Showing Up, Shining, and Resilience During Mental Health Awareness Month

In celebration of May as Mental Health Awareness Month, I want to talk about how we show up, how we ask for help, and how we shine. I’m inspired to talk about these things by the educators showing up every day to help their students thrive academically and by all my colleagues at HMH supporting this work. Fostering the growth of all students can be extremely challenging. Sometimes it may even start to feel impossible.

No doubt, the work of educating our future generation and celebrating their successes is an incredibly rewarding and honorable job. This work can also take a toll, and chances are this toll is showing up in some way in every classroom. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “one in six US youth aged 6–17 experience a mental health disorder each year, and half of all mental health conditions begin by age 14.” According to HMH’s most recent Educator Confidence Report, concern for these students is prominent in teachers’ minds, as it ranks third among all concerns. Ranked even higher are “mental health concerns for fellow teachers,” with 68% of all teachers surveyed listing that as a concern. 

Here at HMH, a profoundly important part of my mission is supporting our eleven Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to make sure that everyone doing the work to support teachers and students is connected internally to communities ready to offer support and encouragement. The HMH Mental Health Matters ERG has been a vital part of the network of support across the company, carrying out a mission, as they have framed it, “to create a brave space for authentic dialogue, advocacy, and education around mental health and self-care.” 

Leading with empathy

One of the executive sponsors of the Mental Health Matters ERG explains: “A big part of my ‘why’ in sponsoring Mental Health Matters is to normalize talking about and supporting mental health needs at work, the same way we’d treat and support employees’ physical health. Outside of work, managing and advocating for my own and my family’s mental health is incredibly important to me, and I value the opportunity to sponsor and support that work at HMH. It’s a natural extension of my own empathetic leadership style, and I’ve seen the positive impact it can have on engagement, retention, and professional growth. Our people leaders in particular need tools and frameworks to successfully navigate this arena with their teams.” 

Another executive sponsor of Mental Health Matters says: “I believe deeply in the importance of focusing on mental health in the workplace, with the goal of creating an environment where everyone can be successful. My feelings have been shaped by my personal experience with family and seeing firsthand how complicated mental health challenges can be—particularly because they are so personal and so unseen and oftentimes not understood. For a long time, discussions about mental health in the workplace were not considered normal or acceptable. We spend so much time at work with teammates; we need to be able to have empathy for each other and understand each other’s struggles to really trust each other and work together as teammates. By talking about the importance of mental health in the workplace and normalizing conversations about it, we can create a better environment for everyone and lift each other up.”

The Mental Health Matters ERG has an ongoing practice of noticing and sharing with one another what are known as “glimmers,” using an online chat platform to share anecdotes and photos (such as the one at the top of this post) about little moments of joy. As explained in a Psychology Today blog post, glimmers (a term coined by author and social worker Deb Dana in 2018) can act like a positively charged counterpart to the more well-known concept of triggers: “While triggers can feel like a gloomy cloud, glimmers are the shining stars that can pierce through the darkness.” 

Glimmers and resilience

I love seeing this concept in play with the Mental Health Matters ERG, so for this Mental Health Awareness Month, I wanted to share with you a few of my recent glimmers, in hopes that they shine some light through the challenging times we all have to navigate in our vitally important work ensuring that every child academically thrives. 

• I was on a call with HMH leaders led by guest speaker Dr. Rictor Craig. He’s Head of Schools and cofounder for the Statesmen College Preparatory Academy for Boys, and he graciously shared his story of how the school was built with the voice of the student in mind, and then he introduced us to a group of his student scholars. Dr. Craig then moved out of view so that his students could take center stage, and our conversation with them was deep, illuminating, and amazing in many ways, not least of which being the maturity and seriousness on display by the students, who all faced the moment of speaking to a large group of adults they didn’t know with a poise far beyond what would be expected for eighth graders. Talking with them was a powerful glimmer all on its own, but an extra glimmer bubbled up when Dr. Craig occasionally chimed in to clarify a point. The way he did it, using his desk chair with wheels to sloooowly roll into the foreground of the frame, smiling about his comical intrusion, made us all laugh on our side of the call, and brought smiles to the faces of all his students. Every few minutes, having fun with how his photobombing looked to us and to his students, he rolled in and out of the frame and dropped some words of wisdom and support for his students. It was clear that his students appreciated who—and how—he is, how his work is grounded in play and joy and a genuine sense of caring for his students.
• Throughout this wonderful conversation, the Statesmen scholars shared insights into their impressive academic growth and growth as leaders. One phrase in particular came up again and again. Each scholar reiterated it with sincerity and with an understanding of how it helped them succeed: Ask for help. We’re lifting each other, lifting as we climb. One of the scholars said what he would tell a younger struggling student, a younger version of himself: “You matter. Your voice matters.”
• I was recently sitting with my grandson Troy and reading my current favorite book to him. The book is called The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy, and it beautifully encourages readers to live courageously and with kindness and to ask for help. I’ve been telling everyone about it—literally everyone—my husband, my friends, my coworkers, and most especially my six precocious and precious grandbabies. While reading the book to Troy, I thought about all I wanted to do to make sure he grows, feels secure, and keeps growing and feeling all the possibilities in life. I come to this line, and we read it together: “Always remember you matter, you’re important and you are loved, and you bring to this world things no one else can.”

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Find free resources for supporting students’ mental health and more on HMH’s blog Shaped.