Business Can Lead the Way on Addressing Mental Health

From theSpec.com comes this post about workplace mental health concerns and how corporations may be in a better position to do something about it.

Here is a link to an executive summary of the report referenced in the above item.

Wavelength

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When I was a kid, one of the high points of my day used to be coming home from school to watch the Merv Griffin Show.

Long before he was a real estate tycoon and game show visionary, Griffin was a singer and, for a quarter of a century, he was a talk show host.

The show's format was similar to that of Carson's Tonight Show and he had many of the same guests; you just didn't have to stay up past 11:30 in order to see it.

We saw the show on a UHF station out of Burlington, Vermont. UHF was fascinating to us because, unlike the “regular channels” two through 12 that you selected with the rotary switch tuner that had hard, definitive stops for each channel, UHF was more of an interpretive spectrum and its stations were literally “tuned in” in the same way that you tuned in a radio.

I watched the show in the same way that an anthropologist watches a new culture: I most often had no idea what they were talking about, but I was captivated because these were adults talking to other adults about adult things. Perhaps, in some way, I was looking for a way to understand the adults in my world.

I have a few very clear memories of the show: the banter with trumpeter Jack Sheldon whose voice I recognized from the seminal “I'm Just a Bill” segment of Schoolhouse Rock; the regular appearances of Arthur Treacher, the British character actor who went on to lend his name to a chain of fish and chip shops; David Letterman appeared on the show early in his career as a stand-up and one of his jokes was “Hands up, everyone who's in the country illegally.” Mel Torme was on the show many times and I remember them talking about how he came to write “The Christmas Song” that Nat “King” Cole made unforgettable.

The genesis of that song is the stuff of legend now, but I can recall marveling at the disconnect between what they wrote and the circumstances that inspired it. It was the middle of summer and the hottest day of the year and Torme, with his writing partner Bob Wells, wrote the piece in an effort to imagine themselves into a cooler place.

As I have gotten older, I have come to the position that it is in the remembering that this time of year has its greatest power.

When you're a kid, the details of any given holiday season are a blur: it's uncomfortable clothes, strange foods, toys, visits to people you don't know, but who seem to know an awful lot about you. All that you want to do is play with your stuff, or depending on your age, the packaging it came in.

There is not a lot of nostalgia for this time of year when you're young. Like doctor's visits and exams, it comes around every year and the only thing that changes is the quality and variety of the gifts you receive.

Once you become an adult, once you break the annual cycle of holiday celebrations, you are driven to replace them with some sort of idealized facsimile.

Each of us I think goes through their first experience of this time of year as an adult when we are separated from family and familiars, from tradition and history. It can be a very disturbing, disorienting experience. It's like going from having your own room to staying in the guest room: nothing is where it is supposed to be and you are under some pressure to get up on time so the rest of the house can use the restroom. This is probably one of those foundational experiences that we all have to have in order to define ourselves as distinct from our families of origin.

And, as hard as it might be to experience, it is more difficult for parents when their children no longer come home for the holidays. It's one of those benchmarks that are as inevitable as they are unsettling. A corner has been turned when the annual holiday portrait can no longer be organized without benefit of negotiation and trips to the airport.

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So, even though this might be the “most wonderful time of the year” our hearts our full and our feelings mixed with a kind of sad nostalgia We look back on our memories of holidays gone by and while we might speak in terms of Currier & Ives, what we see in our mind's eye is more akin to an Escher drawing—exquisite in its detail but something that could never exist in the real world.

And yet every year we relaunch our efforts to turn our holiday fantasies into reality because we all want to do a good job. Long after we may have abandoned Santa Claus we still try to make it onto his list and avoid the lump of coal in our stockings.

Like so many of our traditions associated with Christmas, this high-stakes behavior modification has its roots in central Europe where more than just the weather is grey.

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Deeply rooted in our celebrations are the figures of St. Nicholas and Krampus. St. Nicholas would reward children's good deeds and Krampus would round up the bad ones and eat them. In those days, being good for goodness' sake was not good enough; it was literally a life or death proposition.

To this day, we frame Christmas as a merit-based holiday where we expect to learn our place on the naughty-nice axis and be rewarded accordingly. If we are nice, we get a gift from St. Nick and if we are not, we get eaten. Even as adults, as the days get shorter, we alter our behavior in a kind of campaign for recognition and reward. Our self-worth is tied to the quantity and quality of the presents we receive.

Intellectually, we might know this is not true, but this risk-versus-reward idea is so ingrained that parents will question the love of their children if they are not able to provide the latest and the hottest gifts each year.

Celebrating the holidays is to hold oneself to an impossible standard: the tree is never big enough, the gifts are never exactly what was wanted and the meal was never good enough. Making matters worse are the seemingly endless array of self-appointed experts with tips and tricks on how to get the “perfect” this or the “ideal” that.

Lubricating the entire year-end celebration machine is a relentless musical soundtrack designed both to evoke and to provoke.

We are the the shoppers who “rush home with their treasures” so that we can get out “walking in a winter wonderland.” We buy chestnuts even though we don't have open fires. We commit to memory the names of the reindeer by humming the one about Rudolph and yet, when pressed can never come up with Comet, Donder, Cupid and Blitzen.

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My favorite music for this time of year is instrumental. I am a big fan of the music recorded by Vince Guaraldi in 1965 for “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

I haven't quite figured out whether it's the music itself, or my associations to it, but every time I hear a cut from that recording I think of a warm fire, hot chocolate and many of the items from the “Most Wonderful Time of the Year” list. Most of all, I think of a time when Christmas was much less complicated.

In the days before the VCR it was always a challenge to figure out when the special would air each year and arrange our lives accordingly.

Even as a kid, I strongly identified with Charlie Brown and his struggle to come up with his own definition of Christmas.

It is a tribute to Schulz's artistry that, in just over twenty minutes, he and the animators are able to capture the complexity of Christmas. Each of the characters in the Peanuts universe speaks to some aspect of Charlie Brown's character. His eternal optimism comes from Linus, his ego from Lucy, his artistry and imagination from Schroeder and Snoopy, his self-worth from Pigpen. In the show, these and other characters literally dance around to their own music until Charlie Brown is able to direct them toward a coherent holiday celebration.

In the end, we are not presented with a simple answer: that this or that is the true reason for the season. Schulz uses Biblical language, but the real lesson is Charlie Brown's search for a meaning that makes sense to him, a personal vision.

Each of us has a spectrum of memories about this time of year. Each Christmas has a different character and each of those characters has its own music, or theme, and, like Charlie Brown, it is our responsibility to find a personal coherence. It's like the radio in that regard, you have to keep adjusting in order to stay on the proper wavelength.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director

How Would You Feel If You Were in Poverty?

At a recent Prosperity and Problem Solving Supper (PPSS) for the Licking County Bridges Out of Poverty ininitiative, we asked students from a youth group at St. Francis de Sales church in Newark to interview one another about poverty.

What follows is an assembly of their answers to one of the questions.

Thanksgiving

The following is from a letter received at our YES Clubhouse.

Through the generosity of local organizations (churches, service clubs, etc.), we are periodically able to provide care packages to the families of our YES Club members.

Thank you so much for the food you sent home to our family.  On two separate occasions your staff sent us food.  I appreciate this so much, without this food our family would have not been able to eat any meals.

I work 45-50 hours a week to try and make things work, but unfortunately it doesn't always happen.  After paying bills and gas to get to work, there is not always enough money for food.

Holidays are rough for me, as it takes everything I have to just pay daily living expenses that there is no money left for anything extra. 

I thank God my children understand this, but it breaks my heart that can't even put up a Christmas tree. 

I hope all of the YES Club staff have a wonderful holiday and again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for making sure my family does not go hungry.

We don't always hear back from our parents, but when we do, it quickly puts the holiday season in the proper perspective.

On behalf of the Board of Trustees and the staff of Mental Health America of Licking County, including the YES Clubhouse, please accept our very best wishes for a happy Thanksgiving.

--Paddy Kutz
Executive Director

More Questions Than Answers

I write about my dad because I can't talk to him anymore.

I remember when he turned the age that I am now and it seemed, looking back, that he had a lot more worked out then, then I do now.  I want to ask him about that, but I can't.

I want to ask him about fear and see what he has to say. 

The more time I spend in the mental health arena, the more I recognize the paralytic that fear has been in my life.  And, perhaps I flatter myself, but I think it played a part in his as well.  I know he forced himself through it and I would love to know his secret.

In the two decades since his passing, I have been carefully crafting this myth about my dad that is informed equally by "Death of a Salesman" and the Jimmy Stewart role in "The Greatest Show on Earth." 

I believe that he was a great salesman because he had some significant accounts with some of the largest employers in Canada.  I know he was a great salesman because he had a genuine interest in people.  I saw flashes of this growing up, but I really understood this when there were many more people that I did not know at his memorial service.

I believe that he had a very deliberate mind.  He seemed to find great comfort in the logic of mechanical systems and would spend hours in quiet solitude taking things apart, examining their components, cleaning them and putting them back together.  He would look forward each year to the last two weeks of August and his annual vacation.  He did not spend this time trekking around from one tourist destination to another, nor did he want to lay on a beach somewhere.  His ideal vacation was to trade in his suit for his work clothes and do things like take trees down, fix plumbing problems, or move large rocks.

Central to many of these projects was the practical application of physics.  My dad looked for every opportunity to explain the importance of the lever, the inclined plane, the wedge and the pulley.  It didn't seem to matter what the job was or even how many times we might have done similar tasks in the past, he would introduce each of these basic machines with such proprietary pride that it seemed he must have invented them all.

I can recall, with what feels like painful precision, the many trips I would have to make from wherever the job site happened to be to his workshop to get a piece of pipe.  There was always a stubborn bolt somewhere that would not yield to the crescent or pipe wrench until its handle had been extended and mechanical advantage applied.

I tell people to this day that my dad invented leverage.  Who says he didn't?

My dad was quite skilled when it came to felling trees.  He seemed to like the geometry of each instance.  He would scrutinize the location with great care and determine where he wanted the tree to fall.  Sometimes it was a simple job with a chainsaw, but the ones he took greatest pleasure in were the ones that involved redirecting the tree's natural fall.  So, for example, the tree was on the side of a hill and would, logically be expected to fall in the direction of the bottom of the hill, my dad would excel at rigging the tree to fall in the opposite direction.  Not only would these efforts involve his beloved leverage, but he could also bring out the block and tackle and lots and lots of chains.

I watch "Ax Men"--the reality show about commercial loggers--because it reminds me of those times I spent with my dad.

I would like to ask my dad about this, because I never really understood why he had such an affinity for this kind of work. 

I just sort of accepted that he would have been happier running a garage in a rural community because he had that sort of a personality.  People would come to him with their problems--not personal problems, although I think he might have dabbled in that to a certain extent--but primarily their mechanical problems.  If he couldn't fix it, he would certainly know where it could be fixed and by whom.

Despite having grown up in an urban environment and spending his entire professional life in a white collar job, he just always seemed more content gossiping at the local hardware or meeting the Guay brothers who owned a lumber mill.  I would like to know more about this aspect of his personality.

I write about my dad because I am trying to understand myself, trying to work out the answers I can no longer find out just by asking.

As I get older, I think that my dad and I are more alike than I would have been comfortable acknowledging when he was alive.  Now, I think I could talk to him about that.

I think that between my older brother and my younger sister and me, we received a pretty even distribution of his personality traits; each balanced by my mother's compassion.

My brother is the mechanic.  Trained as an artist, he has painstakingly built a business from a thousand and one moving parts, each of which has to be disassembled, cleaned and put back together.  In order to meet the needs of his clients, he will chase the solutions to problems with a ferocious tenacity. 

Like my father, my brother is always thinking, always analyzing, always working out ways to have the tree fall right where he wants it.  And, like with my father, it is profoundly frustrating to recognize that all of his hard work has not provided him the kinds of objective measures of success that he has earned and deserves.

My sister has the greatest portion of my father's interest in people.  She was a past master of social networking long before the term became part of our idiolect.  When she smiles, it is as though you have been picked out of the darkness by the beam of a lighthouse.  It is positively transformational in its effect causing, with only slight exaggeration, flowers to bloom and trees to bear fruit.

I joke that she is the son my father never had because, whereas my brother and I gravitated toward the arts, she ended up following my father into the investment business and, like my father, was able to build for herself a pretty respectable portfolio of clients.  My sister also is the only one of us three to have had children, which, I am certain, would have pleased my father very much.  (Both that she had them and that my brother and I did not.)

The three of us share my dad's temper, although I think we manage it each in our own way.

The myth of my father is that he experienced depression which can be defined as an anger turned inward.  When I was growing up, my brother turned his anger outward and expressed it physically.  As he has gotten older, he has learned other ways to work through his frustrations.  As I get older, it is getting harder for me to hide mine.  I was never big on any kind of physical expression, but I am capable of saying some pretty hurtful things. 

Here is where I should make some comments about my sister's temper, but I don't have a real understanding of that.  I have seen less of it because for too many years we have lived too far apart.  I do know that she has a temper which means that she has let it out at least once.

It is one of those eternal ironies that, as children, we seek to differentiate ourselves from our parents and emphasize those aspects that we think make us unique and individual.  As we age, however, we learn that, in the words of the great Buckaroo Banzai, "No matter where you go, there you are."

I write about my dad, not because I want to upset my mom, but because I see him more and more each day I look in the mirror.