- Let's get those booties bopping.
I'm Basica your booty camp instructor.
It's time to work.
I'm sorry, I'm late. I was up all night
packing from booth,
and this morning my family got in a car accident.
Look girl, we all have problems.
This morning, I couldn't find matching socks.
So we all know adversity.
It doesn't seem like that's the same thing.
I'm pretty sure it is.
Let's get some squatting.
I just need to find a place to put my baggage down.
You can just wear your baggage like me.
It seems like we have a different amount of baggage.
Come on now, booty squats I wanna see perfect form.
Remember if you are cheating, you're only cheating yourself.
Squat. Squat.
Oh, feels like it's harder for me than other people.
This is like a basic class.
I don't mean to be disrespectful.
You are though.
I want to be bouncing my booty like everybody else.
You're not though.
I dunno, maybe it was the car accident?
That was so long ago.
Or the heavy coat?
Look, I treat everyone the same because I believe in you.
This is not working for me.
Oh my gosh, you need something different.
Yes, thank you. Finally!
Maybe a class that goes at your pace.
That sounds amazing.
That's our VIP package, an additional $500 a day.
Booties up.
So you're here because
you want to end mental health stigmas.
Great, me too. Now what?
If you've been on this journey with us so far,
you know that we have talked to so many activists
that are changing the game.
This week we're talking about mental health activism,
which is an issue that is near and dear to my heart.
Because in a former life I used to work in psychology,
but also because managing my own mental health
and supporting my family and community
has been a really important part of my life.
Mental health is more than just happy or sad.
And if you know what I mean, then, you know what I mean.
Did you know that nearly half of Americans
suffer with mental illness at some point in their lives?
So statistically speaking,
you're likely to interact with someone with mental illness
nearly every day.
And yet, misunderstandings and stigmas around mental health
still keep these issues in the shadows,
which keeps people from getting the help they need.
That's why I am so excited to talk to
our very cool youth activist today, Amanda Southworth.
Eighteen year old Amanda Southworth,
is the founder of Astra Labs,
a tech non-profit that aims
to help those who need it the most, but get it the least,
She designed her first app, Anxiety Helper
when she was thirteen.
And credits to technology for saving her life.
She has been challenging systems and forging new pathways.
And I am so excited to learn how to join the fight.
In this wild and crazy specific time of the pandemic,
have you found anything that's been like a new joy
or a new comfort?
- Oh my gosh.
I found the most amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe
and I made it 41 times in a row during quarantine.
I made a batch of cookies every night
for literally two months straight.
- That was my joy.
- Amanda, we hear a lot of different conversations
around mental health and mental illness,
but there's still a lot of stigma around mental health.
Do you have advice for young folks
who are interested in getting more support
in their mental health, but are fearing the stigma?
- The stigma is widely believed by
a lot of different people.
Actual studies have been done that shows
mental health stigma in all areas of society, right?
So the mental health stigma directly negatively impacts
people with mental health issues.
So one of the things that I
and a couple of other of my friends
who have mental health issues have fallen into
is the trap of like believing the stigma.
It's really hard to convince yourself like
oh, my brain is actually sick.
I'm not just like choosing to be this way, right?
When you educate yourself about the stigma
and when you understand why it's wrong,
you start to get a whole new perspective
that just makes having these conversations
and dealing with it and figuring out
how you want to go about coping with it
that much easier.
- Amazing. What is one thing you would recommend
to somebody who's looking right now
around learning more about mental health stigma?
- It once again goes into,
you need to understand the stigma
and you also need to understand the history
about the treatment of the mentally ill.
The period of forced asylum
that happened in the 1900s
where people just popped mentally ill people into asylums
and were like, have a fun life!
It also plays into the criminal justice system
where there's more people in prisons
than there are in mental health facilities or asylums.
Sadly, the US prison system
is one of the biggest providers of mental health care
in the United States,
and as you can imagine,
that's really not an ideal situation.
- You have been really outspoken about
the systems that have failed you.
What advice would you give them around
challenging these systems and trying to find new pathways?
- Knowledge is truly power.
What are your state's laws about mental health coverage?
What basically is going on where you live?
One school might have like a really good comprehensive
mental health care program,
and another school might have a really awful,
like not comprehensive at all mental health program.
Some police stations will do wellness checks
and they will come in, guns blazing like sirens on
someone who's having a mentally ill episode
will be pulled out of their house
in front of their neighbors
already in a very precarious state of mind.
I know there's an experimental thing going on in
Los Angeles county where they just have
social workers come to you in an unmarked white van,
they talk you through it
and they get you to where you need to be.
Like local politics are super duper important.
National change doesn't happen just because you
think it should happen.
Action at a national level on an individual scale
is like almost impossible to accomplish.
We'll get pretty much any of the modern activism movements.
They're not just one individual person doing the work,
there are hundreds of thousands of people
on a grassroots level organizing and so on and so forth.
And so if there's not already a presence in your area,
create a presence.
If there's not already actions happening in your area,
create an action.
And then change will eventually have to come.
- Discussing mental health can be a really
sexy topic to bring up and have it be a platform.
But the action and the change,
we're still talking about bad policy choices
that have happened in the 70s and we're still affected by.
So how slow is this change?
- Oh my gosh. Don't even get me started.
Okay. Like we have a greater cultural understanding
of mental health,
but we still have little to no access to mental health care.
It's still basically like impossible to go see a therapist
if you're broke.
If you want to commit suicide,
instead of someone nicely guiding you down
they just call the police on you,
and you're pretty much forcefully institutionalized
depending on where you live.
Even if we do have these conversations about mental health,
they have to be more than surface level.
- Amanda, the pre-teen and adolescent years
are a time when often mental health issues start
to express themselves for the first time.
I'm wondering if you think that there's something different
about someone who's just in the beginning process
of learning about their mental health issues
and someone who's further along in their journey.
- Yes, so that's actually a really interesting point.
Puberty and adolescence is full of a lot of
personality changes, it's full of a lot of very core events.
We conflate a lot of these symptoms of mental illness
with just general lazy teenager syndrome, I like to call it,
which is like where the general teenager is considered
to be angry with their parents.
And they're considered to be slobs
and they're considered to like
not wanna care about anything.
Those symptoms very much kind of echo
the same symptoms of depression
or the same symptoms of beginning mental illnesses.
And often times what happens
is the young person knows something's wrong
and they go to their provider
and they say hey, this is happening to me,
and the provider's like
you're just a kid as opposed to an actual mental illness
that they have.
For the young people, I would recommend
learning about it as much as you can.
Getting a feel for your symptoms, writing them down,
keeping track of how you're doing is really essential
and really vital.
So that if you go to someone or you talk to someone,
you can specifically say no, it wasn't just like a bad day.
Like I've been having suicidal thoughts for like 15 days,
these past three months, right?
So you can start to show a recurring pattern of issues.
And something else that I would say is
finding a trusted adult that you can talk to
and you can go to and you can say
hey, I've been having these issues, what do I do?
- It's interesting.
I think that you and I both share the experience
of being a person who supports others
when they're navigating mental health issues as well.
Do you have any advice for an adolescent
who is currently supporting another teen
in their mental health issues?
- It's definitely a very fine balance
because at one end you want to really support your friend.
Like your friend's going through an awful time
but at the other end, you are a teenager.
You are not a licensed mental health professional.
So one of the things that I did really early on
into my adolescence,
that I think we should really have a conversation about
is knowing when to tell your friends
that they need to get help and setting boundaries.
At the end of the day,
you can be there for your friend as much as you can,
but you can only take on so much.
You are not a replacement for an adult.
You're not a replacement for a therapist.
- I wish I could go back and tell teenage me
what you're telling,
what you're sharing right now. - Oh, thank you!
- It's I feel like it's a very, very valuable advice.
I know you talk a lot about generational trauma.
I'm really interested to hear how you would describe
generational trauma and why it's an important element of
mental health activism.
- So generational trauma is basically
the concept that
something that happens to one person
in a specific generation
and it has like a ripple effect.
So there was this study done
that discussed the effects of trauma.
And basically what they found was people who had
higher incidences of trauma earlier on in their life
were both more likely to be the perpetrators
and the victims of trauma later on in their life.
Generational trauma is just the coronavirus of trauma
where like one person gets it
and they pass it along to everyone.
And then it's like,
"Oh, we're all sick now. Thanks guys."
I basically want to create the mask
for the COVID that is trauma.
One of the things that we have to do is close these
cycles of trauma.
- I love that metaphor so much.
And it's interesting because, you know
I personally, in my management
of my own mental health issues over my lifetime
have really valued going to therapy and
having a therapist that has been supporting me
in different times in my life.
- Something that's really interesting
and that I want to bring up is like,
we have a view of therapy as like reactionary, right?
So it's like, oh, I'm depressed.
So therefore mentally go to therapy or like,
Oh, a traumatic event happens
so now I'm gonna go to therapy.
But we don't see therapy as like a proactive measure.
One of the really interesting things that
someone who's positioned as the future of mental health care
is therapy more as a gym than it is a hospital, right?
So like instead of going after everything's
already hit the fan
and you're pretty much already at the end of your rope,
you do a small amount all of the time
and you build up your muscles and you reduce the risk
of it becoming a greater issue later on.
And it overall just improves your health
and it improves the lives of everyone around you.
- So Amanda, there's a discussion around social media
and how social media is part of the problem
when it comes to mental health.
And that social media and technology
is causing more stress for our gen Z
and different folks like that.
But you've made an app on the phone that will
still make people go back to their phone.
- Technically, so it's like the other area of my life
that I'm deeply passionate in.
Software is a tool, like fire.
You know, you can use it to make smores
or you can use it to burn someone's house down
and commit arson, right?
Like it really depends on whoever's wielding the tool
and their own ethics and their own morals
and their own personal values.
And mobile phones right now truly are
one of the most accessible ways to get people help.
It's like downloading an app and looking for
basic depression help tools, super simple.
You don't have to deal with any of the stigma.
You don't have to wait in line, you don't have to pay $200.
It is there when you need it. And it is on demand for you.
It costs us significantly less to build the mobile app
than it would to be
giving someone direct person to person aid.
For example,
the average non-profits cost per person helped is $5.
And our average cost per person helped is half a penny.
- Wow.
- So that is the magnitude of difference
that a mobile app makes in terms of accessibility,
and in terms of people being helped.
- I'd love to see this app.
Can you show me? - Okay here we go. I can.
It's called Aetheria,
it's a free mental illness treatment app.
There's about 40 tools in the app.
Every day you do a daily check in
and you give it your symptom info and your severity,
and it recommends tools for you moving forward.
And so we serve around 14 to 17 mental illnesses
- Wow. - We're still finalizing
the list.
So these are all the illnesses we serve.
We're a co-occurring disorder app.
So if you have both bipolar and you have anorexia,
you can add both of those.
And it'll adjust to your treatment plan where
most of the mental health apps on the app store today
are like one for anxiety, one for bipolar,
one for eating disorders,
and they don't really work in conjunction.
So this is where you can kind of see all the tools
and start to build your tool kits.
So I would like to foresee consequences,
I would like to do guided grounding,
I'd like to deal with my cravings.
One of the other things we could do is
make like a crisis plan.
These are created it in advance
in case they have a crisis later down the line.
So there's crisis card,
which is basically like if you're in public
and you're having a flashback
and you need someone to help you,
you basically open the card and you hand your phone to
a person and it tells them how to guide you through it.
So like, let's say I have flashbacks it's caused by PTSD.
So this would be like, this is what the user experiences
when they create the tool.
I have a really hard time telling reality from past.
- What should they do if all fails,
call my dad at 999-999.
- Wow, this is amazing! It's so thorough, Amanda.
I'm just so excited.
I can't wait to download it - Thank you
- And look through it.
I would love for you to share with us
four action steps our viewers could take
to be a part of the mental health bite.
- Number one,
learn about the stigma of mental illness
and how it potentially integrates
into your own false beliefs about mental illness.
Look into the history of mental health
and people who are mentally ill
and how they were treated in the United States.
And then the third thing I would say is
work on your own personal issues.
And part of that involves
making sure that you heal your own trauma.
And then number four is just be a friend.
One of the things I commonly see
mentally ill people talking about specifically
in regards to suicide prevention
is I wish my friends checked in on me more.
I wish my friends paid attention to me more,
I wish my friends were kind of able to see
how much I'm struggling.
The fifth thing, if we can is,
learning how to say no and learning how to set boundaries
for yourself and learning when situations are too big
for you to handle by yourself.
So like setting those boundaries
so that you protect yourself
because at the end of the day,
changing these mental health care systems
and helping people who are mentally ill
is not something that's gonna be done
in the course of one day.
But it is a marathon,
and it happens by incremental change on a local level
day by day, by day by day,
until it turns into national change.
So setting those boundaries
and having those priorities in place
ensures that you're able to stay in place
and you're able to continue to go through the marathon
and that you don't burn out.
- Wow. It was so great talking to Amanda.
If you're experiencing your own
mental health crisis right now,
you can text 'Home' to 741-741.
If you're interested in volunteering,
you can check out Astra Labs, the Body Project
or the Trevor Project.
I'm Tessa Claire Hersh,
and this has been 'Now What?'