'Rethink mental illness': Experts suggest these ways to prioritize mental health on Time to Talk Day
Discussing mental health can feel scary and overwhelming, but an annual initiative is pushing to normalize it. Thursday, Feb. 6, is Time to Talk Day, a day of awareness about discussing mental health that can be summed up by the day's tagline: "Rethink mental illness." It was started in 2014 by Time to Change, a U.K.-based organization focused on ending mental health discrimination and changing people's attitudes around mental health.
The purpose of Time to Talk Day is simple: Get people comfortable discussing mental health. Like other annual awareness days, Time to Talk can "plant invaluable seeds for future support, advocacy, policy and support for individual, local and global change," says Margot Rittenhouse, a licensed professional clinical counselor and director of clinical services at Alsana.
Kiana Shelton, a licensed clinical social worker at Mindpath Health, notes that it can also be incredibly beneficial for breaking stigmas in communities that have experienced dismissal of their mental health symptoms. "National and global awareness encourages open conversations supporting a collective priority rather than an individual burden," she explains. "For many BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of color] and marginalized communities, these [awareness] days provide space to highlight the impact of trauma, systemic barriers to care and culturally responsive healing approaches."
Time to Talk Day is an excellent opportunity to discuss mental health with people in your life and reflect on your well-being. "While [some] people may not have the money or education to provide specific types of support, any human can contribute time to another," says Rittenhouse. "The time that one human contributes to another by allowing them to speak on their experiences can help understanding, destigmatization, normalization and compassion to flourish."
Does the idea of talking about mental health make you nervous? The Time to Talk Day team has compiled suggestions for listening to and sharing mental health experiences. They also provide tips for discussing mental health in different settings, such as with employees, a sports team or students.
When listening to another person's experience, they recommend the following:
Ask questions and listen.
Use positive body language and encourage them to share.
Don't try to fix the other person's problems or challenges.
Dispel any myths and avoid clichés like "Pull yourself together" and "It's not as bad as you think."
Be patient; even if someone's not ready to talk, it may help them to know you're available.
When sharing yourself, the team recommends taking these steps:
Find a way that feels right for you (in-person versus over the phone, for example).
Find a suitable time and place in a setting that makes you feel more comfortable.
Practice what you want to say.
Be honest and open.
Suggest things they could do to help.
Try to speak to at least one person on Time to Talk Day (and most days), even just by text. As Rittenhouse puts it, "humans are social creatures, therefore, while it may feel like effort to reach out, it often refreshes one's battery to speak with someone in their support system."
There are so many beneficial mental health actions — small and big — you can also try on Time to Talk Day along with speaking to others. "It's all about being intentional. You would be surprised that the smallest acts can have grand effects," says Shelton. Here's what she and Rittenhouse recommend doing on Time to Talk Day:
Spend five minutes doing a mindfulness practice, such as meditating, journaling or walking.
Create a sense of accomplishment by establishing a small routine, whether it's taking five deep breaths during your lunch break, performing a short skin care routine or making your bed every morning.
Practice gratitude by naming three things you're grateful for today.
Keep your body nourished, even on a busy day.
Reflecting on your mental health on Time to Talk Day might also make you consider therapy and whether it's right for you. The choice to start therapy and find an accessible option can feel overwhelming, but there are plenty of steps you can take before making that leap. From a practical point of view, you can look into details like what your insurance company's mental health coverage looks like. You can also browse an online directory to see therapists in your area — and, if you don't have insurance, see which providers offer low-cost or sliding-scale fees.
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Choosing Therapy
Shelton recommends starting simply with curiosity if your fears stand in the way of entering therapy. Ask yourself what concerns you, such as a potential lack of representation, a previous negative experience or not knowing where to start. "Identifying these barriers can help you feel more in control when the time comes to take the next step," says Shelton.
Plus, it can help to ask people in your life about their therapy experiences, giving you greater context of the many ways therapy can look, adds Rittenhouse.
While many people still prefer the intimate nature of an in-person therapy session, it's also worth looking at the benefits of online therapy — including the accessibility. There might not be a therapist you vibe with in your immediate area who has availability or accessible office hours. If you live with social anxiety disorder, it can be a welcome solution to avoid needing to leave your house or go to a new space.
Aside from making up for potential hindrances to in-person sessions, online therapy has also proven to be beneficial. Studies have shown it is helpful for people living with a wide range of mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Like in-person therapists, some online platforms accept insurance, while others don't.
Unsure how to start looking for the best online therapy service for you? We've compiled many great resources to sort through, from the best affordable online therapy to the most culturally sensitive online therapy. You can also look at options based on why you're seeking out therapy, such as our roundup of the top online therapy options for anxiety or the best online couples counseling.
If you're facing a mental health crisis, it's also important to know there are resources you can call. You may want to write these numbers on a piece of paper and store them in your purse or wallet to have them available, whether for your own use or to help a friend in need.
Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — text or call 988
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline — call 800-662-HELP (4357)
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) HelpLine — call 800-950-NAMI (6264) or text 'HelpLine' to 62640
Margot Rittenhouse, LPCC and director of clinical services at Alsana
Kiana Shelton, LCSW at Mindpath Health in Katy, Texas
Content concerning mental health is for informational purposes only and is not intended as professional medical or health advice. Consult a medical professional for questions about your health. If you are experiencing a mental health emergency, call 911, local emergency services or 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).
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National Geographic
7 hours ago
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Photograph by Lynsey Addario, Nat Geo Image Collection Could the United States, which has a maternal mortality rate much higher than other wealthy nations, benefit from MHI's midwife-centric approach to maternal care? Research suggests that it could. In the U.S. the overall maternal mortality rate is 18.6 per 100,000 live births; for Black women, the figure is even higher at 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, worse than MHI's numbers, a statistic Zaslow describes as 'alarming.' Plus, in the U.S., the maternal mortality rate has been climbing—it's already the highest among high-income countries—and experts anticipate that rate to rise for a variety of reasons, including patchwork maternal care that fails many, as well as medical discrimination that disproportionally impacts Black, Native American, Hawaii and Pacific Islanders. 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Midwife care can lower mortality rates as well as lead to fewer preterm births and low birthweight infants as well as reduced interventions, like C-sections, in labor Photograph by Lynsey Addario, Nat Geo Image Collection (Top) (Left) and Photograph by Lynsey Addario, Nat Geo Image Collection (Bottom) (Right) Solutions for a 'broken model of care' In December 2019, Jillian Perez was lying in a medical gown on the table in her OB-GYN's office for her first prenatal visit. She felt 'like a number,' she remembers, as though her pregnancy was a problem to solve, rather than a natural process. 'It just didn't jive with how I wanted my pregnancy to be treated and to go,' Perez says. 'I want to be talking to somebody who I know and trust.' Perez isn't alone, and science tells us that this kind of bond with a midwife has documented health benefits for mothers and children. 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'What I had already begun to sense as a patient […] became a full-blown realization that our care model is completely broken.' In response to what Sharma describes as the 'one size fits all' approach to pregnancy, she started building Millie in 2020. The maternal health startup combines obstetric and midwifery services that women can access in clinics and virtually. An app that provides stage-relevant content, care team messaging, and other resources, as well as remote monitoring tools. 'It was just very much a pissed off mom who was trying to build a better experience,' she says. But Millie isn't the only startup capitalizing on the midwife renaissance: Oula and Pomelo Care are both invested in rethinking women's health. A student midwife in Somaliland attends to a woman who came with complaints of weakness and dizziness six-months after giving birth. Photograph by Lynsey Addario, Nat Geo Image Collection A growing number of midwives The percentage of births attended by midwives was 10.9 percent in 2022, up from 7.9 percent in 2012, according to the American College of Nurse-Midwives. But it could be poised to grow exponentially, in part due to sheer need: According to 2021 projections from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, demand for OB-GYNs could exceed supply by 2030. That's particularly true in rural areas where pregnant women must increasingly travel to get care, says Holly Kennedy, a nurse midwife and the Helen Varney Professor of Midwifery Emerita at Yale School of Nursing. Since 2010, over 500 rural hospitals have closed their labor and delivery wards and more are poised to close in the near future. Kennedy only discovered midwifery herself 'by the luck of the draw' during an internship in the early 1980s. She was so impressed by the midwives, she decided to go back to school to become one herself. 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According to the Commonwealth Fund, integrating midwives into health care systems could potentially avert 41 percent of maternal deaths, 26 percent of stillbirths, and 39 percent of neonatal deaths. The benefits of a midwife model of care Using a midwife doesn't have to mean forgoing a doctor. At medical centers like NYU Langone's Joan H. Tisch Center for Women's Health, they're innovating on integrating the two. On a Thursday evening in May a group of about 50 women mingled over wine and hors d'oeuvres alongside the center's OB-GYNS and midwives as well as local doulas and lactation consultants. Just last year, the hospital embedded midwifery into its obstetrics and gynecology department, chaired by Gossett. She arrived at NYU via the University of California, San Francisco, which has a robust midwifery program, and admits that she was 'startled' by the 'lack of midwifery' at NYU. 'For the vast majority of women, [pregnancy] is a safe and healthy process,' Gossett says. While physicians can play a critical role in reproductive care, they're trained to view pregnancy as a disease process, says Gossett. In contrast, midwives treat pregnancy as a natural phenomenon. 'And to the degree that we can let [births] happen naturally. That's what we should be doing,' she says. That's why Gossett believes it's important that the midwife or group of midwives is partnered with a physician group, including high-risk obstetrics. 'When things go wrong in labor, they go wrong very fast and they can go very, very badly wrong,' she says, which is why having an embedded midwife practice within a hospital setting is ideal. 'Midwives are frontline maternity care providers in nearly all other nations, but ob-gyns are the dominant maternity care providers in the U.S.,' Sakala says. 'Because having a baby is not inherently pathological, this is a deeply irrational situation.' A parallel, she says, would be using cardiologists for routine blood pressure checks who would have a 'more interventionist approach' to healthy people. 'There's such a benefit [to a midwife model of care], but at the same time, you want to have an easy transition of care when things get more complicated or [a] patient changes from being a low risk patient to one that's more high risk,' says Joanne Stone, Professor and System Chair of the Raquel and Jaime Gilinski Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. And other major medical centers have embedded midwifery as well—take Northwell Health, New York State's largest healthcare provider, which has embedded midwifery at some locations, and the Midwifery Program at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, which operates independently but still prioritizes collaboration with physician colleagues. Parents and a midwife in New York share a moment of joy and relief after their newborn daughter was resuscitated. In the United States, which has the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income countries, midwifery could provide solutions for women and their children. Photograph by Jackie Molloy, Nat Geo Image Collection Midwifery, Kennedy says, is a potential answer to the perinatal care crisis. But even though a recent Listening to Mothers survey found that a majority of women said they would want or would consider a midwife, the interest currently 'exceeds current levels of availability and use of midwifery care,' Sakala says. Growing pains in the profession will be inevitable since there's a shortage of teachers in the field. Telfer points out that while doctors' residencies are funded through the government, that's not the case with midwifery. Meanwhile, like all hospital care, the cost of hospital births is rising as much as 20 percent, according to some estimates. The median cost of a healthy vaginal birth in the United States is almost $29,000 (the median cost of a C-section is almost $38,0000). In comparison, midwifery is far less expensive and a more efficient way to deliver care. According to a 2020 case study by the National Partnership for Women & Families, childbirth costs at midwifery-led birth centers were 21 percent lower. 'In my mind, this is a perfect moment for us to have grown our midwifery program because they do help us grow in a cost-effective way,' Gossett says. There are also larger reforms on the horizon: Sakala cites a new model from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services called Transforming Maternal Health as 'an immediate catalyst for midwifery.' This 10-year care delivery and payment reform model in 15 states will provide resources and technical assistance that includes requirements such as increasing access to midwifery care and birth centers, Sakala says. She hopes it will 'foster a tipping point for midwifery.' Her personal goal, and one shared by Birth Center Equity, is that 50 percent of births will be attended by midwives by 2050. Getting there might require a radical rethinking of maternal health in the United States. Goode notes that there are social, structural, and political determinants of health at play, all of which need to be addressed. 'We need a big picture, systems re-imagination of the perinatal healthcare system,' she says. Midwifery can, as the evidence shows, be part of that shift, potentially leading to better outcomes for pregnant women and, like MIH in Uganda, significantly lowering the maternal mortality rate.
Chicago Tribune
8 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Groups that support LGBTQ+ individuals brace for funding cuts that could affect HIV care, prevention
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The 2026 budget proposal eliminates the part of the Ryan White program that establishes and funds all AIDS education and training centers across the United States. 'If we do lose this funding, we risk having a less prepared workforce, which leads to delayed diagnosis of people living with HIV,' Jones said. 'This is an infrastructure that, once it's dismantled, it does not come back easily — you can't win the race by slashing the engine.' AIDS Foundation Chicago gets more than 80% of its funding from federal sources. Alongside advocacy work, the foundation provides support services for people living with HIV, including testing and prevention resources, education, housing and health insurance. In 2024, the foundation served more than 8,000 people in the Chicago area. Timothy Jackson, senior director of policy, said the foundation is currently planning for a projected loss of 40% of those funds in the president's 2026 budget request. AIDS Foundation Chicago is partially funded by both Ryan White and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization, the proposed budget cuts all of the CDC's HIV prevention funds. The foundation also receives funding through the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS program, which will also be eliminated in the proposed 2026 budget. These nonmedical services are essential for reducing HIV in Chicago, Jackson said. 'We have to look at all of the other things that make HIV possible, or make the transmission of HIV possible. So that's when we talk about housing, that's when we talk about harm reduction. That's why we talk about transportation and food access and all of these other different things,' he said. AIDS Foundation Chicago filed a lawsuit in February along with two other nonprofits challenging executive orders that sought to end 'diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility' programs and equity-related grants and contracts. 'Our mission is rooted in ending HIV and homelessness in the communities that are most impacted. And it is very difficult to do that when you are not leading with equity,' Jackson said. These organizations' work has already been affected by the National Institutes of Health funding pause earlier this year, and will continue to be affected by cuts to research funding in the planned budget. Jackson said the recent success of the twice-annual HIV prevention shot, lenacapavir, would not have been possible without NIH and CDC funding. 'This administration does not value science. We see that play out over the huge cuts at the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, which all impact HIV and the work around new HIV treatment and prevention modalities,' Jackson said. Even groups that are not largely reliant on federal funding are experiencing the strain of an uncertain economic future. Chris Balthazar, executive director of TaskForce Prevention and Community Services, a health and wellness group serving LGBTQ+ youth in Chicago, says many of his organization's partners are only signing contracts for quarterly periods, instead of their usual 12-month periods, in case funding disappears. These partners are how TaskForce provides many of its services, which include legal and housing aid, HIV and other STD testing, and connecting patients to medical care. 'Imagine what the impact of that is on the ground. How do you sustain a job on a grant that you don't even have a full 12-month contract for?' he said. Additionally, Balthazar explained that while state funding is not being cut as explicitly as federal funding, it is still expected to decline. The federal government partially funds the Illinois and Chicago Departments of Public Health, which then give grants to groups like TaskForce. Since the health departments don't know what sort of funding to expect in the next year, they aren't able to commit to the same grants they have in years previous. 'So much of the state budget comes from the federal budget. And I think that it's scary that, unfortunately, if this continues and nothing is undone, we're going to see major cuts, and we're going to see more and more people who are on the margins of the margins be even more drastically devastated by this,' he said. Both Jackson and Jones said that the most important thing anyone can do for HIV care and prevention in Chicago right now is to call their representatives and express support for continued HIV funding. 'It's reassuring that we have people who are still engaged, who are still advocating, who are still hoping. And when I go and I talk to community groups, I tell them, we can't go back to the '80s,' Jackson said. 'We're going to do what we have always done in 40-plus years of the epidemic: rely on community to get us through.'
