- May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and that's a time to address the challenges faced by millions of Americans who are living with mental health conditions.

These include the stigma around mental illness, a lack of knowledge about available resources, and a shortage of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals.

I talked about these concerns and more with Carlynn Nichols, who's senior director of behavioral health at CNS Healthcare.

So all of us, I think probably need to pay a little more attention to our mental health condition.

But let's talk about our community, in particular, and some of the challenges that we have that I think are not necessarily common to other populations.

And this is really about being able to face up to the problems that we have and to seek help.

- Yes, I think one of the challenges in our community is there's just a lot of stigma around mental health or mental illness.

And one of the challenges we really need to face is that mental health is as important as physical health.

They're very much interwoven, and if we want to be physically healthy, we also need to be mentally healthy.

And so being able to discern when you're not feeling well is important, both physically and mentally, and not only yourself, but also your friends and family.

Being willing to say, "Hey, Stephen, are you okay?

Is there anything I can do to support you?"

And also knowing that when it's something beyond what I can do as a friend of Stephen, to actually recommend something like going to see a doctor or a therapist, which is the same thing we would do if you weren't feeling physically healthy.

- Right, right, I wanna talk about some access issues as well.

In our community, access is about both insurance and the ability to pay for healthcare, but it's also about the availability of specialists, doctors in our community to deal with these things.

You're dealing with kind of a double whammy when you're talking about mental health there.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So, in our field, we have those who are practitioners who are therapists, so we're talking about a licensed social worker, psychologists, and counselors, as well as physicians who are psychiatrists or nurse practitioners.

And, overall, there's a shortage, there's a workforce shortage.

The same shortage we see in other industries, we have the same shortage in mental health.

We have a great shortage.

The shortage in psychiatry has been going on for a long time, and nurse practitioners have begun to fill that gap.

And when you look at the therapists, there's definitely a shortage.

And there's a lot of competition for that level of staff across organizations, across counties.

You have schools that want behavioral health professionals, you have clinics that want behavioral health professionals, and most of our community would access these services in their local communities.

And the need for those who have a desire to serve is really important.

So universities are getting involved, as well as the State of Michigan getting involved and making it an attractive choice for many.

- Yeah, a lot of your work is with children and families.

And I feel like both got challenged in ways that we wouldn't have imagined before during the pandemic.

Now that's technically sort of in the past, right?

- Yeah.

- But I feel like the effects of it aren't.

That we're still trying to sort out some of the things that happened during the pandemic, and certainly, you know, how we go forward.

Talk about the mental health picture there.

- Yeah, so we know the pandemic was a global trauma, right?

So we all had to shelter in place, and children weren't able to go to school.

They weren't able to engage with their peers.

And so much of what we learn in social skills is when we engage with other people in the classroom, learning how to get along, learning what it means to sit somewhere for an hour and learn.

At the same time, we know children are in families.

And as their parents or family members were experiencing stressors and trauma, they were also feeling those same things.

So as we're, I believe, we're like a year beyond the public health emergency, it ended at the end of April in 2023, and what we see is those children who were born during the pandemic are in preschool now.

Those children who sat in a Zoom during their formative years when they were to be in a classroom engaging with teachers and peers, now they're in the classroom and we're seeing some extremely challenging behaviors.

And they're behaviors that our educators aren't necessarily prepared for, because our educators are taught how to be educators, not how to be behavioral health professionals.

So it is important that as early as we possibly can, that we recognize the needs of our children, and we get them assessed and we get them care.

That's the good thing about our system, I will say, particularly our public mental health system, we're able to serve children pre-birth, believe it or not, through 21.

And sometimes we miss an opportunity when a child is in utero, because we don't understand the trauma that a parent or a family is experiencing at that time directly impacts those children.

So what becomes important is recognizing it, and just asking for help as soon as possible.

And even though there's challenges around workforce, organizations are really trying to pitch in and help.

- Yeah, yeah, so for Mental Health Awareness Month, what do you say to people about, "Hey, here's a couple things you could do that might give you more opportunity to think about your mental health and the mental health of the people around you?"

- Yeah, so we have this really neat program at CNS Healthcare right now called Plant Your Sign.

I planted my sign last week where you grab a sign and you put a message on it, like, "Mental health is important," or "Remember to take care of yourself," like something like that.

And it's in my yard, and it gives a message to the people around them, just a reminder.

I put it on my Facebook post every May just to encourage people, because people know me and they know this isn't something that I do.

And I think what's important is to remind people around you that, one, it's okay to not be okay and to be a listening ear.

Sometimes we're moving so fast that we may miss it.

So just being present for the people around you, listening, making sure everyone's okay.

And if they're not, encouraging them to get some extra help if they need it.

- Yeah, but what's that line between someone who just is having a hard time and somebody needs care and needs help?

- I think for the layperson in the world, just think of your functioning.

So if you're not able to get out the bed and go to work, if you're not able to get out of bed and go to school, or if you're at work and then you can't focus or do your job, or you're at school and you can't do the work, so I often say, particularly for children, it's easy to understand, at home, in school or in the community, if you're not able to function at home, in school, or in the community, you might need a little bit of extra help.

And we're not talking about anything other than getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, sitting in the classroom, listening to the teacher, getting along with your peers, like just regular.

And, for us adults, it's kind of the same thing too, at home, at work, or in school, if you're doing that too, and in the community, if you're able to function, okay, you're good.