May 2024 Self Care

It’s very interesting how despite having more awareness about mental health than ever before, we are also experiencing collective record-breaking mental illness rates. I recently spoke on a panel at a youth-created mental wellness day at a local middle school. One of the questions hit me hard. It hit me painfully hard as a parent, fellow human and therapist.

The question was: How do you know if you’re not okay mentally and need to seek help?

This question was equally deep and difficult to respond to. On the one hand, I have observed that children and youth of today sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between crisis and ‘surmountable’ adversity or inconvenience. This is often connected to a lack of confidence or opportunity to skill build to feel capable and resilient when facing challenges. If this is the case, it could be terrifying for someone to feel uncertain if a presented challenge is something they ‘can handle’ or something that would be overwhelming to try to manage alone.

On the other hand, there are the people who have traveled so far away from their innate sense of knowing if they are okay or not. As brand new infants, we already have knowing when discomfort, fear or needs are present and we cry out to attempt to get these things attended to as quickly as possible! What are the factors that move us away from this ability to know important things about ourselves? What has removed us away from this innate knowing? How can we get back or closer to ourselves?

If we’re looking at a sustainable approach to mental health, these may be valuable questions to individually and collectively ask. While our focus as educators is on the wellbeing and learning of children and youth, sustainable wellness on a community level needs to include us too! When we are ‘checked-in’ and have developed an ability to know when things are starting to not feel okay, we have the freedom to be proactive in attending to our needs in a friendly way. This modeling creates space for the young people we serve to also be curious and proactive about their mental health needs.

Spring naturally brings us light and warmth! How can you embrace the gifts of the season to gently shine light on that’s present inside of you and to strengthen the connection you have within?

Written by Amy Rasmussen Waluk, MEd, FTT