- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] - As the longest running public affairs show in West Coast/Central Florida, WEDU's Florida This Week has covered a variety of current affairs and community issues during the last 30 years.

One evolving topic we've covered is mental health, bringing it out of the shadows.

Our experts have helped us lead frank conversations and spotlight local and statewide resources.

On this episode, we welcome a panel of professionals on the front lines of care, people who keep mental health programs running in the workforce, criminal justice system, and within our community of veterans and active service members.

Why these programs matter, what's working in mental health, and how you can get involved within your circles of influence.

That's next on Florida This Week.

[music] Welcome back, everybody.

I'm Lissette Campos.

Joining us on the panel this week, we have Jamie McPherson, a Marine Corps veteran at the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay.

He serves as a veteran ambassador representing the Florida Veterans Support Line, where he promotes the program and establishes connections with a wide range of organizations.

Lisa McLean, the seasoned trial attorney, oversees one of the largest public defender offices in Florida, advancing innovative, data-driven approaches to public safety.

Among her many specialties are the juvenile mental health court and the Street Legal program.

Clara Reynolds is the president and CEO of the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay, a licensed clinician and social work with a master's degree in business administration.

Her career managing nonprofit organizations in the region spans more than 20 years, and Sharon is an author, keynote speaker, and business and life coach specializing in mental wellness, leadership, and workplace well-being.

She is a nationally recognized advocate for employee assistance programs and mental health in the workplace, advising organizations and professional associations.

The issue of mental health cuts across all social and economic levels, and with help from our panel of experts, we're taking a closer look at mental health in three key audiences the local workforce, veterans and juveniles in our criminal justice system.

We begin within the military community.

West Coast/Central Florida has one of the largest concentrations of veterans in the nation.

According to the U.S.

Department of Veterans Affairs, more than 370,000 veterans live in the Tampa Bay area alone.

Statewide, it's more than 1.5 million veterans.

We're really happy to hear about the Florida the Veterans Help Line.

Um, tell us about how it works and what how many calls have you been seeing?

- So the Florida Veterans Support Line was started in 2014 as an opportunity to provide a really community based solution for veterans who are in crisis.

And we were fortunate to be able to expand that statewide.

So we serve about 1,000 veterans and their families a month.

Um, and we connect them with resources and supports in their local communities.

And if they need more assistance, we have what's known as care coordination.

But those individuals are located across the state of Florida.

So if you're in Pensacola and you call our line, we're going to connect you to a veteran care coordinator who's a peer but knows those community resources.

And Jamie helps to oversee all of that for us.

- When you said a thousand calls a month, I was a little taken aback.

Those are a lot of people needing help.

- It's a lot of people that need help and support.

And we recognize I think one of the things that I've heard, and I'm not a veteran, but, you know, when individuals leave the military and they rejoin community, you know they're not they're not retiring to the VA, they're retiring to community.

VA is part of that solution.

But for many individuals, they need help and assistance outside of the VA.

And Jamie is a master of helping to navigate within the VA system.

So we're very fortunate to have this professional peer collaborative that comes together.

- Jamie, how does the conversation change when the person on the other end of the line knows that you are a military veteran as well?

- It gives them a sense of relief.

Well, veterans, military, we're our own culture.

We're taught to be self-sufficient in the military.

We're taught not to ask for help because the stigma that's attached to that, if a veteran or an active duty military asks for, to speak to the chaplain, they lost a loved one.

It's looked upon as something is wrong or something is broken, and it may affect somebody's deployment.

And in some cases it has affected the promotion for somebody.

And even some people's careers have been affected by doing that.

They don't want the news to get out, that there may be something wrong.

And I'm sharing a foxhole with you and you're supposed to have my back.

So many veterans and active duty members will not ask for help.

You just mentioned that we take almost a thousand calls a month.

Those are the ones that are asking for help.

There are many that just haven't reached out yet because they didn't know that's available to speak to somebody that's had shared experiences.

- And when you, both of you are asked, what are people, what are veterans calling about?

What is what are the most common mental health issues that they are calling about?

- Well, on the mental health side, it's probably the second most type of calls that we get on our lines.

Housing and homeless prevention are probably the first, but on the mental health side, it varies because you're dealing with things like TBI, traumatic brain injury.

You have individuals that were sexually assaulted while they were in service, the military, sexual trauma that has affected them and what most people are associating with is PTSD factor.

PTSD used to be called things like shell shock or battle fatigue, and was only for those that were combat veterans.

And it wasn't until roughly ten, 12 years ago when we realized it's related to trauma, not necessarily battle.

- And we have that number on our screen.

It's 1-844-MYFLVET.

Clara, it must be very satisfying to know that of all the places that they could have housed, this Help Center helpline, that it's at the crisis center of Tampa Bay.

- It's an absolute honor for us.

And Jamie will remember because he started with the line, you know, we had individuals in our community calling in 2013, 2014, and they were calling and asking for help.

And usually the first question they would ask is, is, well, what theater did you serve in?

What branch of the military?

And somebody like me would say, you know, thank you for your service.

I haven't, I never served, and they would thank us and hang up.

That was really the catalyst for us to really pilot this opportunity.

And we piloted it in six counties.

And then we were able to expand statewide.

So we are very excited that this incredible Florida based resource is here and available for all of our Florida based veterans and their families.

- And I'm so glad that you mentioned and their families.

Absolutely.

So it's not just for veterans.

It can be for their family members who are calling maybe for help on their behalf.

- Absolutely.

You know, it may be a spouse, it may be a child calling on behalf of their parent who's struggling and is, as Jamie said, not comfortable reaching out for help, but that child doesn't know how to help.

And I say, child, but this could be an adult, an adult child that is trying to navigate sometimes the VA system or other resources.

So we really do take that full approach of we will serve anybody attached to that veteran.

- Jamie has so eloquently explained why the resistance is there, but even in the general population, there is resistance to reach out for help when it comes to mental health.

For the person who's watching the episode now and maybe knows someone who is off, how do you approach the conversation?

What is the advice that you give for the family member who's trying to help the veteran?

Because that's information that could help anyone, really absolutely.

- You let them know first, they're not alone that there's somebody here that's willing to help, and if they don't know the answer, they'll get you connected to somebody who does.

As Claire had mentioned, part of our job was to connect to the VA, but not everybody is eligible for the VA.

So we utilize the community partners in the area and get them connected.

The VA doesn't do everything, especially when it concerns the family, the spouse, and so forth.

So being able to connect those individuals that they themselves are living through the veterans PTSD and the things that are happening in that, and don't know how to handle it.

Now they have somebody they can reach out to and get connected with to get the help themselves.

- Wonderful.

We're going to move on now to turning to the criminal justice system.

The State Attorney's Office in Hillsborough County created the first juvenile mental health court in the state of Florida, started it in 2019.

This experiment was in response to a growing number of repeat offenders in the system with untreated serious mental illness.

And Lisa, tell us about how the program is working so far.

- Well, we have a 97% success rate, which is just extraordinary.

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that, you know, these are young people that we that we have the opportunity to work with.

And there's a lot of support around that.

You're going to see a theme if you're not already seeing it, that collaboration is really, really important.

And we are very fortunate in Hillsborough County to have a very collaborative environment in which to work.

The judges that are 100% behind this state attorney, public defender, um, all the agencies that provide services and involving families.

It's so important, as Jamie said, that, you know, we're not only dealing with the client and in our in our scenario, you're talking about mostly children that are teenagers.

60% of our clients range from 15 to 17 years old.

- Um, and it's very important to involve the family in the therapy that is provided through the system.

- When we talk about prevalence, give our viewers a sense of how many kids are involved in the court.

- So we began juvenile mental health court in 2018, and since then we've served about 500 children.

- And what is the trigger for them to be part of the program?

- Sometimes it's a parent, okay?

Sometimes it's a lawyer.

One of the assistant public defenders will recognize that there's something going on with this child.

And, you know, depending on what the issue is, juvenile mental health court is divided into two sections.

There's the incompetent to proceed children, and then the children that get to engage in, in the contracts that allow for their cases to be dismissed when they successfully complete all the conditions.

- What type of mental illness are we talking about in the majority or predominantly in this group of juveniles?

- That's an interesting question, because, you know, children are different when it comes to the diagnosis, because there is so much brain development that's ongoing, um, up until your early 20s.

And so there's not as much of this kind of solid diagnoses that you see with adults.

But we see a lot of we see a lot of autism, we see a lot of major depressive disorder, a lot of anxiety.

There's like attachment disorder, OCD, these kinds of things that are leading children into the criminal justice system, that parents are reaching out and they want help.

- When, when your office is looking at these cases, do you find that there are many instances where the child has an undiagnosed mental health, like bipolar, for example, that's not been diagnosed.

So you're the first gate that says, maybe we should look at this.

- Yeah, the public defender's office is very much on the front lines of, of being, you know, the agency, the person, the human that's identifying those issues with both the children and the adults.

And that comes from, you know, we provide a tremendous amount of training to our lawyers to be able to recognize those issues, because it's very important for us to be successful in the work that we do.

And in order to do that, you've got to address the whole person.

We take a very holistic approach to the work that we do.

- You all are focused on diversion instead of punishment, correct?

Explain to our viewers how you are seeing that work in the life of most of the kids that you're working with.

- Well, I mean, I think it's important to also recognize that there is accountability in these programs.

You know, there's, there is even with our adult mental health and drug court, and there seems to be this kind of perception in the community that this is a way out a way to get your charges dismissed.

And the reality is that this work that clients do in these programs is strenuous.

They have to report to court a whole lot more than they might otherwise have to do.

I mean, you can sometimes go into court on one court date and resolve your case.

And these are children that are having to go back to court over and over and over again.

But that's how you build a rapport.

That's how you, you know, we I have a success story for you.

And I'll just I'll just call him Stephen.

Stephen was a foster care child that was adopted at the age of nine.

And those parents may not have been ideal.

And sometimes that happens.

Um, for example, the dad in that family wanted Stephen to refer to him as Mr.

Jones.

Not even dad, you know, and so he already had some significant trauma and now he's got attachment issues.

And when he got into trouble, he just really couldn't talk to anybody about what was going on.

And, and our office in particular, I mean, my lawyers in, in this division are just great.

And they care so much about the work that they do, and they just continue to work with him, whether it was in person or in Zoom or on Zoom and, and meet with him over and over again to the point where he ultimately said, you're the first people that have ever been proud of the work that I've done.

He was able to.

He graduated successfully from the program, got a driver's license, bought a car, has steady employment, stays in contact with his lawyers after the fact.

Even came back to visit juvenile mental health court as a success story and talk to the kids in the program.

- Wow.

It's really it's it's so wonderful to see that the hard work that these difficult conversations, they do pay off and they do work in the long run.

- Absolutely.

- And we're going to move on to the issue of mental health in the workforce.

1 in 5 adults experience some form of mental health condition in any given year.

One in every 20 adults live with a serious mental health condition.

This data, coming from the Florida chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the AD Council says that breaking the isolation where that mental health problem can grow and intensify is really the first step in a really good direction.

[music] How are you feeling?

[music] You know, I've just been kind of.

[music] [music] I guess, you know, like, I. I appreciate you listening.

[music] And that spot is from the AD Council.

It's called, "Let's be Real."

Sharon, I'd like to bring you into the conversation.

You have often said that the Employee Assistance Program saved your life.

Tell us about how you convinced companies and associations that the EAP is not a throwaway.

It's not a luxury benefit for the employees.

- Well, the EAP actually did save my life.

It is a fact and not just mine, but my entire family's.

So my father was a boss at New York Hospital, and I was in a horrific place in my life.

I was addicted and at the age of 19, after two rehabs, a halfway house, I blacked out and woke up in another state.

So it was very serious.

I was homeless and addicted.

My father was a boss and had to go to work every day and lead his employees.

So if he did not have this EAP...Ben to go to every day, to speak to about what was going on with his daughter, because if you could imagine having to lead an organization and not know where your child is, it must have been so harrowing.

So then I got sober at 21 years old, came back and my father knew me so well.

And he said, you know, we're a lot alike.

He said, you know, I think you would really love this EAP that I was seeing.

And if it wasn't for Ben Fagaras, who I love talking about, um, he was the first and the bravest to ask me if I was having suicidal thoughts.

So at 21 years old, I'm 53 now, so I'm sober for 31 years and have dedicated my life now to having these conversations.

So I really appreciate them.

Um, and what I, what I notice in these workplaces, because I have been a boss for many, many years in New York and then here with large medical operations.

And what I've noticed is that the EAP comes up maybe when we are coming into November, when we're talking about our health benefits and it's kind of hidden, you know, and it goes really quick.

But I really think that if employee assistance programs were explained and what the benefit was and how there should be no shame around it.

And I think that, you know, there's a lot of people, and understandably so, that are in fear that if they use an EAP that their boss is going to find out and they're going to say, oh, my goodness they might think that they have access to the notes.

They have absolutely no access.

It's all confidential, but we need to talk about it more than during the open enrollment and also doing during what I like to call the hashtag months, you know, mental health awareness, suicide prevention.

I think that we need to talk about it every month.

- When you are speaking at the conferences and when you are speaking before groups of professionals in a certain industry and they say we have a P. Not a lot of our employees use it.

Um, why is that?

- So I have spoken at these and this is exactly happened.

And maybe there'll be an HR representative that gets up before I get up, which is smart actually to say that they have the EAP.

And then I will be signing books and they will go, oh my God, Sharon, I never knew we had it.

And, and it is, it is nobody's fault.

- That happens often.

- All the time this morning.

- That's shocking.

- I know, and that's why I'm so grateful to have these conversations.

So it really is exposing something that we all need to talk about if we're going.

I don't I'm not a big fan of the word stigma.

The only way to normalize the conversation around mental health is to have these conversations, because we're not talking about mental illness, we're talking about mental health.

I'm very proud of the fact that I have great mental health.

I have a therapist.

I have an appointment at 8 a.m.

tomorrow.

I love telling people about my therapist.

I love talking about how I take care of myself mentally and exactly what you were talking about with people being uncomfortable in this silence.

You know, listening is not waiting for our opportunity to talk.

So if we're going to be great leaders, we need to be able to listen.

So the leaders need to be taught how to have active listening skills.

We also, as leaders need to learn how to stop, take a breath, observe our thoughts, and proceed.

So we have to be a little more responsive than we are reactive.

And part of that is not shifting blame on anybody, because the eaps aren't talked about a lot, and not every company can afford an EAP.

But there are certainly so many great programs like the crisis center, um, like the veterans line, like Alcoholics Anonymous, like all of these free programs that are not brought to light, like Nami, which is the National Alliance of Mental Illness.

We have so many non-profits.

- So this is this is the next section is our viewers favorites.

It's the time when we devote it to other big stories, when we highlight issues that our panelists know best about and that our viewers may want to know about as well.

Clara, I'd like for you to start with you.

What is the big story that you'd like to share with our viewers?

- We're really excited at the Crisis Center to be expanding our presence into Plant City.

Plant City, someone who's born and raised in this community remembers when Plant City, you didn't really go unless it was the Strawberry Festival because there was really nothing else out there, and it is now such a thriving city and part of our community.

But by the same token, they're also struggling with many of the things that you struggle with at Tampa or Temple Terrace.

And so we are looking forward to being able to expand, to have somebody in Plant City to be able to help offer support through our care coordination program.

So we're super excited about that expansion.

Lisa, tell us about the Street Legal program.

So we started Street Legal about six months ago.

It came from this idea of how can we better serve our clients in the community?

How can we take the public defender's office to the community so that we're addressing some of the issues of of these underserved communities that may have difficulty getting to our office, that may have difficulty with childcare, with underemployment, food insecurity, again, because we want to address all these issues of, of the humans that we represent.

So we looked at zip codes where the majority of our clients live.

We identified one that worked best for us, and we are collaborating with Hillsborough County with Bay Area Legal Services, with the Tampa Hillsborough Homeless Initiative, with Ibis, with all of these other agencies that allow us to treat the whole person.

We're out in the university area, the third Saturday of every month.

It's building; we have more people every month, and it's... the community has really been responsive.

Sharon, you wanted to highlight a very successful collaboration with Polk County.

Yes.

Oh my goodness.

So Polk County brought me out to speak and many other speakers that talk about mental health and life and in business.

Um, they had its Polk vision.

It was Polk County.

It was a superintendent of the schools.

It was the hospitals.

It was incredible.

It was a behavioral health summit.

So it was a full day that was free to the entire community.

It was sold out, which was great because it was free.

And they brought all of us together to talk about these things.

But I will tell you, it's been it was so rewarding to watch everybody come together.

We talk about collaboration right here at this table, {and we are so much more powerful together than we are by ourselves.

We need each other.

The opposite of addiction is community.

Um, there's been so much isolation so to bring together all of these people in one space coming together to talk about mental health, to talk about behavioral health and then to offer these resources.

I challenge Pinellas County, Hillsborough County, Manatee County to all come together so we can model what they have done.

And Jamie, take us out with one last success story on the Veterans Helpline.

This was a gentleman who was a Coast Guard rescue swimmer.

And we were we were speaking.

He was looking actually to get treatment for detox because he had a bunch of things going on in his life.

He had just finished a fifth of vodka.

He just lost his girlfriend.

She moved to Alaska to be a marine biologist, and he was looking for that.

But as we were talking and building rapport, and I was asking him a little bit about the rescue swimmer side, and he was giving me these invitations and talked about, you know, they teach you how to save somebody, but they don't teach you how to react if you don't.

And he was bringing those out where I had asked him, are you thinking of taking your life?

He says, brother, he had the means sitting next to him.

He says, I was planning on utilizing that after we got off the phone.

He safety planned with me.

We locked up the means in another room.

He came back down.

We agreed to pour the rest of the vodka down the sink, and then he agreed for us to have somebody come and do a wellness check to take care of him while we're waiting for the law enforcement to come up.

He's looking out the window and he says, okay, they're coming up the steps.

I just want to let you know before I let you go.

Brother, you saved my life.

Thank you.

And let us know because of that peer support, being able to talk and build that aspect.

We were there even if it was just for one individual.

- Thank you so much for sharing your stories and for giving us an example of programs that are working that maybe others can adopt as well.

Our thanks again to Clara Reynolds, Jamie McPherson, Lisa McLean, and Sharon Fekete.

Here's one more look at important phone numbers and websites connecting individuals and organizations to resources on mental health.

Thanks again from all of us here at WEDU.

We know you've got plenty of choices for your news and information, and we thank you for choosing us.

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