Mental Health Advocacy — Blog

Hi! I’m Sam Slupski. When this post was written, it was Mental Health Awareness Month. When you’re reading this, it’ll be weeks after May has ended, but the topic is just as necessary. I am a writer, poet, and performance artist who explores how a body survives trauma and I aim to illuminate stories about mental health and recovery, but my work lately has been specifically centered around mental health advocacy. As the world has shifted, it’s become essential that we incorporate new ideas so we can begin to dismantle the oppressive systems that we participate in. The lane I feel most comfortable shining a light on is mental health. My advocacy is aimed towards creating an inclusive and equitable world that is safe and accessible for everyone. This is essentially a call for an interrogation of how we stigmatize mental health and how mental health intersects with white supremacy. It just starts with a conversation, a little bit of education, and someone to empower you to walk through that door. I hope you see this as an opening and that you continue to walk through.

I often wonder how young people are when they form their first memory. As time goes on, I’m sure that answer changes, but for me, my first memory comes from when I was 4-years old. I was riding in a car with my grandmother, grandfather, mother, and father on our way to Osawatmaie, Kansas – effectively the middle of nowhere. We were taking my dad to the Kansas state mental hospital.

When this is your first memory, conversations about mental health become ingrained in you, almost as if it’s a part of your DNA. My father is schizophrenic and my life has been greatly informed by the way my entire family has navigated his illness.

My whole life, I have watched my family be terrified of my father because of his schizophrenia. We were ostracized away from our bloodline because of his illness. As I got older, I was diagnosed with bipolar, and then re-diagnosed with PTSD and a panic disorder, and I felt that same ostracization from my extended family. We were always the “odd ones out.”

I was admitted into a psychiatric inpatient unit for the first time when I was 10-years old because I had tried to kill myself. I went to inpatient treatment every summer for self-harm related incidences for 6 years in a row. My first therapy appointment was when I was 11. My first psychiatrist was incredibly dismissive and was one of the most traumatic people I encountered in my adolescence.

It wasn’t until I was 21 that I found a therapist that finally helped me find a path to recovery from self-harm, toxic relationship patterns, and helped me learn the vocabulary and tools to re-parent myself. Now, here I am today: 26 – in many healthy relationships, living a life I feel proud of, and self-harm free for almost 2 years.

While this is an extremely condensed and limited snapshot into my whole story, I tell you a little bit about it because I think it’s important that you know that from a deep, physiological level, mental illness has always been a part of my life and I have felt the detrimental effects of when people ignore it and stigmatize it. It’s important for me to share a bit about my story so that you see that there is an actual human life attached to advocacy.

It’s also important to talk about how my life has been informed by how my father was viewed because when I was going through treatment, I saw how people treated me. It wasn’t just my terrible psychiatrist, it was school nurses who dismissed my panic attacks, people who made fun of my self-harm scars, strangers on the internet who told me to go kill myself, and told me that medication was for the weak-minded.

The more people told me that my experience was invalid, the more I believed it myself. I internalized this stigmatization because it confirmed my insecurities. And that's what any kind of stigmatization, discrimination, or invalidation becomes: our insecurities; the things we are ashamed of; the things we hate most about ourselves.

Talking about mental health has become something immensely important to me because I believe it is part of my life’s purpose to make sure that the internalized hatred we have for our illnesses stops and I believe this starts with destigmatizing and normalizing the conversations around mental health.

Another reality of my advocacy is that I didn't just wake up knowing all of the things I know now and I am still learning new things every day. I was lucky enough to find myself in a community with incredible writers and thinkers who talked about mental health in a way that I had never heard before. I found myself in the spoken word poetry community where I also learned more about the way that racism, and specifically anti-blackness, are rampant in America. I learned about homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, xenophobia, ableism, and how these, and so much more, are things that compound mental health issues.

I learned that poverty, unaffordable housing, food deserts, homelessness, debt, low-income, unaffordable healthcare, internalized oppression, and discrimination exacerbate mental health issues. I feel an immense responsibility to mention these things because to dismiss these topics is not mental health advocacy – it’s white supremacy.

But as I said, I did not wake up knowing these things. There was a time where I did not have the language for all of this. My advocacy looks like using the language I do have to educate or shine a light on things. It also looks like surrounding myself with people, accounts, books, and podcasts to continue the education to not only learn the language for it, but to do the work in my actual life – not just on the internet.

But because this is on the internet and you, dear reader, are likely reading this on a screen – I want to give a small list of lessons I’ve learned that I believe are good entry points into how we can begin to destigmatize mental health issues.

I also want to empower you to speak up for people who may not be in a place to speak up for themselves. The reason I am able to do what I can today is because I had people to encourage me, educate me, and empower me. It feels necessary that I do the same.

My caveat is, of course, that I am not a professional. I do not have a license to treat mental health issues. I am not a counselor, therapist, or coach. I am simply just a human with a mental illness sharing what I have learned as I navigate my own recovery. These are lessons that I take with me daily, that I incorporate into my life and conversations with those I love because I know unlearning harmful mental health language is difficult. If I would have had this language – if I would have had partners, friends, therapists, and family members earlier on who taught me these things, it would have made such a difference in my recovery.

The hardest thing about my father is that there is a certain kind of powerlessness in mental illness. He didn’t ask to have schizophrenia – in fact, he got beaten in an alley after work one day that triggered his first episode, and yet people treated him like it was his fault. People have treated me as if my trauma, anxiety, and depression are my fault. Mental illness is never anyone’s fault. Yes, we do have a certain responsibility to unlearn harmful behaviors, but I also know my father, and so many others, do not have these tools to do so.

But I do.

I hope you can carry these into your relationships and conversations around mental health:

Describing something as “bipolar,” “OCD,” or “psycho” is unacceptable. These are not words we should use to describe a thing or a person. There are so many other adjectives to use. Do not use these.
You do not have to buy anything to practice self-care. Capitalism makes us believe that we need to, but we don’t. We CAN buy things, but we don’t HAVE to.
In our conversations and advocacy about creating equitable, inclusive & accessible resources for mental health treatment, that also looks like having conversations about addiction recovery/treatment and eating disorder recovery/treatment.
Posting mental health advice on Instagram is not a replacement for therapy and treatment services. They are good jumping-off points, but are not a stand-in for sustainable care.
Taking medication is a valid way to treat mental illness. Pill stigma is still a very big problem and there is no universal treatment option for people with mental illness.
Again– poverty, unaffordable housing, food deserts, homelessness, debt, low-income, unaffordable healthcare, internalized oppression, racism & discrimination are all things that impact and exacerbate mental health.
Telling someone to “breathe” or “just relax” can be very dismissive during times of crisis or distress. Try asking, instead, how that person would like to be supported at that moment.
Boundaries are uncomfortable to set, but necessary to be in healthy relationships.
Your mental illness is not your identity. You are a complex human being. You have a mental illness, you are not your mental illness.
The trauma your family experienced does not excuse the harm they inflict onto you.
Mental health awareness cannot be limited to one month. It requires ongoing advocacy.

If you are interested in continuing your education about mental health and advocacy, I have included a small list of resources that have helped me gain a lot of the language I know now. I am always learning so know that this is not an exhaustive list, but it is my hope that it can be a jumping-off point for those interested in learning more.

First, I believe that the best education we can receive regarding these topics comes from seeing a therapist ourselves. Open Path Psychotherapy Collective is an affordable counseling resource that matches you with a therapist in your area. They offer online therapy and do so at a lower cost. You have to pay an upfront fee of $59 to help keep their non-profit going, but after that fee you can find sessions for as low as $30. As someone who has paid upward of $150 a session, this is a very good and necessary service.

IDHA’s online course on Trauma, Growth, & Resilience: This self-paced online course that provides a diverse overview of trauma alongside actual practices that survivors have found helpful in their own healing processes. The class also serves as an exploration into current research as it pertains to rates of adversity and trauma in people diagnosed with mental illnesses (especially those considered “serious mental illnesses”) and substance-use; findings within the neurological and psychological research on the cognitive and neurocognitive effects of trauma; and concrete guidance around how mental health professionals can practice better trauma-informed care. I love IDHA and the classes they offer, and highly recommend following then for more mental health education.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk: One of my favorite books about how our bodies carry trauma and how it reshapes our physiologies. 10/10 a must-read, in my opinion.

Rachel Cargle’s “How to Be an Ally,” Social Syllabus Resource: A much-needed conversation starter for anyone who may not have an understanding of how white-feminism is deeply dangerous. This document has links to other resources about the racist roots of our Founding Fathers, whitewashing history, definitions of white feminism, and resources about systemic racism. I believe this resource is really important because we have to talk about racism when we talk about mental health and I think this is a good jumping-off point for anyone who may not understand why these things intersect.

Anne Carly’s Instagram: One of my favorite profiles to follow that talks about having inner-child wounds.

Again, this is just a small list and don’t want to overwhelm you to the point where you don’t know where to start. I think these are wonderful places that will hopefully empower you to take steps for yourself and the people in your life who undoubtedly struggle to navigate the world with a mental illness.

Sending you love and light,

Sam Slupski
@samfromkc / atx_interfaces
www.samanthaslupskipoetry.com