from that.

Right and I remember when I was first diagnosed, shortly after I was first diagnosed, I had heard of bipolar but I had no idea what it was and so then I had to go on to the field of educating myself and knowing what that meant and what that meant with how does that fit with my life and the symptoms that I'm having and what kind of coping skills can I use to do that and then I also had to educate people around me such as my parents and my family, my brothers and other close relatives and family members.

Right so are there other peer support specialists at Hope House?

Currently, no, we're always looking, I know Robin's always got her eye open for it but otherwise currently no there is not.

I see, Robin what does it take to become a peer support specialist?

Well Brenda actually went through it so she might be able to describe this more.

Sure.

So after I graduated from college I did a two week course, at the time it was online, and I still think it's done online.

You need to one have the background or diagnosis in order to do it.

If you don't have the diagnosis you can't do it, but otherwise we do a two week intensive course on learning more about your coping skills, learning about how to teach coping skills to others, learning different some different theories that are out there and then really just telling your story, everyone has a story, and I think when you first tell it you're quite, I would say, nervous would be the word, but as you get better at it then it becomes more frequent, more fluid with you, and that's what we really focus on is just telling our story and how what I have gone through and what I have done, how that has helped myself and how that could possibly help others.

So to be admitted to that training you had to have a diagnosis that you could document but did you also have to have a certain type of degree?

No, not necessarily, it just happened that when I did the peer support training it was just right after I mean literally right after I graduated from college so that just happened, but you need the diagnosis in order to be in the program.

Okay, and so, go ahead Robin.

With that particular cohort they also had to have a job available and so we had already offered the job to her.

Oh I see.

And so that's also available to others.

Yeah.

Do you have other jobs, do you have other clinical or peer support specialist jobs to offer to anyone?

Yes if we had someone who had gone through the certification, it's approved by the state of Minnesota, and once they have done that we would be very interested in having them be part of the program and if they have not yet done it but would like to call us we can probably work out some way to make sure that they get that done.

Okay so now when people contact Hope House do they stop in for a few hours in a day or longer or can you tailor it to whatever people need?

Yes, so let's say we have someone who isn't involved yet, they might just give us a call and we talk over the phone and screen basically to make sure that the services we offer are something that would benefit them.

If that's the case then we go ahead and do a diagnostic assessment or obtain one if they have had one recently and then assign them to a worker and then they work out together what they need.

So maybe they need something every day, so they might come over for activities, they might visit at the home, they might go out in the community to work on some social skills, but let's say the person's doing fairly well, they just need to have a safety net so maybe they're meeting once a month, so that's another way that we help support people.

So you do have other people that work with your clients of course but you just have Brenda for peer support specialist.

Yes.

Okay and do people usually have to contact you well in advance before they can come in for a visit, does it take a while to establish all this research that you have to do about them?

When they're first coming in, during this time, because we are short staffeds, there's the challenge of trying to get all that information, but typically when we're fully staffed then we have within a half hour we can get that information, get the releases signed and obtain records so there's really not that much time in preparation.

I think right now it's just the time of waiting, they've done all the paperwork and now we have to have someone available, so.

And you work with people to try to get them employed as well, right?

Yes, although that has changed.

In the past we worked closely with the North Central Job Rep which has since gone away from our area and so at that point we could connect someone to a job coach and help them get connected to jobs in the community or learning more about their interests or whatever level they were at to start work.

Now if someone is interested in work we can help them fill out resumés or make sure that they can go to an interview, they can practice with us, but it's not quite the intensity that it was when we had the job rep collaboration.

How do you decide who gets to spend time with Brenda, for instance?

Everyone wants to spend with Brenda, of course.

I'll bet you're very busy.

I am, I am very busy.

Yes yep.

You know because you seem like you are, I mean you're very open and you seem like you're just easy to communicate with.

You know it hasn't always been that way.

I will tell you that mostly when I first was diagnosed, you know, as I said it was a lot of educating myself and finding out what the diagnosis meant and all that, but I also realized pretty much early on that talking about it is the only way that it's going to get known, hiding it in the corner and closing the door behind it is not helpful for myself or anyone else in that matter and there's a lot of mis-known information and that's where the stigma comes in that people have about mental illness and things, you know, that we're crazy and that we're, you know, we commit all these crimes, dangerous crimes and that isn't the case at all.

It is very common for people especially that have just developed a mental illness of some kind that they'll just simply live with it for a long time right and that's no way to make it go away.

That is true.

I have found for myself medication is a major part of that.

Other people have found where they don't need medication and that's great too, but I just know for myself at this point in my life medication is a key component to keeping my symptoms at bay.

From what I read, and again I'm really a rank amateur in this, but it said that people some people can get by without medication but they usually need some peer support or a group of people to talk with.

Yes and I am very fortunate that a lot of my colleagues from school at BSU and others and I have a very good church support and some other supports in the community have been very helpful and very supportive of me in doing that and have been there the whole time that I've been going through this journey.

How do you feel your mental illness is doing, Brenda, I mean is all this work helping you?

It is and I feel that right now I am doing very well.

As I said before, you know, medication seems to be the answer for me.

This job, the job that I have though can be stressful at times and so there are some self-care things that I do for myself outside of my job.

One of them, for me, something I enjoy just love to do is work out and so you will see me at the gym 3 or 4 times a week just lifting weights and on the exercise bike and you know doing what I can to help and that helps really alleviate a lot of my frustrations and where I feel that sometimes my job ties my hands and I don't feel I can be as effective sometimes as others, working out and lifting weights for me is what really helps kind of alleviate some of that frustration that I have.

Exercise is generally pretty effective in treating lots of problems.

Yep.

What would you say to people that are watching the show that perhaps are thinking to themselves you know I think I've been living with something probably you know depression since that's most common for a long time but I don't know if I really want to admit to anybody that I really have this, I'm trying to kind of keep it a secret, what do you say to people that think they can pretty much just get over it if they just can make themselves snap out of it?

Well from what I have found you really can't just snap out of it and a lot of people don't know where to turn so sometimes the best place to turn is just your general doctor, just your general GP, and going there and having a simple conversation with them.

And I know that a lot of the times now they do some screening for mental health while you're at the doctor's office even if you're there for a sore throat or you know bum knee or something.

They will do some general mental health questions for you as well and I know many people that have done that as a way to start the conversation.

And then the GP, you know, says well you know this may not be my area of expertise but then you know here are some recommendations that I would suggest in the community and that's how I have told a lot of people.

Robin once they have that diagnosis they can contact Hope House, is there a charge for the services you offer?

No and just to note also if someone contacts us even if they don't think they qualify for our program but they're trying to find help we want to make sure that they get help so they can call and we will help find what they need.

We only have about a minute left of our show what is that number that people can call again?

Sure, the number for Hope House is 218-444-6748 and my extension is 109.

Okay and the crisis line is a different number.

Yes 1-800- 422-0045.

Okay and Brenda just 30 seconds left, final words.

All I would have to say is that if you feel that you have some struggles and you feel it might be mental health related go get it checked out.

Well, Brenda, thank you very much for being here today and Robin thank you too for your good work at Hope House.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

That's it for this edition of Lakeland Currents.

We really appreciate you listening and watching our show today and we hope you can join us next time for our next edition of Lakeland Currents on Lakeland PBS.