‘Recovery is possible’
BUTLER TWP — Mallory Bole once signed a contract for planning her own funeral.
On Thursday, July 17, she said she would now do anything to prevent another person from falling into the same pit of hopelessness.
Bole shared her story at the annual mental health Speaker Jam, an event that was a collaborative effort between several county service agencies and nonprofits to highlight stories of recovery from people in the area. The event’s organizers said it is an opportunity to connect people with resources to help them through mental health challenges, and Bole even included herself as one of those resources.
“If you need somebody to sit and talk with, I will sit and talk with you, because it's important and that's what gets me through my daily life,” Bole said. “I will sit here for as long as it takes and talk with you.”
Bole was one of five speakers at the jam, which took place at the Carousel Shelter at Alameda Park. Marcie Friel, mental health specialist for Butler County, said the Speaker Jam has grown in attendance over the years, because it offers people going through recovery a place to connect with others, no matter what their situation.
“I feel like our speakers touch on a lot this year. We have some drug and alcohol, homelessness, there's a lot being touched on under the umbrella of mental health,” Friel said. “People want to hear stories about recovery, good stories about what works for people.”
The five speakers each lived different lives, but there were some similarities between the circumstances they were in or fell into that led them to being at the jam on Thursday. Several of them had difficult upbringings — having family members who struggled with substance use or depression, sometimes leading to their deaths.
One unifying factor each of the speakers touched on was stigma. Wendy Fancella, one of the speakers, said no one would discuss feelings of depression and anxiety when she was going through a divorce; and Betty Walker, another speaker, said people would tell her “just get over it.”
Bole said stigma can prevent a person from even realizing their life can improve.
“I let stigma take me out,” Bole said. “You don't have to listen to what you're told. You don't have to believe what the world tries to perceive you as.”
Walker also said the “just get over it” approach is not helpful. That kind of response from a person can be ignorant or dismissive, which she explained in her talk at the Speaker Jam.
“It's not just get over it,” Walker said. “Anyone who tells you that needs to live your life. Walk in your shoes for a little bit.”
Walker is now a certified peer specialist with the Center for Community Resources.
Fancella said she went to a hospital many times during mental health emergencies and even received shock treatment in the 2010s. She wound up turning to Butler County mental health services for help, where she learned how to cope with feelings that kept her in her home all day.
“Nobody wanted to hear that I was having a bad day,” Fancella said of her life before finding help. She is now the president of the Women’s Club of Southern Butler County.
Jennifer Dearth, mental health supervisor for Southwestern Pennsylvania Human Services, said at the jam that, while the speakers each varied in experiences and stories, they were only a sample of the situations that poor mental health can lead a person to. In addition to her agency and Friel’s, there were also several others at the event, like the Center for Community Resources, the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the Butler Suicide Coalition, so people in attendance could get connected with a service they may need.
As Dearth said, a theme of the event was possibility.
“Not everyone's journey is the same. Coping, therapy that works for one person won't necessarily work for the next person,” Dearth said. “But we all want to share that recovery is possible.”
After seeing family members lose the battle with mental health, Robert Bennett found help in a 13-week grief counseling program with Butler County.
Now sober for seven years, Bennett said he finds purpose and happiness in being there for others going through substance abuse and grief recovery, because there is a level of trust and friendship developed between people with similar experiences. He also offered his company to people who think they have nowhere else to turn.
“It makes me happy seeing them every morning. I can relate to them. I can talk to them. If they need someone to talk to, they can open up to me,” Bennett said. “If anybody that is going through suicide and that, please reach out and call 988, because they can help you out in many ways. I'm always available to talk.”
Dearth said finding people to speak at the event was not a difficult task, because people in active recovery already share their backgrounds with others in their programs and these stories can impact others who can relate.
“The biggest point they want to make is to help somebody else,” Dearth said. “Not everyone wants to speak in public, but a lot of them do about how they hit their goals, about how they found people.”
Friel, too, said one of the reasons for the jam is to bring together as many agencies as possible that can help with recovery. Whether it be from drugs or grief, people could find connection at the speaker jam.
“We know everyone has a mental health story, whether they're talking about it or not,” Friel said. “But it also overlaps with drug and alcohol. It overlaps with the aging population. So little by little, every year, the Community Support Program is trying to kind of breakdown their silos and have all of that come together.”
Even if attendees of the speaker jam didn’t approach any of the vendors in attendance, Bole said she hoped the stories were enough to make them think more deeply about their own mental health. She said events like the jam are now one of her reasons for going on, because if she could survive, she wanted others to realize that they could as well.
“If I didn't have the experiences I had... I wouldn't be able to help the person standing beside me, because someone did that for me at one point in time,” Bole said. “I wouldn't be able to walk beside you and tell you that it's OK to have a rough patch, but we can get through this together, because I'm huge on the ‘we’ aspect.”
