ARPA Funding Supporting Mental Health Awareness and Resources with Amy Ebbeson

Part 7/9 from our mini-series: ARPA Funding in Worcester 

Public Hearing is back with another episode of our ARPA Funding in Worcester mini-series! This week we discuss mental health with our guest Amy Ebbeson, clinical director at Worcester Addresses Childhood Trauma, also known as Worcester ACTS. In this episode, we talk about the importance of recognizing and addressing mental health issues in our community as well as how crucial it is to also address these kinds of issues in oneself. Education and spreading awareness about mental health not only reduces harmful stigma but can also help individuals live happy and joy-filled lives as well as create equity within our city.

Interested in helping further develop research and education on mental health? Fill out this Google Form that will be used to help create mental health programs to support our community!   

 Learn more about how Worcester plans to spend ARPA dollars on the City website.

Public Hearing is a podcast from Action! by Design about our home city of Worcester, Massachusetts and the people we should be listening to—residents, artists, activists, community leaders, storytellers, and those most impacted by issues facing our city. Our mission is to cultivate community through equity, inclusion, and design, and that work starts at home.

Want to be the first to listen to new episodes? Tune in Wednesdays at 6pm on WICN 90.5FM, Worcester's only NPR affiliate station. Not in the Worcester area? No worries, you can listen live at WICN.org

Transcript for this episode

Joshua Croke (00:02):

Hello Worcester and the world you're listening to Public Hearing on WICN 90.5 FM Worcester's only NPR affiliate station or wherever you get your podcast. I am your host, Joshua Croke. I'm the founder of Action! by Design, we help organizations, coalitions and cities imagine, and materialize equitable just and joyful communities through art and design. Public Hearing is our show about making public participation and civic engagement, more accessible in Worcester our home base and sharing stories from people in our community, doing work that resonates with our commitment of engaging people with purpose. This is the Public Hearing podcast. We're continuing our conversation on the American Rescue Plan Act funding that is bringing 146 million to Worcester to address the impacts of the pandemic in our communities. These dollars are earmarked for projects that support those disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, low-income communities and communities of color.

Joshua Croke (01:00):

As a designer, committed to equity. I know that when we build systems programs and initiatives that meet the needs of our most marginalized and vulnerable populations, we meet the needs of everyone and that this work benefits all of us. We've spoken to a handful of people in our community about ARPA, but also about their work, addressing some of the intersecting challenges. Our people face on a daily basis, housing, food, security, employment, and economic mobility, representative arts and culture opportunities and inclusion and exclusion across all those areas. Amongst these challenges, people are the common thread, individuals and families impacted by failures from our systems and structures without truly accessible ways of connecting to resources. I'll say being a human is hard enough without all of that. So how are people coping, managing stress, taking care of themselves and their families. That's what we're here to talk about today.

Joshua Croke (01:57):

Mental health, and how ARPA money if allocated intentionally might help to address the challenges people in our communities are facing. I am very excited to be here with an incredibly dedicated human to Worcester, to justice, to mental health, to education. And I could keep going. Amy Ebbeson is a Worcester-based social worker, social justice educator, consultant, researcher, and trainer, with expertise in mental health, addiction treatment, early childhood trauma, community health and youth development. Who's currently the clinical director at Worcester Addresses Childhood Trauma, also known as Worcester ACTS a UMass Memorial community-based program under the department of community relations. Amy and I are also both part of the Worcester Education Equity Round Table, and Amy is a true exemplar of being committed to bringing joy into justice work. Amy, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about mental health and how Worcester can better address the issues people are facing. But before we dive in, I welcome guests to share any other information about their background experience in social location. They feel might benefit listeners to know as we are much more than our resumes and bios tell people. So welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. And what else should listeners know about you?

Amy Ebbeson (03:15):

Josh, It's such a pleasure to be with you. You always inspire my thinking and as I'm sure the conversation will unfold. You have definitely been a thought leader in kind of where I've landed with. What's gonna help people, in terms of social location, I am a heterosexual white woman born in Worcester, raised in Worcester middle ager now, wow, that's a whole different thing. But professionally I think is more where this journey kind of started. I began working in a residential treatment center right at a high school. So just already working in the mental health system before I was even an adult and having the experience of seeing who was in the mental health system, how they were treated in the mental health system using that to reflect on kind of what I saw going on around me. I've shifted sort of after a while into teaching mental health in a college setting and that is a whole different experience. And I think that's kind of a piece of what has brought me here. You know, how, like when you get someplace, you look back and you say, wow, all those things that didn't really make sense or didn't seem to go together, really do come together in this sort of the threads of how I'm moving through the world, how I'm thinking about this stuff. And yeah, if that sort of explained it.

Joshua Croke (04:50):

That actually totally makes sense. And it's funny that you say that because I think of my own like higher ed journey, and I, you know, the very rapid version I started in conservatory for musical theater left and transitioned to a criminal justice, a criminal psychology program left and transitioned to anthropology and then left and worked for a while and then came back to school and went to engineering school at WPI and built a major around creative design technology and business. And people are like, that seems like there is a nonsensical path to all those things. And I thought of those same thing.

Amy Ebbeson (05:26):

Some of those things surprised me

Joshua Croke (05:28):

For a while, right. And then I was like, you know what, the thing that all of those have, that is what I ultimately was pursuing was better understanding people and how to work with people, right? Enacting your, like literally becoming a different person and pulling from your own experiences to like make that person come to life in psychology. You're looking at understanding the human brain and human interactions. And then all of that really coming to the work that I do now in community building and really thinking about thoughtful and equitable facilitation that encourages like the ability to co-create with people to solve challenges has been an incredible journey and really shifted my thinking from what we're often, I think taught even the underlying lessons in a lot of our institutions is that people need saving overall. Yeah. Right. It's like, how can you come into space and solve the problem. And I've learned as a designer now is that if you know how to facilitate and convene space with people who are most impacted by the challenges that you're trying to solve, they already know how to solve it. We just need to listen and help organize and help really distill all of those ideas to develop actionable plans. So that's, so yeah,

Amy Ebbeson (06:54):

Yeah. Really the solutions are grounded in people and in communities, I love that. And similar, I would say, you know, kind of the central question I've been concerned with my whole career is what does it take to get people to care about each other? Right. Kind of similar to your thing, but like you watch the world and you're like, why don't they care? Or, and I don't always know if it's that they don't care, but just making sense of that part, where we can somehow really other people, you know, we can really put them in a group and, and say, you're not like me and you don't deserve the same things or, and what are they doing to come there? And what harm does it do when we do live in a world that really needs us to fit in these boxes?

Joshua Croke (07:42):

That absolutely. And I think like a current and a lack of understanding that segregation is still a thing is one of the issues, because I think proximity always helps to amplify people's empathy and not necessarily understanding the varied and differing lived experiences that people have had that maybe one has not had personally. Right. But being able to like empathize and understand and see that what we're fighting against is a lot of misinformation and structural barriers that institutions are not really taking the time to dismantle or to observe.

Amy Ebbeson (08:29):

And they're benefiting from them. That's, a big part of it, isn't it like exactly. Right. They're not gonna dismantle something that they benefit from, or, you know, you kind of speak to that piece of the invisibility of this stuff. Like we don't really see that we're organized this way. We don't really understand it all until later on in life. Right. And so rarely do we take the time to reflect and like, how did I land here? What does it mean to be who I am with this set of social characteristics and relationships and relationships, right. Yeah. When you were talking about kind of being with people, it's relationships that cause people to shift into empathy 100%, right? Like the racial justice stuff that we're both passionate about I think if you're a white person who cares about racial justice, you've been in relationship with a person of color and you've taken the time to really connect and really try to understand their experience.

Joshua Croke (09:33):

Absolutely. And when you talk about invisibility as well, like I think of the mental health crisis, right. And that has been exposed and exacerbated by the COVID 19 pandemic. Yeah. But again, for folks like yourself, who've been doing this work for so long, you know, that this has always been a problem, but again, it took a global health pandemic to expose the realities of some of that. And for better, or for worse have led people into pathways where they're now seeking help and support. Right. And are being met with a very overwhelmed and under-resourced system. So what are some of the things in broadly speaking related to mental health that you feel are some of the leading challenges that you see both here in our community, as well as in, you know, our country at large?

Amy Ebbeson (10:27):

Just what you said capacity, right. We have not valued mental health. We have not prioritized mental health. I think it's part of systemic oppression right. In our culture especially around gender we've really have this idea that men and boys shouldn't really have emotions, feelings that is feminine that's girl stuff. And if you are talking about your feelings or your feelings are hurt, then you know, relinquish your man card right now. And setting that up from the beginning, I think is a big part of why we are here now. Right. In my experience, working, especially with students, I've had male students and female students like their feelings and emotions are similar, predictable. The response they get to those feelings is what's really different, right? Yes. And so what do we do to humans when we kind of give them the messages in society that your feelings are not okay, your feelings are weak, your feelings are to be ignored.

Amy Ebbeson (11:33):

Then that's a big part of why we are where we are. This field is not really valued at all. Right? Like it's seen as just something that's fluffy, like something that's add on it's the frosting on the cake, the structure of our whole, of this whole field is really grounded in this systemic oppression. My people, the social workers are mostly white women, not because only white women care about the work of social work, but because of the credentialing process, in all honesty, right. The credentialing process for social work I, you know, have a master's degree in social work. I did it full-time. And it was two years beyond my bachelor's degree during that you're expected to work as an intern for what amounts to a year of full-time work, not getting paid, paying the school to be able to do it.

Amy Ebbeson (12:39):

So just that structure right there eliminates anybody who needs to support themselves and someone else. Right? So you get women that have, you know, a significant other that may be supporting them, a family that's supporting them sort of coming from this place of being able to give service because of privileges they may have. And so that's structure, I think, is already at play in the field itself with a master's degree. Like the salary ranges are very entry-level it's entry-level of any other field. You need a master's in this field. And that's a big part of the problem who's gonna go into a field that is not valued, is not paid, you take on a lot of the stigma of working with marginalized communities yourself.

Joshua Croke (13:35):

Well, and you say stigma, it was literally that word was sitting in my head for the stigmas around getting into the mental health field to begin with just like the stigmas around pursuing therapy. Right. You know, I was raised in therapy is something that only people with, you know, severe needs go to. Right. And it wasn't something that anyone needed to manage their own life. You know, it was always like this story of like oppression Olympics, you know? Yeah. Of like someone always has it worse than you. So what you're experiencing does not matter. Right. And that erasure of real feelings, regardless of what threshold we've placed of severity on those things, they all impact people. Right. They impact people's lives. And, you know, I recently moved to a four-day workweek because of the critical nature of self-care.

Joshua Croke (14:31):

Yeah. And not just because that's like, oh, who wouldn't wanna work one day less a week. But because of the research that shows how our minds and bodies are able to produce and to think, and to be more present in our work, when we have a more equal balance, I actually recently started a project with a close friend of mine where we're exploring and really starting to learn more about like transhumanism and the thinking of like, what is the next stages of like human evolution and change both from like our own biology and how we evolve, but also like how people are using technology and eugenics and all these other sciencey things to kind of manipulate people, it is pretty heavy. And that's like, we'll table that because that goes pretty, pretty deep. But at the core of it is really thinking of like, how are we best enabling and supporting people? And what we really have started talking about is like, we need to shift our thinking that people are just production machines, 100,

Amy Ebbeson (15:38):

100 percent, Yeah.

Joshua Croke (15:39):

Fuel Corporations and to like live, to work, not work, to live, you know, and really challenging, those structures.

Amy Ebbeson (15:48):

I love that. That's where you kind of came to on that, cuz that is what this is about. Our, American values are so much productivity, do more, be like, what do you have to show for it? Even the mental health system, when we diagnose mental illness, it's based on how are you performing in the world? Are you doing the things that we expect you to do? Like go to work and, you know, be a significant other and be a parent and so, it's all grounded in this system that just really wants you to produce.

Joshua Croke (16:24):

So we're talking about mental health, we're talking about the challenges related to capacity, the barriers of credentialing that allow people to get into this field. And this series is about ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act funding and obviously we have taken not so much detours in all of these conversations that we've had with people, but we've brought in some of the considerations that might be made as people think about how we should be spending this money. So I would love to hear from you around your thoughts around the ARPA dollars opportunities and ideas that you have for how our community might use these dollars to benefit everybody by addressing things like mental health,

Amy Ebbeson (17:05):

Beautiful. What I've come to in sort of doing this work is the recognition that the thing that keeps people from living their best life, that from having empathy for others is trauma it's trauma. And in social work, we kind of have this recognition that the things happen at multiple levels, right? So your personal trauma is gonna show up interpersonally, but also nationally, right? Like if you think about a topic like racism it looks just like other traumas we're working so hard to those of us that aren't as impacted by it works so hard to not think about it, not look at it, not do like really, we're trying to legislate not talking about it in schools. That is the most trauma response ever. Honestly, when you have something traumatic happen, you are in this space of kind of being stuck there.

Amy Ebbeson (18:07):

Right. You cannot stop thinking about it. You can't really move forward from it. And it shows up in everything and you don't even see, it is kind of part of the huge thing. When you talked about stigma and like kind of the ideas about what it means to go to therapy, those things are the same, right? Like sort of when we don't have good, accurate information about something we're reliant on stereotypes, we're reliant on media, we're reliant on somebody else to give us the narrative, right? So we like that's pretty big this, this idea that we really need to understand trauma and how it's showing up. And thinking about social work, education and counselor education, even social workers don't necessarily get trauma content. I teach this at the graduate level. It's an elective. It's not part of the curriculum.

Amy Ebbeson (19:12):

I ask my friends who are licensed mental health counselors, same, right. They're not getting this and that's shocking, cuz pretty much that's all of it. Right, and I've been doing this series, the Trauma Training Tuesday series, you did an amazing one by the way. And taking those deeper dives on trauma, you really see that people don't know this information, like as I do training on it, people will say, why is this the first time I'm hearing about this? I came from a refugee camp and no one's ever talked to me about psychological trauma. Exactly. That to me is so much of what the problem is doing it, you know, for college students. Some of them had had a psych class in high school, but not everybody right. We're not talking about the things that impact our lives. So much trauma racism, all of these things we don't talk about in academic settings problem.

Joshua Croke (20:16):

And one of the things that, you know, I've had conversations that have been kind of like uncomfortable with people in my family. When you mention words like racism and trauma. Because people like underline bold them, capitalize them in their minds of like, these are so massive things to imply that I might have racial bias or that my trauma might inform the decisions that I'm making is like so offensive to me down to my core. Right. And that in and of itself trauma response. And I was like, I feel like there was like a veil lifted that had clouded my world until I was given more information about trauma as this barrier for so many of us to move toward a direction of, I think like collective and individual worthiness. Yeah. Right. Like what we are, what we take away from ourselves and our communities when we don't feel like we or others are worthy. And that is so fundamental to how, at least how I've experienced some of this.

Amy Ebbeson (21:24):

Well, that's a big symptom of trauma in all honesty. You really do question like there must be something wrong with me that I had this happen to me or what did I, even when you experience a trauma, even amongst people that know or that have a clue, they do say things like, well, you must have done something you must have somehow brought that. Or you must have known some. And, I think makes sense. We have a need for safety. It's the most basic need. We don't want to wrap our heads around the idea that something bad could happen to any one of us at any time, and we have no control over that. That's terrifying. So we blame people that are victimized and we say they must have done something and here's why they deserved that. And we do that so we can feel like it won't happen to us. cuz I'm not like that. Right. And as you said, when you were kind of talking about your family and having conversations, trauma really is the barrier to empathy. When we, you know, another thing that I've done is a lot of training and work around racial justice and for people that are white, when you talk about racism, they very quickly wanna talk about how they've been hurt because we don't validate anybody's trauma in this culture in this country

Joshua Croke (22:42):

That's right. Absolutely well, and you have an approach that you're developing and working on, that's informed by all of your work that might be intersecting with ARPA. Do you want to share a little bit about that?

Amy Ebbeson (22:54):

My hope is that we can build a mental health workforce by training people in trauma recovery. For my own healing, I began working with someone who's a trauma recovery coach and taking that to really recognize that that is a knowledge base that will be so helpful to everyone. My, plan, my hope for the ARPA money is to be able to give people this knowledge, this information that are already embedded in settings, where community comes right. And that's a piece where you helped me think about this, that you said like I'm with young people all the time. And I know that my experiences really inform how I think about this and could it help them, but I don't have this certificate or this credential or this green light to talk about it. And I'm kind of terrified to this program is the answer to that. That's at least my hope that will take people like you, people that are embedded already in community, people of African culture of Southeast Asian and give them this information and knowledge and support so they can help the people that they're already with.

Joshua Croke (24:10):

And that truly to me is transformative because if we have more people who feel enabled to provide some levels of support and also observe and identify where trauma might be playing a role in someone's struggle, or, you know, a family dynamic or, you know, whatever it might be. I think that is the change that we need. Right. It's almost like how I talk about and it might sound silly to make these comparisons. But when I talk about like innovation and like creating like transformative change in places, it needs to happen in all places. It can't be just like, oh, you're going down a path of study for innovation. It's like no innovation as a mindset needs to exist in every space that people exist in. And this is, I feel the same way about trauma, you know, recovery and addressing these issues.

Amy Ebbeson (25:06):

Agree. It's so much about our own personal experience and what is keeping us in those boxes, keeping us from being our full human self.

Joshua Croke (25:18):

Well, Amy, we are getting so close to time. I could talk to you forever and we're gonna have to have you back on the show, especially as you continue to develop this concept. And when there are opportunities for folks to get involved or if are there currently?

Amy Ebbeson (25:32):

Yeah. Thank you so much for saying that. I just kind of created a form, a Google form to capture the information of people that would really be interested in participating in this. And it sounds like we can put that on your podcast page even, right?

Joshua Croke (25:46):

Yes. Those will be in the show notes.

Amy Ebbeson (25:48):

Woo. So in the show notes, if you're interested in getting more involved in this and would really benefit from this trauma knowledge base grab that form, please fill it out, let us know about you

Joshua Croke (25:59):

Amazing. Well, since the, you know, we talk so much about equity and justice. One of the things that I think is often forgotten about is the joy piece. And so let's end on what is a joy activity for you that brings light into your life that helps, you know, you move forward through a lot of the challenging things that we work in.

Amy Ebbeson (26:19):

All right. I can't lie silly puppy videos, right?

Joshua Croke (26:22):

Oh my God.

Amy Ebbeson (26:23):

Yes. Like you may, I have that playlist of things that like, no matter how bad I feel, I'm gonna, it's just gonna crack me up. Those, that dog that's like the treats are in the fridge, all of those kinds of things. I think you have to intentionally find something that makes you laugh or happy or can just shift you for a minute.

Joshua Croke (26:40):

Yes. I saw a video the other day of a dog that was friends with a sloth that was like saved from like a bag that was like discarded. And they like helped heal this sloth and this sloth and the dog that was there became like best friends with each other. They, literally the sloth hugs the dog. It's really, my God amazing.

Amy Ebbeson (27:01):

Sloth hug is such a good joy moment.

Joshua Croke (27:04):

Yes. So we are gonna end there folks. And as always thank you for listening to Public Hearing our podcast and radio show that airs Wednesdays at 6:00 PM on WICN 90.5 FM Worcester's only NPR affiliate station and can be heard wherever you listen to podcasts. Our show is about Worcester, community engagement and elevating resident representation and decision-making spaces. Thank you so much to Amy Ebbeson for being here today. I'm your host Joshua Croke. At Action! by Design, we engage communities with purpose. Connect to and support Public Hearing @publichearing.co have an idea for the show? Let us know, rhyming intentional. Shares, likes and follows really help us out as well. Our audio producer is Giuliano D’Orazio, who also made our show music also, thanks to Molly Gammon and Kellee Kosiorek, who also support the production of this show. The work continues Worcester. Thanks for listening.