mental illness

Slavin didn’t see student wellbeing as part of his job until, in 2008, he started reading about stress, depression and burnout among medical students. He was shocked by the high rates that he read about, but didn’t think they could apply to his students. “It was unimaginable to me,” he says. He thought that as a teacher all he needed to do was be kind and compassionate; his students seemed happy, and their satisfaction with their education was high according to the standardized national questionnaire.

The title of the exhibit, Put It To The Fire, references centuries-old healing rituals practiced across the globe, where fire is used as a metaphorical cleanser, releasing unwanted energies, mindsets, and attachments in order to create space for new intentions to grow and thrive. The exhibit intends to address multiple aspects of the mental health journey: from pain to healing, and suffering to hope.   

While policymakers and government officials acknowledge the importance of mental health – the Surgeon General has named it one of his top six priorities – less attention has been paid to the root causes of poor mental health and to creating safe, supportive, and well-resourced neighborhoods and communities for people to live in. Mental health problems often start with difficulties in childhood, and if the work of youth service providers shows anything, it’s that addressing this will require expanding the current notion of what young people need in order to have good mental health. 

The TV show, titled “It’s OK, That’s Love,” stars Gong Hyo-jin, who plays Ji Hae-soo, a psychiatrist working in a hospital in Seoul. She meets a successful novelist struggling with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and schizophrenia. What begins as a series of comedic encounters soon transforms into a budding romantic relationship between two individuals coming to grips with their own inner turmoil.

A younger son of Ramirez was diagnosed with ADHD, and she worried about the impact of the frequent yelling in the home, which she attributed to the stress of living in a cramped environment. “When a kid who has ADHD starts listening to someone who’s yelling, they start feeling anxious [and] he just doesn’t want to be home.” Ramirez said her two teenage children, a girl and a boy, also suffered from having to share a room. 

Alexis attributed his mental-health issues to his assignment in cleaning up contaminated debris at the 9-11 Ground Zero site, but the Navy claims no such record of this work. A report in British paper Daily Mail notes Alexis was seen exiting a subway near the World Trade Center just as the twin towers were collapsing. The sight, it says, quoting Alexis' father-in-law, left him "traumatized." Indeed, the career of Alexis runs parallel to the 9-11 era, when thousands of servicemen were assigned to secret combat missions that do not appear on their military records.

Whether your understanding of mental illness is limited to what you’ve seen on the silver screen, or as intimate as a firsthand struggle, the topic has occupied a continual space in our national discussion, eliciting controversy and fascination. Today, there are nearly 60 million Americans who suffer from a mental illness, and it continues to present a quality of life, household and community issue. 

“Poems like this are called occasional poems and are difficult to write,” says acclaimed poet Laurel Ann Bogen, who also teaches poetry at UCLA.  “Of course, in this type of circumstance expectations are high and as a writer you are constrained by time and subject.” Writing inspiring and healing poetry is familiar to Bogen, who won the esteemed American Academy of Poets College Prize while attending the University of Southern California at only age 17 in the late 1960s.