How do you recognize the differences between mental health and mental illness? Understanding the differences is a key component to maintaining mental health, which like physical health, requires daily attention. Without maintaining mental well-being, we put ourselves at risk of developing a mental illness. In part one of this episode, Kirk and Tiffani discuss the differences between mental health and mental illness, what to do when we are experiencing an "off" day, and how to support those who may be experiencing a mental crisis or mental illness.

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Thank you for joining us today for part one of our two part series of the differences between mental health and mental illness. My name is Tiffany Fritzsche, I'm a licensed mental health counselor and here is my co -host.

Hello,I'm Kirk Fassauer, Director of Crisis Response Services. For a long time, Kirk and I have been talking about how do we let people know the difference in mental health and mental illness and where that intersects in our daily life.

And also how do we start conversations with others about how to better support ourselves and better the support that people around us with understanding how mental health impacts us all. So today we are starting off with our very first podcast and we are diving into what are the differences between mental illness and mental health.

So Kirk tell us a little bit about yourself and what brings you to the mental health world. Oh well I've been in the field of mental health for 30 years in various capacities but my love has been psychiatric emergencies so I've done that.

for most of my career. And as a licensed clinical social worker, I've had the pleasure of being at Peace River Center for 23 years,

doing what I really enjoy doing, and that's crisis response work, and developing a team that goes out into the community and helps individuals in emotional distress.

Along with that has been some of the community. work that I've done with regard to working very closely with law enforcement and helping them to better engage individuals who are struggling with emotional issues,

not necessarily mental illness, and we'll get into the difference between mental illness and emotional issues. So that's led me down the path of being very close with law enforcement.

and doing some work with them for their own trauma, the trauma of the subjects that they work with, and has even afforded me the opportunity to become a crisis negotiator with a couple of teams in the area,

and I do some training in that area as well, and train law enforcement quite a bit in the area of working with mental illness and mental health. Thank you. as I mentioned,

I'm a licensed mental health counselor, but I work mainly with children and families, so I've been at Peace River Center, it's a community mental health agency in the Tri -County area, so Polk, Highlands and Hardee County in Central Florida,

and I started out over a decade ago. I started as an intern getting my graduate degree, and I fell in love with the purpose of community mental health, and I would say, for me,

working with kids and families, I've always had this desire to help stabilize families, going through a crisis, help kids understand their big feelings and their small feelings,

help kids and families connect. And that role at P. Shevers Center has been such a great opportunity, learning more about infant mental health, early childhood mental health. But what we have found, especially since COVID,

is that there's this... disconnect, I think, with when does this big feeling turn into psychopathology? When does having a bad day turn into having a bad few days,

having a bad few weeks, and then finding yourself in this hole that you don't know how to get out of, and you don't even know how you got there? And so, Kirk, one of the things that I've learned so much from you,

and love that you share with the community, is what is the difference in mental health and mental illness and how do you know? So what is the best way that you have found to describe? Like what is mental health?

- Okay, well I do think that the term mental health has been thrown around quite a bit lately. And I had an interesting conversation with a colleague who has a college -age student.

And they were talking, they said, I'm doing this for my mental health. I'm doing that for my mental health," and finally,

the colleague who's the parent said to me, "I asked my daughter," it was a daughter, "asked my daughter," so what do you mean by mental health? I'm hearing that term a lot,

and she didn't have an answer. And so I was like, "Oh, okay." Yes, we do. It's not just a buzzword. It's not just a term. Mental health is something that is getting thrown around quite a bit.

And it often gets confused with mental illness. So people think that can be used interchangeably. And one of my hopes has been over the years,

especially when doing training with law enforcement and the community, is being able to separate those two out a little bit more so that there's a better understanding of why the topic of mental health is so important because everybody's stressed,

everybody has some level of anxiety, people are involved in relationships, they have family that they want to be a part of and family they don't want to be a part of, they have extended family, I mean all these things work,

co-workers. these things create a great deal of stress. How people cope with it, good or bad, is how people address mental health. When I start talking about mental health,

I often get people to think about, "Okay, so what do you do for your physical health?" You go walking, go to the gym, maybe do some running, find something you like to do, and you do that. That helps you fend off.

off any physical illness. So when we talk about mental health, I'm encouraging people to think about it in those terms as far as look at mental health in terms of what do you do to just kind of let go of some stuff,

to relax, to be with yourself and get comfortable with yourself. Not if you're comfortable with yourself, but how do you get to that point where you are comfortable with yourself?

And so those things that we do every day, we take a break, we take our vacations, we try and just do something to relax and I go home and I have a little bit of scotch and you know and just sit back and relax.

It's like okay, is that necessarily good or bad? No judgment here. It's about what do you do to take care of your mental health? to unwind? To alleviate a lot of the stress and anxiety we all are experiencing and COVID really brought a lot of that to light because we've seen especially with our young people a unique set of challenges because A) they're in transition B) they started isolating,

you know from peers which he socially we need that social reference to bounce off of, "Hey, am I doing okay?

Well, I'm looking at you. Okay. You seem okay with it. I'm okay with it. Oh, this is kind of cool." So we have that social reference piece. So when we talk about mental health,

it's those things that you do every single day. You know, you're not even considering part of taking care of your mental health. That's very important. And if you don't do those kinds of things, you feel out of sorts.

So think about your daily routine. You know, people will have a daily routine, they get up, they do A, B, and C, and if something happens where A, B, and C gets interrupted,

they feel a little off. They feel a little off. So those are the kinds of things when we talk about mental health is what do you do to readjust when things are a little bit off. I take an extra break.

I'm not feeling so well today, maybe I'll call in for work and just kind of sit for a while, read a book, go for a walk, relax, meditate, and these are things that we're all going to get into in our podcast over time is how to do some of these things so that people have some nice tools.

But when we start to isolate and we got changes going on. like classrooms are now here, that virtual window,

and that change creates a whole new stress. Learning a new skill creates a whole different kinds of stress. - Yeah, just to jump in, so the National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI,

they released a statistic in 2020 and they said one in 10 people under 18 experienced a mental health condition in following a COVID-19 diagnosis. And so, I know still we're finding the effects of long COVID,

still we're readjusting, as you said, to, okay, from overnight basically making your life be on a computer, right? Relationships, not being able to be face to face,

you know, even doctor's visits being on telehealth. And then now we're kind of coming into a new normal. That ripple effect can be long lasting sometimes and people think,

well, we're back to normal, we're not. It's a new normal. And one of the things that you mentioned before, and we've talked about this before just personally, I think that

there is a lot of buzzword action going on right now with mental illness and mental health and I think on the other end of that,

there's also buzzword action going on with stigmatizing words and-- those of us in the mental health community and those of us who have been affected by mental illness and mental health, which is everybody,

you want to say the right thing. You want to like, you want to support the people you love and you don't want to say the wrong thing. And one of the memories that I have and I've shared this before is,

you know, it's pretty straightforward when someone has a medical condition or if someone has had a surgery or a physical illness You check on them. How are you? I see you have a cast, you know, are you okay?

What happened? You know, what are you gonna do? Do you need any help? but when someone has a mental health crisis or a mental illness that motivation or even comfortableness of reaching out is kind of diminished because you don't want to say the wrong thing. You don't want to be offensive and one of the stories that I've shared, and my sister would not mind me sharing this is that you know. She after she

graduated from college. She took some time off and she worked at like a resort in the wilderness somewhere and while she was there she was walking up the stairs and she fell and she broke her wrist. And you know all by herself really no family no support and she reached out for help and got somebody to give her a ride,

didn't have a car, went to the emergency department, didn't really have a handle on insurance and what's in network and what's out of network, 'cause she was far from home. She figured it out, got the support she needed,

got the treatment she needed, and advocated with her employer to get the accommodations that she needed. And when she was sharing this story with me, I thought, I'm so glad that she was able to get those resources.

and the support that she needed for recovery. What if it had been a mental health obstacle, right? How many times do we feel that we have a right or that it's justified to ask for what we need when it's physical,

but we don't when it's mental, right? Right, we tend to circle the wagons and kind of isolate ourselves and lots of times. wallow in our own misery if you will at those points because we're afraid to be abnormal and I'm not really sure what normal is and you know because we say,

"Oh, you're not normal. What does that mean?" Everybody's different. Everybody has a different viewpoint of the world and you mentioned being careful about stigma and jargon and again real world experience just even trying to come up with a title for this podcast.

We want to be sensitive to not offending anybody by some of the catchy little things that we've played around with as far as terms go. But so we're mindful of that.

And I think that's, for me, that's a big point of this podcast is raising a level of awareness that people become mindful of how they say things. It's not necessarily going to take it away.

I mean, we're just a small little you and I, small little group in little old Polk County, trying to get some word out there to reduce the stigma as best we can.

One of the exercises that I do in training is before we even begin, I have people, what are the terms we use to show all the terms we use because there's often a three column list on all the terms,

not all good for individuals with mental illness and then they say, "So, what do we call people with heart disease? What about people with diabetes? What about people with cancer?" I mean,

there's a lot of laughing and giggling going on as we're going through one list, but we'll get to those other lists. lists, you could feel the breaks come on and people really are starting to think about the terms they use.

And it's important. You can't just throw it out there and not expect words not to hurt. And I think two, people are learning that more and more when we look at social media and how people utilize that.

People are brave when they text, but they're not so brave when it's face to face and say things that are very harmful in typing because it's just words,

"Well..." Well, and also I think, and you've said this before, you feel that sense of like, "I'm justified in my recovery. I'm justified in my needs when it's medical,

when it's physical." All right, I don't... guilty asking for help if I keep climbing stairs. I don't feel guilty if I need to take a nap from recovering, but there's still the sense of like, well, pick yourself up by your bootstraps,

get over it, you know, you're ruining the mood or the atmosphere of our place. You never say yes when we ask you to come out, so we're just gonna stop asking that sense of you're a burden when that should not be the sense.

- Exactly, exactly. And that's, again, we're-- the confusion comes in, I think, from mental health to mental illness. Because, again, people do things every single day to take care of their mental health,

just like they do their physical health. And when you don't take care of the mental health side of things, it can turn into illness. It doesn't always, but for many it does.

I mean, the statistic is out there that one in five Americans will experience a mental health episode in a given year. And so one in five.

So that's a lot of people that are going to have some type of emotional distress going into the realm of illness. If somebody had a little pain in their chest,

they would go see a cardiologist and they wouldn't think twice about it, like you said. But when it comes to not really feeling the motivation for it. For weeks on end,

and it becomes this slow burn where it becomes their new normal, and next thing you know, it creeps in and it gets deeper and deeper, and they haven't really talked to anybody about it.

Yeah. Well, let's just jump in and say that sometimes therapists and practitioners were the worst because we hold those boundaries for our clients. We hold those boundaries. for people that we're intentionally focusing on,

but we might not hold those boundaries for ourselves. And I think it's so common for people in the field, for first responders, for law enforcement officers, we hold the line for the people we're protecting,

if you will. But then that line gets really close to us and starts to create a situation to where we're not taking care of ourselves and then you have compassion fatigue set in and then you have burnout sit in.

And sometimes I think that we're the last people to realize once we're in it, right? - Yeah, yeah. Well, there are many that get into our profession to not address their own issues. They're comfortable addressing somebody else's issues,

but then looking at themselves becomes the challenge. It's scary. It's scary to think, oh, maybe I'm a little off. No. just going through something.

And the hope, especially when we have people in treatment as therapists, the hope is they're learning something along the way.

We're not there to take pain away because I often think that people think, "I go to therapy, it's all gone, I feel better." Well, hopefully they do feel better, but it's not all going to be gone. It's there.

It's part of their experience. part of the human condition of having struggled through something but coming out the other side, learning something, hopefully for growth.

Sure. And like to circle back to the mental health versus the physical health, you might have a scar. You might have a reminder of what you've gone through, but it's a testimony of what you've gone through and what you've survived.

Right. You know that recovery journey is different for every person. And I think recovery is so much easier when you let people help you walk through it. One of my hopes for this podcast is kind of encouraging and equipping people to understand,

well, how can you help? What can you do, first of all, to identify and to monitor yourself, right, to give yourself the supports that you need, but also to help the people around you.

One of the things that I think a lot of people do, you know I’m southern, so south Florida, all the time when people were growing up a lot of people having babies or surgery, you know, you came with those casseroles.

You brought casseroles and you brought them to the families and you met their tangible needs. And I think when people are hurting, they're tired, right? But those tangible needs are still there.

And we don't think about that with mental illness, sometimes. that those tangible needs are still there. And so what can you do, you can meet those tangible needs when people have babies, when they have surgery,

you know, we come over and we offer help and we bring dinner. And if you're a close friend, you do laundry, you know, you watch the baby so you can take a nap. And for mental illness, if someone maybe has a Baker Act Admission or if someone is just having a low day,

what can you do? Well, a lot of things. - Absolutely. - But knowing that. know, offering that help and being there, it's just as crucial as it would be for a mental or for a medical condition.

One of the things that you've shared before that I've heard and I love is that just like physical health is not this constant state, you know, you go up and you down and if you exercise,

like you said, and if you have good sleep and you drink water, which is always a struggle for me, I feel like my water is in the form of the ice cubes in my iced coffee. I'm told that's not right.

But you do those things and usually your physical health maintains, but even if you're doing everything right, sometimes you come down with something, right? Mental health is the same.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. And in understanding that mental illness is a list of symptoms that a professional or licensed individual is able to help kind of explore that with you.

You take a look at that list and you go, "This is what I think I got," and you try different things. Sometimes medication, sometimes not, you know, it all depends. Well thank you for joining us today.

If you enjoyed our show, please like and subscribe. If you, or somebody you know is struggling with... mental illness or any type of issues That they wish to talk about locally.

You can call our number eight six three five one nine three seven four four Or nationally you can call nine eight eight. Thank you