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Women's Advocates Emphasize Importance of Mental Healthcare

Speakers urge women to put their own well-being at the top of the list at an event sponsored by the Oregon Women’s Health Network.
June 5, 2013

 

June 5, 2013 – A topic often overlooked – self-care for women dealing with mental health issues – was the theme of a lecture held recently at McMenamin's Kennedy School in northeast Portland.

“My guess is there are a lot of people here who take care of other people,” said Sherri Sacconaghi, a certified holistic health coach and personal trainer, be they parents or healthcare workers – or those in other stressful jobs.

Sacconaghi's talk focused on self-care through nutrition. She said most of her clients want to find “the secret” to losing weight or feeling better, usually focusing on what to eat or how much to exercise – and argued that there is no one diet or formula that works for everybody. Instead, the most important connection between food and health lies in how and when food is consumed. She asked audience members to raise their hands if they routinely eat at their desks, or keep their smart phones near them when they have lunch or dinner. After several hands went up, she challenged everyone to eat lunch next week away from a screen, and to expand the amount of time spent on their lunch break, even if just by a few minutes.

“You can be eating the healthiest food in the world,” Sacconaghi said, but the stress of multitasking takes away from its benefits, so much so that “your body is not metabolizing that food.”

“Give yourselves a little bit of extra time. You will be the best caregiver in the world if you put yourself at the top of the list.”

Martha McCormack, a doctoral student in social work at Portland State, talked about her work researching caregiver strain among those raising children with mental health issues. “We have to support those stories right from the very get-go because they're complicated,” she said. “We have a responsibility to listen to each other.”

McCormack's current graduate work builds on a 25-year career in children's publicly funded mental health, at one point pairing families in crisis – those interfacing with Child Protective Services, the Department of Human Services, the foster care system, or some combination – with others who had faced similar problems. “We brought family partners in to say, 'I've been there, and we can get on the other side of this,'” McCormack said.

Often, parents who’ve been dealing with caregiver strain over a long period of time, say the stress they face affects how they deal with their children. Family partner programs, and other early interventions, help families identify what they are doing well and “return parents' capability to be in love with their child,” she said. “If we're working only for the changes in the child, we're not going to be very satisfied.”

Wendy Sample, a volunteer with National Alliance on Mental Illness Oregon, also talked about how mental health issues can affect families: Sample's sister, who turns 60 this year, has lived with mental illness since she was a teenager.

The support she receives as a volunteer makes her feel “safe, secure, embraced and normal in that community,” she said. “In so many work environments I've been in, there's been no flexibility in that.”

Sample, who chairs the Alliance’s annual walk to end the stigma associated with mental illness, called the experience “very emotional because there's a lot of people we've lost” from mental illness.

Trainings held by the Alliance teach Portland police officers how to interact with people with mental illness – “We've just really suffered in this city with the way they've responded.”

The event's final speaker, Della Rae, the founder of DonorsResource.org, a talk show host on KBOO, and the author of The Little Book of Self-Care, said she believes one has to be well in order to do well, and that “accomplishments and accolades are only as important as how you feel.”

The only time it's 100 percent acceptable to prioritize self-care is during air travel, when passengers are advised to put on their own oxygen masks first in a crisis situation. “We're often told if you do care about yourself, you're a narcissist,” she said.

The Oregon Women's Health Network – a coalition of advocates for women's health and well-being in Oregon, under the umbrella of the Oregon Health Authority – sponsors a series of lectures. This year those lectures focus on mental health issues. To learn more about these events, click here.

Image for this story by athena (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr.

Christen McCurdy can be reached at [email protected].

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