Chazz Scott had it all. The successful career as a cybersecurity expert. The six-figure salary. The well-appointed condo overlooking the Potomac River and the high-end luxury car. From the outside, life looked good, but appearances can be deceiving, and they masked Scott’s inner turmoil.

He was burned out at work and battled depression. He felt hollow and lacked passion for the things that once fueled his ambition and joy. While searching for ways to shake the malaise, Scott thought back to reading The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale in college. The self-help book made him realize he could change his current reality simply by changing his mindset.

Scott knew he needed to focus on what was good in his life to create a positive energy that would build momentum toward fulfillment and contentment. It was a straight-forward concept, but Scott’s science-based mind craved supporting evidence. He dove into researching neuroscience and discovered the fundamental elements of positive psychology, a relatively new field of study that helps people achieve higher levels of happiness and reach their true potential.

Scott was fascinated by the field’s intersection with neuroscience, particularly as it relates to the study of neuroplasticity.

“For many years, it was widely assumed that people were stuck with their current way of thinking,” says Scott, who grew up in Ellicott City. “But we now know that the brain is capable of change through new thoughts and behaviors. With repetition and consistency, new neuropathways are created and older, less-used pathways become weaker.”

About eight years ago, Scott began to incorporate positive psychology into his life by establishing a morning routine that prioritizes his physical and mental well-being. He wakes up at 5:30 a.m., goes for a brief jog, and completes stretching exercises before meditating for 20 minutes. He then carves out time for reading or listening to a podcast.

This combination of movement, mindfulness, and mental growth sets a positive tone for his day and keeps him feeling balanced and productive. The seemingly minor steps resulted in gradual but profound changes to the way Scott viewed and lived his life.

“I feel happier, more resilient and better equipped to handle challenges that come my way,” he says. “Understanding that we all have the innate ability to change our mindset is incredibly empowering. It provides hope for something more.”

The nation’s mental health crisis and corporate burnout epidemic suggest millions of adults and adolescents need help in their own search for more. That’s where positive psychology comes in. Its empirical study of the factors that allow some of us to thrive while others search endlessly for life’s true meaning helps to define true happiness and how to achieve it.

Positive psychology was popularized by Drs. Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the late 1990s as a departure from psychology’s traditional disease model, which focuses exclusively on treating mental disorders. Positive psychology does not address behavioral or emotional dysregulation and is not a substitute for treating severe mental illness. Instead, its interventions grow positive emotions and resources that help people maximize their true potential.

Dr. Seligman believes psychology should be just as concerned with human strength as it is with human weakness, and that it should focus on amplifying the best things in life while nurturing people’s innate talents.

“Positive psychology’s traits are skills that can be learned and strengthened, much like any other ability,” says Carly Hunt, who earned her PhD in counseling psychology from the University of Maryland, where she was the faculty instructor of a course called Living the Good Life: The Psychology of Happiness. “With intentional practice, you can cultivate more gratitude in your life.”

Hunt played collegiate golf as an undergraduate at Georgetown University and as a graduate student at the University of Maryland. What she might have lacked in physical talent she more than made up for with mental toughness.

“I’ve always been fascinated with sports psychology, positive self-talk, and the mental resilience athletes need to perform well,” she says.

At Georgetown, Hunt also took a Buddhist studies class. The coursework introduced her to mindfulness, self-compassion, loving kindness, and similar practices that led her to pursue a PhD at Maryland. Over the course of getting her PhD and doing a postdoctoral fellowship in biobehavioral pain research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, she studied positive psychology’s impact on physical health and the mind-body connection.

Part of Hunt’s current work as the owner of Present Mind Consulting involves helping driven professionals and high-end talent build the confidence and motivation they need to achieve their goals. She works with performers, sports teams, and artists to address mental health challenges and cultivate personal strengths. She also collaborates with companies to develop strategies that enhance employee well-being and foster a healthier work environment.

Hunt works closely with Christopher Steer, who earned his law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law and now runs a consulting firm that helps companies achieve higher levels of organizational performance. Steer initially grasped the importance of positive leadership as an undergrad captain of the Johns Hopkins lacrosse team. That realization was reinforced by reading the book Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which introduced him to the idea of stimulus and response, and how the space between them is where growth, joy, happiness, and contentment happen.

“Personal evolution involves focusing on the things we can control rather than feeling like life is happening to us,” says Steer. “If you’re not getting the results you want, it’s time to explore a different path.”

Positivity—or good vibes, in the colloquial—is important, and people need to maximize their inner strengths, but Steer believes these feel-good ideas must link to tangible results. He says research reveals that executives and managers who lead with positivity drive better performance among their teams. That’s why high-level executives are increasingly interested in engaging in conversations about psychology, energy, and engagement. They’re realizing it’s not only acceptable but increasingly essential to embrace these concepts.

“Business leaders have started having conversations about emotional intelligence and the principles of positive psychology in the world of organizational development,” says Steer. “Modern neuroscience and psychology have finally converged within long-standing intuitions. Now, we can bring them together in a way that’s more accepted and impactful.”

Steer points to Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft. When Nadella took over the company, he instituted a people-focused approach and introduced Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success as required reading.

“Microsoft talking about mindset? That’s a game-changer,” says Steer. “The right influencers, backed by solid research, can shift an organization’s culture.”

Positive psychology is no replacement for competitive salaries, good benefits, and the opportunity for professional growth, but Steer says research now reveals that corporate executives who lead with positivity drive better performance, retention, and development.

“You can’t commoditize dealing with people,” he adds, “but the ability to manage the human variable is becoming the most valuable skill.”

“Positive psychology helps people build on their strengths or resilience resources like mindfulness, rewarding social connections, and compassion toward self and others.”

As we all know, life isn’t always easy. Hardships happen. Challenges are inevitable. In that sense, the term “positive psychology” is a bit of a misnomer. The practice is not concerned with papering over negative experiences. It’s more about finding tools to cope with negative experiences and even grow from painful events or adversity.

“Positive psychology helps people build on their strengths or resilience resources like mindfulness, rewarding social connections and compassion toward self and others,” says Hunt. “These resources help us withstand challenges and even thrive when facing them.”

Chazz Scott tuned his passion for positive psychology into the launch of Supra Mentem, a consulting business that specializes in helping executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals improve their overall well-being, reach peak performance, and achieve sustainable success. He emphasizes that embracing gratitude and experiencing positive emotions doesn’t involve ignoring life’s difficulties or being overly optimistic.

“Many of us don’t have effective coping strategies in place, so when stress occurs, we don’t know how to deal with it,” says Scott. “I’m now able to recognize when stress levels rise. I know to begin breathing exercises or meditation to get my body back to a state of balance. Having a set of practices to fall back on is essential for effectively managing life’s ups and downs.”

Scott has coached health care professionals, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, to reduce the negative impact of burnout. He’s also worked with successful professionals who are striving to achieve a better life balance. Many of them are mid-career, feeling disengaged and stressed, and realizing that their current work habits are unsustainable.

“They no longer feel fulfilled and may be contemplating a career change or questioning whether they are on the right path,” says Scott. “They seek guidance to restore balance and find a sense of purpose in their personal and professional lives.”

He knows from experience that positive psychology can help encourage professionals to reconnect with their true selves.

“When you align with your personal wellness, even if the job isn’t the right fit, you can still improve your experience,” says Scott. “You can evaluate whether the job is something you still want or confirm that it’s time for a change. Focusing on your wellbeing allows you to make decisions with more clarity and greater confidence.”

Scott is also focused on addressing the youth mental health crisis through Positively Caviar, a grassroots nonprofit he launched to teach positive thinking and optimism to kids in underserved communities throughout Baltimore.

Joan Wharton runs a mentorship program in conjunction with the Baltimore City Public Schools and partnered with Scott to lead a series of workshops for the girls at Cherry Hill Middle School.

“Chazz is very impressive and brought an energy that resonated with the girls,” says Wharton. “He met them where they were, and gradually helped raise them to another level. He taught them that the way they think shapes the way they act, and that what they feed their mind, soul, and spirit shows in their actions and attitudes.”

Scott’s workshops discussed personal growth and self-care. “His messaging focused on developing a positive mindset be- cause the way the girls think can influence their behavior and the outcomes they experience,” says Wharton. “Having a positive mindset allows them to grow through empowerment and enlightenment and encourages them to build a strong foundation for their future.”

Weekly workshops aren’t going to solve the world’s problems, but Scott understands the importance of introducing tools to impressionable kids that help them cope with challenging situations.

“My goal is to make sure they recognize that they have the agency to control what they think and feel,” he says. “It’s about giving them the ability to respond to their emotions in a healthy way.”

“As we know, life isn’t easy. Hardships happen. In that sense, ‘positive psychology’ is a bit of a misnomer. But the practice isn’t concerned with papering over negative experiences. It’s about finding tools to cope and even grow from pain or adversity.”

Interest in positive psychology is gaining traction among people who want to perform their best, regardless of their field or profession. But that doesn’t mean positivity can be pursued without consistent and intentional effort. Maximizing one’s potential demands daily focus and work.

“People rarely set aside the time and space in their lives to improve upon their strengths and virtues,” says Hunt. “Cultivating inner strengths and mental qualities that support happiness is something many of us long for and yet we often find ourselves racing toward the future, believing it holds some level of positivity that the present moment lacks.”

Even something as simple as jotting down three good things that happened throughout the day in a gratitude journal can be a powerful practice. Or you can practice “savoring,” which involves intentionally noticing and holding a positive experience in your awareness for 20 to 30 seconds, allowing yourself to fully absorb it. You might even visualize the positive feeling filling you.

The benefits of these practices have been studied extensively, according to Hunt, who says dedicating five to 10 minutes a day to them can be transformative over time. Our brains naturally focus on the negative. Practices like gratitude, savoring, or acts of kindness help shift this bias, pulling us away from threat-focused thinking and into a mindset of greater positivity and altruism.

Meditation and mindfulness, which encourage being fully present in the moment, reinforce these benefits.

“What inspires me most is the universal application of positive psychology’s practices,” says Hunt. “We all strive for authentic happiness and fulfillment. At the end of the day, that’s at the core of what we want most in life.”

An estimated 60 million Americans experienced a mental-health related illness in the past year, and some researchers believe roughly half of the U.S. population will encounter one at least some time in their life.

For many, traditional front-line treatments like talk therapy and medications such as antidepressants—which have been found to help roughly two-thirds of the population—are effective. But for others, alternative options have been limited until recently.

Some treatments are newer than others. Psychedelics, for example, are ancient but remain taboo in many circles. Much like the brain itself, many are just starting to be understood.

“We can take pictures and try to measure some things, but the brain is a little harder to study than other areas of the body, because it’s obviously inside of our skull and it’s hard to access,” says Trish Carlson, a psychiatrist at Sheppard Pratt.

The following innovative treatments, practiced and researched locally, show promise to help meet the challenge.

TRUST THE PROCESS
Eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, can calm the brain to help you make sense of trauma, anxiety, and stress.

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A black plastic bar, about to be illuminated with green dots, rests on a tripod a few feet away. You’re handed a pair of mouse-sized buzzers, told to think of your distressing thought and follow a speck of light as it moves from left to right and back again. The buzzers occasionally stimulate your hands.

The sequence moves quickly. It can be difficult to keep up. After 10 seconds or so, a clinician pauses everything, asks you to briefly share what you’re thinking now, if you’re still stressed at a level 10. Repeat. Again. For up to an hour, or maybe even another session, until you report you’re feeling closer to zero—calm—while thinking of what’s been bothering you.

This is what eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, looks like at Bolton Therapy & Wellness in Bolton Hill, one place you can find the mental health treatment technique that can help heal trauma or other troubling experiences.

The process, which can include tapping opposite sides of the body or listening to sounds, mimics natural dual attention (or bilateral) stimulation in the body thought to help the brain properly store and process distressing memories.

The eye movement and other stimuli are “calming the right brain that’s feeling the anxiousness and bringing onboard the left brain that’s reasonable,” says Lisa Robinson, the practice director at Bolton. “At the end, you don’t have the same agitation, physical sensations, or arousal due to the memory, and you can move on.”

Developed in the late 1980s by New York-based psychologist Dr. Francine Shapiro, who found that walking paired with moving her eyes back and forth eased her distress, EMDR has since been found to help people cope with PTSD, anxiety, stress, phobias, addiction, and to rewire memory networks in adults and children.

“It’s changed my practice,” says Dr. Desyree Dixon, who founded Bolton in 2013, got trained in EMDR in 2019, and now teaches others to use the method. “Sometimes I want to reach out to some of my earlier clients and say, ‘Come back, let’s work on some of these things using this new tool.’”

IT’S ELECTRIC
Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a non-invasive, in-office potential solution for treatment-resistant depression.

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Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, can be a relatively simple, life-changing choice for those with treatment-resistant depression. (Patients who qualify have tried at least two antidepressants that have not proven effective.)

Transcranial means across or through the skull. With TMS, a magnetic coil is positioned over the head that delivers electrical pulses one to two centimeters deep, usually to stimulate a part of the left side of the brain (the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex) that’s been found to be underactive in people with depression.

So long as patients don’t have epilepsy or seizure disorder or metal in the head or neck, the treatment is considered safe and delivered under the guidance of a doctor, nurse, or trained technician. Patients sit in a chair for roughly 20 minutes a day, five days a week, for five or six weeks, and let the machine work. There’s a three-minute protocol that’s also effective.

“What it’s thought to do, in the same way that we think oral medications work, is change the neurotransmitter balance in the brain,” says Trish Carlson, a psychiatrist and service chief of the TMS program at Sheppard Pratt in Towson.

She notes that everything in our brain works off electrical energy. “TMS is focusing directly on the area of the brain we think needs to be rebalanced.”

The noninvasive procedure is thought to rebalance neurotransmitters in the brain like serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine, that help to regulate mood, and increase blood flow in the targeted area.

The FDA approved TMS as a major depression treatment in 2008 and Carlson says the majority of people will see some improvement. Research shows that roughly one in four patients experience full remission and about half enjoy partial relief, with about two-thirds still feeling better a year later.

Most insurances cover TMS use for depression. In 2018, the FDA also approved it for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder by way of targeting a circuit across both sides of the brain while a patient is asked to think of, or be exposed to, what makes them anxious. More research is being done relative to cognitive disorders, addiction, and PTSD.

REALITY SHIFT
Psychedelics still have limited legal use for mental health, but that could be changing.

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You don’t need to travel far to realize Baltimore is an epicenter of psychedelic research. Johns Hopkins Hospital has a research center that’s been dedicated to psychedelics for the last two decades and at Sheppard Pratt, the Institute for psilocybin has been exploring uses since 2022. And beyond those institutions, there’s a local community exploring the potential mental health benefits of psychedelics’ mind-altering power.

David Jun Selleh, a psychotherapist and licensed clinical professional counselor at Inner Path Wellness in Mt. Washington, for instance, is a part of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s task force—established in 2024 as the seventh of its kind in the U.S.—due to deliver policy recommendations for psychedelics from mushrooms and plants to state legislators by the end of July.

“Generally, all psychedelics induce neuroplasticity in the brain,” Selleh explains, “the growth of new cells—which allows for new ways of thinking and new perspectives. When you combine that with [talk] therapy, it breaks everything open to possibilities.”

He’s sitting on a couch at Inner Path, alongside University of Maryland, Baltimore alumna Lauren Going, who co-founded the city’s first psychedelic-assisted therapy center in 2022.

Here patients are given an eye mask, headphones, a mat, and a private room to sustain them on their travels, and as soon as four minutes after receiving a supervised injection of the psychedelic drug ketamine, they usually experience the peak of what’s typically a 45 minute to hour-long “journey,” says Selleh.

It’s a hallucinogenic trip often described as an out-of-body experience. Ketamine, primarily a synthetic drug used legally for decades as a general anesthetic, creates a surge of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain. At Inner Path, ketamine is used off-label for treatment-resistant depression, suicidality, or other mental health disorders.

With a low psycholytic dose, people can think and speak clearly while they’re under the influence. With a higher dose, after patients return to reality, a second hour of talk therapy follows, the idea being the trip can spur more lasting change.

Times and tastes have changed since the heyday of the Grateful Dead and in the roughly 50 years since most psychedelics were outlawed by President Richard Nixon in what became known as the War on Drugs. Names like “magic mushrooms,” (psilocybin), LSD, or MDMA still get a bad reputation. Ketamine is also still known as the “Special K” party drug.

But psychedelics, which some archeologists say humans may have experienced tens of thousands of years ago, delivered in a supervised clinical setting have shown great promise.

In 2019, the FDA approved a ketamine nasal spray for major depression. The Department of Defense is funding psychedelic research for veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Additional legal pathways for uses could be coming. The 19-member state task force of which Selleh is a part won’t directly change the regulatory status of any psychedelics, but their recommendations could be a catalyst.

“There is rising support,” Selleh says. “People are hearing enough to know there’s something to this.”

As a young girl growing up in Washington, D.C., Kay Jamison was intense, curious, and had a keen fascination with science. She volunteered as a nurse’s aide, a candy striper, and even assisted with minor surgical procedures at the hospital at Andrews Air Force Base, where her father was a pilot and meteorologist.

At 15, she toured a federal psychiatric hospital, St. Elizabeths in the District of Columbia, for the first time, which she says she found “fascinating and horrifying,” not knowing that she, too, would soon suffer from own mental illness.

And while Jamison had always had a passionate personality, by the time she was a senior at Pacific Palisades High School in suburban Los Angeles, she found her moods shifting between two extremes—exhilarating highs and dark, unyielding lows. That pattern continued for years, though she never sought help or intervention.

It wasn’t until 1974 (just three months after becoming an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles) when she became, in her words, so “ravingly psychotic” that she could no longer ignore the fact that something was terribly wrong.

That something was bipolar illness, then known as manic depression. It was, in fact, a disease she was all too familiar with thanks to her patients whom she diagnosed (and her own father who struggled with the illness). And though she shared her diagnosis with colleagues and close friends, her illness was largely a secret.

After years of serious struggle, a near-lethal suicide attempt, and always a fear of being “discovered,” in 1995, Jamison wrote An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, an astonishing account of what it’s like to live with bipolar illness.

As both a student of the disease and someone who struggled with it, the stakes could not have been higher. Because she was afraid of the way her work would be perceived, Jamison knew that telling her truth would mean giving up her clinical practice, by then at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. She also feared that publicly sharing her story would lead to losing her hospital privileges or, even worse, her medical license.

It did not. Instead, she revolutionized the field, becoming one of the most famous faces of the illness (along with a long line of luminaries who suffered from bipolar disorder, including writer Sylvia Plath, poet Robert Lowell, and composer Gustav Mahler) and one of the foremost authorities in the world on the disorder, even co-authoring the definitive medical text on the topic.

The acclaim, however, has not made her immune from detractors. As she writes in a 2011 preface to An Unquiet Mind, 15 years after the book’s first printing, “The kindness and generosity of most people was heartening, the vitriol and irrationality from others disturbing.”

Thirty years since the publication of her groundbreaking book, we spoke with Jamison (now professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center) about stigma, how to prevent it, and how views about mental illness have changed since she wrote her memoir.

Do you remember the day you were diagnosed with bipolar illness, which was then known as manic depression?
I went to a psychiatrist who had been my clinical supervisor when I was an intern and I trusted him implicitly as a doctor. He was the only one I trusted to go see and he just gave me a very thorough psychiatric examination. He said, “It’s unequivocal. You have manic-depressive illness. You are going to need to be on lithium”—and that was the beginning of struggling with that notion of taking lithium. Overwhelmingly, I was relieved because I knew he was right and I admired him for not mousing around about it and not prettying it up and just saying, “This is going to be really hard.”

Was there a light-bulb moment when you decided to write An Unquiet Mind?
Some of it was that I felt hypocritical treating and studying the illness and not acknowledging that I had it. Also, I got fed up, hurt, and overwhelmed by the lack of information about how many people have bipolar illness and how unaware the world is in general.

When did you start thinking about the impact of sharing your story?
All along, and certainly when I was going to publish a book about my illness, I thought about it endlessly. Would I lose my job? Would I lose my hospital license? Would I lose my state license? I knew I would lose my privacy and I knew I would lose my ability to see patients.

Was any part of you reluctant to share?
Of course—and I still am. I am trained to be a therapist and I loved it. It was a huge part of my clinical identity. I practiced close to 20 years, including clinical training before giving it up.

Why did you feel you’d lose the privilege of seeing patients for sharing your story?
I had written a very personal book. I had practiced before [the book was written] and had told people about my illness and also colleagues with whom I’d worked to feel free to contact my psychiatrist and chief of my department if there were any concerns whatsoever. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. My book was terribly personal and I think patients have a right to come into your office and talk about their own problems without putting it through the whole kind of strange way of looking at it from someone who has written a book about it.

Where does stigma come from?
“Stigma” is a word I really don’t like, I prefer the word “discrimination,” partly because it has legal implications but one uses stigma because it’s widely used.

So where does discrimination come from?
If you look at the animal world in general, whether you look at a dolphin or a sea lion who is strange to a group, that will be picked up immediately—and the animals will respond accordingly. It’s a natural reaction when things are different. It’s not surprising that when people act in ways that are not usual or ways that make people frightened or hopeless, people are going to distance themselves from it. I feel very strongly where our field [of medicine] has let all of us down is that you can’t just expect people to understand—that is unreasonable. What you can do is give them information with which to possibly change their mind.

How do you prevent discrimination?
The greatest way to destigmatize any illness, and particularly with a psychiatric illness, is with research and good treatment. If you look around you in medicine and you look at epilepsy, for example, it’s not that there’s not still stigma around it but there’s much less stigma than there used to be. And that started when you could begin to control public seizures. And with something like cancer in the ’50s, when it was pretty much a death sentence for many kinds of cancers, people wouldn’t talk about it—and now it’s treatable, so they talk about it much more.

What is the impact of stigma?
The most devastating impact is that people don’t get treatment. They feel alone with their suffering and they feel like they don’t want to reach out and others don’t understand or their licenses are going to be pulled or they are going to lose a job or a relationship—and those are all very legitimate reasons. And then, of course, people stigmatize themselves by saying, “I should be able to pull myself together.” This seems much more a part of personality than other medical illnesses. It seems like you ought to be able to get over it by dint of will.

When you got sick, was your line of thinking that you should “just be able to handle it”?
At some point it became clear I was ill and that I was not anywhere near myself. It took a while. I was brought up like many people to believe that you could just get a grip—I was brought up Episcopalian and in a military family and in worlds that put a real premium on coping with something yourself and getting on with it. And that’s completely not helpful. It’s a good philosophy of life in general, it’s just not a good philosophy of life when you are ill.

Do you see things changing in terms of discrimination?
I do. The things that have helped psychiatric illnesses is that there are many more treatments available than there used to be. And people are much more aware of it than they used to be. General physicians are more aware of it, too. And people in general are aware that there are antidepressants and you can go to a doctor and maybe get some help. People talk about it more. And thanks to the internet, people can learn much more about it.

People are better informed than they used to be, but I also think there’s a huge amount of misinformation and a lot of terrible attitudes. If you look at the language in the public arena in politics, you can say people are “crazy,” “come from insane asylums,” or are “nutty as a fruitcake.” People can say things about those with mental illness that you could never say about any other large group. That’s painful for people.

How did the pandemic impact people who were struggling?
One of the things that happened during the pandemic is that people became much more aware of the extent of mental illness around them, because they were in day-to-day contact with their kids in a way in which they are ordinarily not—so they saw the illness. But it has also had a tendency, perhaps, to trivialize—everything is “anxiety” and “depression” in a general, somewhat ill-defined way.

There’s all these sloshing around of concepts together that take away from the notion of illness. People say, “mental health issues” instead of mental illness. I suppose it’s meant to be less stigmatizing and more normalizing. But it’s confusing. I just think that the language has gotten mushy.

You were diagnosed while in training. How have you seen attitudes toward seeking help change within the medical community?
Residency programs are doing better than they used to and are more aware of depression and stress. It’s up to medical students and medical school faculty to make education about depression a priority so that students recognize symptoms if they get them—or can recognize them in their colleagues. It’s better now than it was, but it’s still pretty minimal.

Your memoir was published 30 years ago. Would you do anything differently now?
Probably not—you have to write what you have in front of you in terms of your life. You are not given the opportunity to go back and change things.

What advice would you give to your younger self and what do wish you knew then?
I went off my medication on and off for the first few years of my illness but that was very costly, there was tremendous loss, and I haven’t stopped my medication for decades, but I regret that hugely.

What personal price did you pay for going off your medication?
Getting manic, getting depressed again, getting suicidal, nearly dying by suicide.

What’s your advice to anyone who is struggling or who loves someone who is?
Learn. Read. Be aware that good treatment exists and that the consequences of not getting treatment are pretty awful.

Growing up in Chicago, Nicole Clark was steeped in the visual arts. But by adulthood, she had given up her creative pursuits, except for some occasional writing.

“It was a desert of creativity for many years,” says Clark, who moved to Baltimore in 2010 for better job opportunities. But after a divorce at the age of 30, Clark returned to her creative life. “It came out of necessity for my mental health,” she says. “I was not aware that I was in a season of depression.”

One day, Clark found some abandoned wood panels and took them home to use as a canvas for her paint. “I did not have a community in Baltimore at the time,” she says. “I needed artwork for the apartment I moved to after my divorce. I was like, ‘I’ll make art for my walls.’ Initially, in the absence of having a community, it was feeding my soul,” she says.

Some 11 years later, it’s taken on an even deeper meaning.

“It took me years to understand the creative process and the healing that can bring,” explains Clark. “My work is a lot like writing an essay: You write to answer a question, but sometimes you don’t know what the question is. My paintings are a means for me to understand what’s going on beneath the surface. Once I finish a piece and step back, it’s a reflection of a question that was ruminating. As my creative processes have crystallized, I began to realize my art was like my writing—it was a portal to understand what was happening at a subconscious level.”

Below, Clark gives us a deeper look at the process behind two of her works.

King of Sorrow

“King of Sorrow originated when I was doing research on Norse mythology and I found this symbol for the Valkyrie. I decided that the female warrior was going to be the ethos of the piece. I didn’t have a studio at the time, so I was painting in the basement of my apartment building.

“It was winter and it was dark. I can look back now and see that I was going through a very, very dark depression. I was struggling with suicidal ideation and really lost my sense of identity. I was trying to will this female empowerment, this Valkyrie, but the composition of the piece wasn’t working.

“As part of my process, I would turn the canvases around. One night I flipped the canvas and stared it for a while. As I stared at it, I saw this profile, this silhouette of a closed eye and a tear coming down. At that time my neighbor and I would have porch sits and she’d play guitar and she played Sade’s ‘King of Sorrow’—I’d never heard the song before. I started crying quietly.

“Later that week, I had that song on repeat while I was finishing the piece. That was the song that informed putting the crown on the image—I was trying to will a sense of hope in my own life and I was playing with genders, as well—a woman can be a King of Sorrow. I was trying to add this sense of majesty and honor to the darkness with the crown.

“Painting it was a means to give form to this otherwise murky time. It is probably one of the most powerful pieces I’ve ever done and gave some meaning and purpose to that dark time.”

I Took Apart the Sky for You

“My brother who dabbles in music had just written these lyrics, ‘I took apart the sky for you and left it there for you to see,’ which became the name of the piece. He was the one I called and who continued to check on me and offered me an affirming experience of reaching out and encouraged me to get help in a really powerful way.

“He was the one who really helped me in the moment. He was not afraid to ask the hard questions—and when he asked me how I was, he was willing to hear an answer of ‘not that great.’

“He went to hell and back to help me understand joy again. For me, ‘I Took Apart the Sky for You’ means showing unconditional love and the lengths that I felt my brother would go to help me.”

While sound baths have been around for thousands of years, they’ve enjoyed a recent surge in popularity. Despite the name, a sound bath does not entail the use of water. Instead, the client lies prone on a yoga mat as the teacher creates sounds that “wash” over them. It’s up for debate whether this ancient practice started in India, Egypt, or Greece, but one thing is for sure: Sound baths can be an effective form of meditation.

To learn more, we spoke with Susan Selckman, owner of Updog Studios, a yoga studio in Towson that hosts several sound baths a year.

So what is a sound bath?
A sound bath is an immersive sound experience linked to rest and healing energies. Different instruments are played, from gongs to singing bowls to rain sticks to drums. Sound baths have become popular as a way for people to have another method to restore energetically. The idea is to reach a deeper level of relaxation and reset with sound frequencies at various decibels.

What are the benefits of a sound bath?
People are looking for a different way to find some peace and rest—this is just another way to bring them there. It helps with sleep, both the level and depth of sleep for days after—I consistently hear that. People are seeking some form of release. They might not be ready to take a yoga class; even if it’s gentle, there are instructions to follow. With a sound bath, where you just lie there, the work—and it can be work—is to surrender.

Why have sound baths become a recent trend in the wellness community?
People are so tattered that they are looking to create ease in their life. Ever since the pandemic, a lot of people would love to go into some type of therapy, but they’re told, “There’s a three-month wait, and you’ll need to self-pay”—tell that to someone who is already not in the best mental place. A sound bath is not a replacement for therapy, but people are just looking to see if something like this can help.

When deciding where to go, what should we keep in mind?
Trusting where you go is important. The person who is playing the instruments must understand how to keep the instruments under control—it can get away from you and get loud. If that happens, it can completely disrupt the experience. It’s also important to be receptive. If you go into this thinking, “It’s hokey,” you’re not going to have the best experience.

Can’t we just do this at home?
There are some amazing meditation apps out there, like Calm and Headspace, but it’s hard to get out of our own way. People will say, “I can do that at home,” and I’ll say, “Awesome, do you?” The answer is usually no.

WHAT YOU NEED

Yoga Mat: A well-cushioned mat provides a soft place to land.

Bolster: Props keep you comfortable and help absorb the sound.

Hydrate: Drink a cup or so of water prior to your sound bath—you don’t want to interrupt the experience once it starts.

Amie Ward came up with the concept of becoming “The Healthtender” when she realized that people in the hospitality industry, especially bartenders, were under an enormous amount of physical and mental stress. Both alcoholism and even suicide were alarmingly prevalent in her industry. She decided to combine her background as a bartender with her 20 years of training in the physical fitness and wellness arena to create a program specifically tailored to those folks behind the bar.

Why did you see a need for mental health and wellness resources in the hospitality industry?
I started my programming back in 2015 because I had been seeing this disconnect between the amount of labor that we put in each day as bartenders, but how little we were taking care of ourselves. We’ve lost people in the industry as a result of suicide or because of complications from alcoholism, and that kind of took it to the next step of teaching people about trying to be a little bit more mindful about the way that they’re drinking and what’s actually happening to your body on a physical level when you’re drinking.

Was there a pivotal experience that made you realize you wanted to start improving the industry?
The Baltimore Bartenders Guild would do a monthly education event, and in December of 2015, I got up to talk about how to give yourself proper nutrition when you’re on a marathon shift. This woman named Lindsey Johnson, who runs a company called Lush Life Productions, was there. And she’s like, “You have to do this,” and that kind of inspired me to start putting together my business plan for The Healthtender.

How did it feel to be recognized as someone who could supply a need for not just your community, but the global bartender community?
There was definitely validation. I want people to feel good in their skin, I want people to feel good with their bodies and just be able to listen to their bodies and really understand that better. It’s been wild and it’s been awesome and I’m so happy that I do this.

What are some of the services that you offer to bartenders?
Lots of movement classes, stretching classes, mobility classes, boxing, because I love boxing. But my biggest thing and the thing I’m most proud of is being able to make classes that are adapted to every type of body. So making people who would never find themselves in any kind of gym setting or whatever feel really comfortable about it. I’m not a nutritionist, but I can teach people how to meal-plan. I am a Mental Health First Aid instructor as well.

What do you recommend as a good first step for bartenders if they are interested in improving their overall wellness?
Would you like to eat a little bit better? Would you like to move your body better? Would you like to feel less pain? I think taking a mental inventory of what’s going on in your world is a good start. I love when people just come to talk to me first because I always will talk to people for free without any reservation to find out what their needs are and kind of send them in the right direction.

How would you describe the community you’ve built?
This is just a group of humans that genuinely care, support, and want to see each other survive, thrive, and grow in their own journeys. It’s just so supportive, and it’s really the way that I want to see the industry going when it comes to mental health and being able to create that community literacy on the topic of de-stigmatizing sobriety, addiction, and the pursuit of mental health.

What are your hopes for the restaurant and hospitality industry in the future?
I really want a shape-shifting of the entire culture and the landscape of hospitality. I want health insurance to be a normal thing. I want five-day workweeks or 40-hour workweeks to be a normal thing. I want owners to pay their bartenders appropriate equitable wages. I want people who are generally more vulnerable as a population or in a marginalized identity put to the forefront so they can actually be the leaders that they were designed to be. I want the hospitality industry to prioritize people rather than profits.

By Jane Marion

Photography by Mike Morgan

 

On a quintessential cool and crisp October morning, Victor and Lynne Brick stand in shavasana, or resting pose, as they finish up their morning yoga class with a private instructor inside their newly built labyrinth. The labyrinth—an elaborate, winding gravel path with stone borders—faces southwest, says Victor, because, particular to their property, that direction channels positive energy and a sense of well-being. Indeed, this is the spot where they center themselves and meditate before the beginning of a busy day.

Morning exercise is followed by what Lynne calls a daily “two- sipper” swig of Veuve Clicquot mixed with orange juice and poured into a Planet Fitness-branded Champagne flute as a way of welcoming the day.

“So many people wait to drink mimosas when they’re on vacation,” says Victor. “So we have this tiny little mimosa every morning because it’s a celebration. It’s a sign to ourselves and to the universe—we celebrate life. L’chaim,” he says, invoking the Jewish toast meaning “to life.” “It’s just a tiny symbol.”

Though they spend most of their time at an oceanfront South Beach, Florida, condominium, their palatial Timonium brick (of course) family home, with its soaring Corinthian columns, a large deck and hot tub overlooking six acres, a home gym, an Infrared sauna, a pool, and a tennis court, is something of a touchstone. It’s also where they spent the height of the COVID-19 outbreak. And getting the labyrinth built was one of their pandemic projects.

“We turned our sunroom into a yoga studio, did yoga on the deck, we swam, we played tennis, and we got back into our routine,” says Victor. “We made this our health club.”

For the Bricks, whose fit physiques, glowing complexions, and preternatural perkiness belie their age—he’s 69; she’s 66—it’s all about living a healthy (albeit wealthy) lifestyle. And they embrace it all, whether that means drinking protein shakes packed with collagen powder, turmeric, coconut water, almond milk, matcha, cacao, and other ingredients, or taking a custom combination daily of some 20 or so botanically based supplements based on their bloodwork and recommended by master herbologist Donald Yance.

“We don’t do guesswork,” says Victor, as Lynne loads collagen powder into the mixer. “We try, whenever possible, like everything we do in life, to quantify and maximize our results.”

And that also includes meeting with their feng shui guru, Hope Gerecht, whom the couple consults “on almost every major decision we make,” says Victor. “We ask Hope for her input on all things. She’s the one who determined the direction the labyrinth or the fountain outside our house should face, or which way we should face when we sign agreements, and which times are most advantageous to us for making business decisions, that kind of thing.”

While their devotion to self-care might sound a bit extreme, there’s a purpose behind their passion.

“The key is to die young, as old as possible,” jokes Victor, whose full name is C. (Charles) Victor Brick. (“Lynne thinks the ‘C’ stands for control,” cracks Victor. And yes, Brick is his real last name.)

“We do more in a day than most people do in a month, and the only way we can do that is to take care of ourselves. We built this house to nurture us so that we can do everything we need to do—we have so many people counting on us that we cannot fail.”

Suffice it to say that both Bricks, who met in 1974 while still students at Towson University, have always been the picture of health. In fact, they met at Burdick Hall, the gym on TU’s campus, where he was playing indoor basketball and she was walking with a group of girls on her way to dance practice.

“She walked through, and someone whistled,” Victor recalls, “and she turned around and smiled instead of ignoring them. She was the only one who smiled. I said to my friend, ‘See that girl? I’m going to marry her,’” Victor recounts. “I’d never seen her before, but it was that look in her eye. I was looking for a hardheaded woman.” (For her part, says Lynne with a laugh, “I wasn’t looking.”)

“I really felt that I needed a partner who could help me accomplish my greatness,” Victor says, “even though I had no idea what that would be at the time.”

FOR THE BRICKS, WHOSE PRETERNATURAL PERKINESS BELIES THEIR AGE, IT’S ALL ABOUT LIVING A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE.

That journey toward greatness began in earnest in 1985, when the Bricks founded Brick Bodies, the first of their eponymous gyms that tapped into the fitness-fueled zeitgeist of the times—think: aerobics, leg warmers, spandex—and helped them build an empire in the Baltimore area. In fact, by 1998, Self magazine deemed the duo “one of the foremost fitness couples in the country.”

While their local gyms were a huge success, the Brick Bodies brand was not known beyond these borders.

“It wasn’t scalable,” says Victor. So, the ambitious entrepreneurs turned to investing in Planet Fitness, the no-frills, low-budget centers whose “Judgment Free Zone” welcomes all shapes and sizes. By 2008, the couple started building Planet Fitness gyms at warp speed, initially, averaging 10 new clubs a year. To date, the Bricks own 82 Planet Fitness gyms (from Washington, D.C., to Washington State and even nine in Australia), making their centers the largest privately owned franchises in the system. In total, their Planet clubs boast 600,000 members (“almost the population of Baltimore City,” Victor notes).

To focus on their Planet franchises, in 2015, they handed the reins of Brick Bodies to their now-40-year-old daughter, Vicki Brick Zupancic, a former Division 1 and international basketball player, naming her CEO.

Their hard work has made them successful beyond their wildest dreams, which is also why they feel it’s so important to give back. In addition to running the gyms, they have donated their time and talents—and a small fortune—to the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation, which they founded as a way of honoring Victor’s oldest brother John, who died of complications from schizophrenia.

The Bricks say that they see giving back as yet another path to wellness. “Giving back is part of our DNA,” says Lynne. “Giving…is a sign of gratitude. And the more you give, the more you get—it feels good to give.”

Victor circles back to a favorite story in the Bible to bring home the point about sharing one’s fortune when you’ve been lucky enough to acquire one.

“There’s the story of the rich man who came to Jesus and asked what he could do to get in the Kingdom of Heaven,” says Victor. “And Jesus said, ‘Sell all that you have, give it to the poor, and follow me.’ And the man went away despondent for he was a rich man and had many possessions—people want to do it, but they just can’t. And then every now and then someone takes a stand for something. And they are the ones who change the world.”

This story resonates with Victor and Lynne personally—if you have something, give it away, make a difference, take a stand for something, and change the world along the way…

Despite outward appearances, life has not been all Champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Victor was born in Okinawa, Japan, to a Filipino mother and an American father, the fourth of five children. He spent his early years in Honolulu. When Victor was eight, his family moved to Silver Spring, where his dad, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, worked for the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks, and later the Washington Area Transit Authority, supervising the acquisition of real estate for the subway system.

When Victor was in middle school and his brother John was in high school, John was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Later, when his youngest brother, Bob, was in college, he, too, was diagnosed with the rare disease that strikes roughly one percent of the world’s population. “The NIH wanted to study the family and their genetics,” recalls Lynne.

Victor found solace and salvation through sports, first at Silver Spring Boys Club, then Silver Spring’s White Oak Junior High, and Springbrook High School. Athletics offered an avenue, at a time when anti-Asian sentiment ran high.

“We were people of color in a totally white community, not long after WWII. Sports were a way for us to prove ourselves—and we proved ourselves very well,” says Victor. “My brother Merrill played football and basketball and ran track, I played basketball and ran track, and John was a runner.”

Despite their heartache, the stress, and, in Victor’s words “constant crisis management,” the Bricks stayed strong as a family unit.

“We are firm believers that tough times don’t build character, they reveal it,” says Victor, his background as a motivational speaker evident in almost everything he says. “John pulled our family together. We rallied around John because of my parents. I saw how my mother was devoted to John every bit as much as she was to Merrill and me—and I followed suit.”

It was difficult for Victor. There was one time when he had to come to the rescue when Bob landed in jail after a psychotic episode in Canada. And he struggled watching John wreck car after car, unable to hold down a job, occasionally finding himself homeless. Nonetheless, Victor lights up when he talks about his brothers.

“John was always different,” he says. “He was always socially inappropriate, and I rarely ever remember him being happy, but he was brilliant, and he passed on his love of reading and history to me. He wrote this short story once, and I’ll never forget, he described this character as ‘marvelously gifted and tragically flawed’—that was my brother. I took all the great things from him, and I learned from them—and I tried to help him with his flaws.”

Through the turmoil, Victor says, it was Lynne, a former nurse at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland, who was his “rock.”

“I understood that it was mental illness,” says Lynne. “And with my nursing background and my DNA to care for other people, I knew that he couldn’t help it. When he had his issues, everyone in the family rallied—and I was part of the rally team to surround John with love.”

Victor and Lynne encouraged John to live a healthy lifestyle, as a companion to his medical care. “He didn’t get support or encouragement in that direction, not from the medical profession and not even from my parents, because that wasn’t deemed as very effective or important,” says Victor. Adds Lynne, “We tried to help John with lifestyle choices, getting sleep, exercise, nutrition—those were things he could have control over, but it got to a point where he refused to listen.”

By 2005, John was 62 years old and living in a trailer park in Port Orange, Florida, just outside of Daytona Beach and three miles down the road from his parents. “He began to withdraw from society and from contact with the outside world,” says Victor.

As John slipped deeper into psychosis, he began to believe that his illness was his punishment for sinning. “He blamed himself and felt he needed to do penance, and one of the ways he tried to absolve himself was to eliminate all the conveniences of modern life,” says Victor. “He had no radio, no television, then he got rid of the refrigerator, and then you’d go to see him, and he wouldn’t come out and would have to talk through the door. Finally, he got rid of an air conditioner in a metal trailer home in Florida in the middle of summer.”

On June 13, 2009, Victor’s father found his son’s body on the floor of that trailer. The temperature inside was 115 F.

“We think he died of heat stroke or a heart attack,” says Victor. “My mother refused to do an autopsy, but it was really schizophrenia that killed him. He fought it to a point and then gave up—that was the saddest thing for me, to see my brother give up.”

A few days later, at John’s funeral, as the family gathered inside the church, something shifted inside Victor. “I was just overwhelmed with emotion,” he recalls. “I was weeping inconsolably in the church. I looked around the church and there was no one to weep for my brother but my mother and our family. It was so sad. He was this beautiful person and yet he passed, and no one even knew that he existed. It was at my brother’s funeral that I said, ‘I will make sure they remember John and that others don’t have to go through what we are going through.’”

“WE ARE FIRM BELIEVERS THAT TOUGH TIMES DON’T BUILD CHARACTER, THEY REVEAL IT.”

True to his word, to honor his beloved brother, by 2015, the Bricks launched the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation. Since that time, the money they’ve donated has gone to running the operations of the organization, “so we have no overhead,” says Lynne. “And we will continue to make substantial personal contributions so all funds raised will go to research, programming, and services,” says Victor, who shies away from saying how much they’ve given, though it’s a considerable sum.

The foundation has a simple but lofty aspiration: to “put a dent in the universe,” in Victor’s words, and change the way the world treats mental health.

To that end, the foundation has taken a broader salutogenic, wellness-based approach to mental health (as opposed to pathogenic, which is illness-based)—including exercise, nutrition, and mind-body practices such as meditation—and integrating it along- side more traditional treatments like medication and therapy.

To hep run the foundation, in 2019, the Bricks hired Cassandra Vieten, a clinical psychologist and a leader in the field of mind-body research, as executive director.

Despite research that has proven that mind-body practices can change the physiology of the brain, the research has been long-ignored, says Vieten.

“We believe that mental health is an ecosystem,” she says. “If you look at it, many different things impact our mental health: nutrition, body movement, spirituality, meaning, and purpose…and yet when we go for mental health care, most of that is never brought up. We think this is not just an optional cherry on top of the sundae. [The mental health profession is] using a very rudimentary and narrow approach to addressing mental health—and it’s to our detriment.”

Since its founding, the foundation has taken on major projects, including awarding a $1.2-million grant to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), for a landmark study on the effects of “positive stress” (also known as good stress or eustress, which releases endorphins) on mental health.

“We tested women with either high stress or depression and tested the effects of high-intensity interval training, breathing techniques, and meditation,” says Elissa Epel, a professor and vice chair of adult psychology in the department of psychiatry at UCSF, which was the recipient of the grant. “What we found is that those things improve stress resilience. While we can’t eliminate stressful events from our lives, if we have a more positive [reaction], it serves as a buffer from the effects of stress.”

In addition to awarding the grant, the foundation created a seminal report, the Move Your Mental Health Report, to review the results of more than 1,400 scientific studies about the effect of movement on mental health, conducted over 30 years.

The conclusion? Exercise should be a part of a treatment plan for anyone with depression and anxiety. As a result of the report, there’s now an interactive database on the foundation’s website, for anyone to use, be it mental health professionals, policy makers, or families.

“These projects will give people a road map of what to do to improve people’s mental well-being, not just for those who have mental illness but for anyone,” says Victor. “For instance, if you have anxiety, you might need to do something more calming like yoga or qigong; if you’re depressed, cardiovascular exercise or structured group exercise is better for you. Our database will tell you that.”

Closer to home, the John W. Brick Foundation also awarded a grant to The Johns Hopkins Hospital, to donate equipment for an exercise room on the adolescent floor where John was an inpatient many years ago, and installed a fitness center at Arundel Lodge, a behavioral health center in Annapolis with a variety of support services. They’ve also given a significant grant to the National Center for Healthy Veteran’s Valor Farms, a residential integrative wellness center in Lynchburg, Virginia, for veterans suffering from PTSD.

“MANY DIFFERENT THINGS IMPACT
OUR MENTAL HEALTH: NUTRITION, BODY MOVEMENT, SPIRITUALITY, MEANING, AND PURPOSE.”

The foundation has an international presence as well. For the past two years, the John W. Brick Foundation has partnered with The Never Alone Summit, in collaboration with the Deepak Chopra Foundation’s #NeverAlone initiative, to produce a global gathering to support mental health during the pandemic. One hundred and twenty thousand people from 70 countries participated.

Alongside such luminaries as Chopra, aerospace surgeon Yvonne Cagle, and Surgeon General Richard Carmona, Victor and Lynne spoke together at the three-day summit, one of the largest gatherings of mental-health professionals, wellness experts, and brain scientists ever. There the Bricks received the prestigious Global Wellness Summit 2020 Debra Simon Award for Leadership in Mental Health for their work with the foundation.

“It was very rewarding,” says Victor. “It was a landmark event that indicated to Lynne and me that the foundation had arrived on the international stage—and that we were making a difference.”

As for the foundation’s future, the first six-and-a-half years have just been a warmup for what’s to come. “We have big plans,” says Vieten. “We’re just getting started,” adds Lynne.

In 2022 alone, the Bricks will fund several major scientific studies. Additionally, the foundation has provided a large grant to the Baltimore-based Holistic Life Foundation, a nonprofit organization that incorporates mind-body practices for children and adults in underserved communities. In May, the foundation will play a role in a summit featuring athletes and entertainers who have struggled with mental health.

Victor emphasizes that the foundation is not promoting the idea that exercise or meditation can replace the clinical treatment of one’s mental health, only that it should serve as a complement.

“We’re not advocating you don’t need meds,” says Victor, who, along with Lynne, is a member of the board of advisors for the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science. “We respect the medical profession and the role it plays, but we are saying there’s a continuum—medicine is meant to eradicate disease. Holistic processes are meant to either prevent it or stabilize it once it’s gone. We are looking to blend the two.”

Medical professionals such as James Potash, director of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins Medicine, are impressed by the Brick’s efforts.

“They have pushed us to think hard about the relationship between physical health and mental health, and that’s a valuable thing for us to keep front of mind,” he says.

Experts such as UCSF’s Epel believe that the foundation fills a void in the treatment of mental health. “This foundation is in a league of its own, because it is funding strategic research that is much needed to show the benefit of integrative strategies for mental health,” she says. “There’s no other foundation like this in this space—they are leading the field.”

In many ways, Victor’s youngest brother Bob, now 66, is living proof of how someone who struggles can benefit from healthy lifestyle choices. Thanks to support from his brother Merrill and Merrill’s wife, Sherry, Bob regularly rides a bike; works out at his local Planet Fitness in Florida; lost 60 pounds as the result of following a low-carb, low-sugar healthy diet; and is able to hold down a part-time job and live on his own, while also staying compliant with therapy and medication. He has even been able to dramatically reduce his medication dosage.

“He is flourishing,” says Victor, smiling. “If I called him now, he’d be happy.”

In the meantime, the Bricks continue to open Planet Fitness gyms, the success of which is inextricably linked to their foundation work. “I do the business at the beginning of the week and the foundation at the end of the week,” says Victor, “because without the business, the foundation doesn’t exist.”

While in Baltimore in late October, Victor and Lynne were off to the grand opening of two new Planet Fitness clubs, one in Elkridge and another in Ellicott City. In the following weeks, they opened two new clubs in Tennessee and one in California. By December, they had opened two more gyms in Australia, one more in Washington state (and yet another in Australia at the beginning of the new year).

“We divide our time to something like 70 percent to the gyms and 30 percent for the foundation,” says Victor. “We go to grand openings, and we try to get to every club every year.”

It’s a lot to juggle, but like everything they do, it’s a winning strategy.

“They are simply remarkable people,” says Epel, “and together, an even more remarkable couple. They walk the talk and live their own lifestyle of well-being and spreading contagious, positive emotion. They have big, generous hearts and an equally grand vision to match it. It’s remarkable what they have accomplished.”

Getting into the Kingdom of Heaven can wait, but for the ever-beneficent Bricks, entry seems all but certain.

niversity of Maryland sophomore Sara Berman of Baltimore is a poster child for camp. She started going to Camp Louise an all-girls camp in Cascade, Maryland, at age 10, spent eight summers as a camper, and is now a counselor. “I remember being homesick at the beginning of that first summer, but when I left, I couldn’t wait to come back,” she recalls.

Tom Rosenberg, CEO and president of American Camp Association (ACA) says, “ACA believes that camp, day or overnight, provides an environment created just for children. At camp they learn real life skills, develop self-esteem, and gain a sense of independence and community. Whether children are playing, exploring nature, conquering new heights, or becoming part of a camp family, they are creating memories that will last a lifetime.”

Berman can attest to that.

“Besides making life-long friends, camp gave me skills that helped prepare me for college and my future. It taught me to be independent, problem solve, live in a communal environment, and try new things.”

Even before the pandemic, many kids spent too much time on their screens. Camp provides a welcome break from technology. “We’ve found older kids really feel good about not having to keep up with texting friends, Instagram, and their Facebook page,” notes Rosenberg.

Unless a camp is geared to technology, cell phones at overnight camp are often collected and given back at the end of the session. Even most day camps don’t allow cell phones.

“At camp everything is 100 percent in person,” says Rosenberg. “Children have the opportunity to participate in human-powered activities and to learn important skills like communicating, socializing, collaborating, resilience, and empathy. Camp is a welcome opportunity to work on their human skills and be physically active, especially after this time of prolonged social isolation.” All these skills will be important in a camper’s future.

Today, the camp market has definitely widened. There are many different flavors, from traditional day and overnight camps to specialty camps. Facilities may include skate parks, go-karts, and zip lines. A camp might have pottery, silver works—even glassblowing. There are cooking camps and camps themed to wilderness skill building, circus performance, and debate. If you have a camper with a special need there are camps for kids with dyslexia, asthma, and diabetes. And if you want a camp with a little religion mixed in, you can find that, too.

Rosenberg says, “Now more than ever before, kids need camp. With the pandemic, many children lost ground with social and educational skills, while others had mental health issues.” Alicia Berlin, director of Camp Louise, says, “In summer 2021 we hired a mental, emotional, and social health director who oversaw a team of 11 people on our Wellness Team throughout the summer. We plan to have a similar model of professionals to support campers and staff this summer.”

COVID-19 still remains a factor for both administrators and campers. Last summer, kids enjoyed activities in pods, overnight camps had fewer children in bunks, many day camps limited the number of children, and camps kept children on campgrounds. As much as we all thought and hoped COVID would be behind us, it’s not.

For camp 2022, Rosenberg says, “Think fluid and flexible. No one knows what COVID will be like. Depending on how it is acting, camps will have to be flexible.”

Jon Bisset, executive director at River Valley Ranch camp in Carroll County, is cautiously optimistic for the season ahead. Bisset says that they offer a wide variety of camps on their 500-acre campus, from overnight to day camps and, “This summer, we are hoping to be up to full capacity.”

Still, he adds, “What’s important is that camp be safe and provide a meaningful experience for the kids.”

Camp Resource Guide 2022

FOLLOWING IS A LIST of just some of the camps in or near Maryland offering everything from religious study and computer skills to sports training. As with all things impacted by COVID-19, camp schedules are subject to change. Visit the camp website or call for the most up-to-date rates, dates, and COVID-19 policies, as well as to register.

BALTIMORE LAB SCHOOL
2220 St. Paul St., Baltimore, MD 21218.
410-261-5500. baltimorelabschool.org.
Designed for students in grades 1-12 with learning differences, this program has a low student-teacher ratio, on-site specialists, and an innovative arts-based curriculum. Baltimore Lab School’s summer program is designed to help students discover their strengths, exercise their creativity, overcome academic difficulties, and prepare for the school year ahead. Session runs July 5-29.

BETH TFILOH
400 Delight Meadows Rd., Reisterstown, MD 21136.
410-517-3451. btcamps.org.
Located on 70 acres, “BT camps” offers a range of traditional and specialty camps for kids ages 2-15. The facility includes four swimming pools and an aquatics center (with a triple-decker, double-barreled water slide), a lake with boats and a 25-ft slide, as well as arts and crafts, ropes course, zip line and plenty of ballfields and green space for play. June 20-August 12.

CAMP CENTER STAGE
700 N. Calvert St., Baltimore, MD 21202.
410-332-0033. centerstage.com.
Baltimore Center Stage will host three summer sessions for children in grades K-12. Each session is themed to “Creative Impressions,” and will explore everything from dance and improv to acting and STEAM activities. Sessions run June 27-August 5.

CAMP FAIRLEE
22242 Bay Shore Dr., Chestertown, MD 21620.
410-778-0566. campfairlee.com.
Camp Fairlee is a traditional overnight summer camp located outside of Chestertown on the Eastern Shore. Programs are for children and adults aged 6 and up. Camp is for people of all abilities, providing accessible recreation
for campers and family respite. Accessible activities include canoeing, kayaking, wall climbing, swimming, nature trails, and indoor games. There is a health center staffed with nurses. June 26-August 14.

CAMP JEMICY
11 Celadon Rd., Owings Mills, MD 21117.
410-753-8032. jemicyschool.org/camps.
The five-week summer camp for coed students ages 6-14 run by Jemicy School offers skills instruction, tutoring, and recreation for children with dyslexia and other related language-based learning differences. Full, half-day, and extended-day programs offered. June 27-July 29.

CAMP HORIZONS
3586 Horizons Way, Harrisonburg, VA 22802.
540-896-7600. camphorizonsva.com.
ACA accredited since 1983, Camp Horizons specializes in sports, outdoors, arts, sciences and technology, aquatics, outdoors, and equestrian activities as well as classic camp traditions! Open to campers ages 6-16. Camps will run June 12-August 14.

CAMP PUH’TOK
17433 Big Falls Rd., Monkton, MD 21111.
410-329-6590. camppuhtok.com.
Located on over 60 wooded acres in northern Baltimore County, Puh’tok has provided kids 5-16 with camp activities that emphasize leadership, appreciation of nature, and teamwork since 1942. Activities include archery, pony rides, swimming, tubing, and zip lines. Day and overnight camps are available. Camp will be open in one-week sessions from June 27-August 19.

THE CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL OF BALTIMORE
2800 Edison Hwy., Baltimore MD 21213.
410-732-6200. thecatholichighschool.org.
This school offers a variety of programs from June-August. For the most up-to-date programs, visit the website.

CENTER FOR JEWISH CAMPING
5708 Park Heights Ave., Baltimore, MD 21215.
201-417-0294. livecamp.org.
If you’re looking for a Jewish summer experience that’s perfect for your child, consult Alli Muser for free, unbiased, and personalized guidance for families considering Jewish day or overnight camp. The Center for Jewish Camping is a collaboration between The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore and The Louise D. and Morton J. Macks Center for Jewish Education.

CHESAPEAKE BAY OUTWARD BOUND SCHOOL
1900 Eagle Dr., Baltimore, MD 21207.
410-448-1721. outwardboundchesapeake.org.
Expeditions are open to middle and high school students and teach students technical skills like navigation, camp craft, the basics of backpacking or rock climbing, and much more. As students learn these skills in challenging situations, they also learn the value of teamwork, compassion for others, and the pursuit of excellence. Check the website for excursion dates.

COLLEGE SUMMER ACADEMIC PROGRAMS AT GETTYSBURG COLLEGE
300 N. Washington St., Gettysburg, PA 17325.
717-337-6924. gettysburg.edu/offices/conference-event-services/summer-programs.
Gettysburg College offers several virtual and in-person camps for high school students. Each one-week program is led by noted faculty, and campers can explore subjects including psychology, creative writing, and Civil War Era Studies. The school also offers several athletic camps. Visit website for rates and session dates.

COLUMBIA ACADEMY
Five locations in Columbia, Ellicott City, and Fulton.
columbiaacademy.com.
Every week, elementary and middle school campers explore a new theme. Just a few activities include engaging STEM activities, team-building quests, outdoor water days, and planned weekly virtual field trips and enrichment.
Sessions run June 13-August 19.

FORK UNION MILITARY ACADEMY SUMMER CAMPS AND SCHOOL
4744 James Madison Hwy., Fork Union, VA 23055.
434- 842-3212. forkunion.com.
Fork Union will offer three athletic-themed summer camp programs this year. Camp is for ages 7-17 (some are coed). There is also a non-military summer school program that combines academic study, leadership development, athletic activities, and summertime fun. Summer activities are located in Central Virginia.

GILMAN SUMMER!
5407 Roland Ave., Baltimore, MD 21210.
410-323-3800. gilman.edu/community/gilman-summer.
Enrichment and skill-building programs for kids grades K-12 designed and taught by Gilman faculty and field experts. Camp experiences include art programs, STEM courses, cooking and music, foreign language, and sports camps as well as Young Scientists, Makerspace, Outdoor Experience, and Nature Explorers camps. Camps will run June 6-July 1.

GLENELG
12793 Folly Quarter Rd., Ellicott City, MD 21042.
410-531-8600 ext. 2157. glenelg.org/summer.
Glenelg offers a variety of camps from traditional day and sports camps, to specialized camps for everyone from the budding chess player to nature explorers. There’s even a training program for high school students ready to move up as counselors, and campers enrolled in Adventure Camp take off-campus trips for hikes and to tour local landmarks like Fort McHenry. Camp runs June 20-July 29.

HARFORD DAY SCHOOL CAMP
715 Moores Mill Rd., Bel Air, MD 21014.
410-838-4848. harfordday.org/community/summerprograms.
This independent school located in Harford County offers an annual summer camp experience. Check the website for more details.

HOWARD COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL
8510 High Ridge Rd., Ellicott City, MD 21043.
410-313- 2787. hocoarts.org/camp.
This year, campers may select from a wide range of age-appropriate visual and performing arts camps, including Cardboard Creations, Dance & STEAM, Monster Madness, Tiny Playwrights, and much more. Camps conclude with an exhibit or performance of student work on the last day of each camp session. Programs are open to the public, regardless of residency, for grades K-7. There are full and half-day programs as well as before and after care available. Sessions run June 27 -August 26.

ID TECH CAMP AT TOWSON UNIVERSITY
8000 York Rd., Towson, MD 21252.
1-888-709-8324. idtech.com.
Students ages 7-17 can code using Java, design video games, engineer robots, produce a YouTube series, and more. Kids meet new friends and gain a competitive edge for school and future STEM careers. One-week sessions run June 20-August 1.

IMAGINATION 101 SUMMER ARTS CAMP
4701 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21210.
410-472-4737. charmcityplayers.com.
This nonprofit camp conducted by Charm City Players at the LeClerc Auditorium at Notre Dame of Maryland University offers two-week performing arts classes for boys and girls ages 7-16, including acting, dancing, and singing. June 20- July 1: Shrek The Musical Jr.; July 11-July 22: Seussical Jr. the Musical; July 25-August 5: Disney High School Musical Jr.; August 8-August 19: Disney The Lion King Jr.

IT’S ALL FUN AND GAMES
1810 Valleybrook Dr., Kingsville, MD 21087.
410-879-4460. funandgamescamp.com.
Held on the 20 secluded acres of Valleybrook Country Club, this camp is open to children K-13 looking for old-fashioned fun! Activities include swimming, tennis, nature and science exploration, arts and crafts, field trips and special visitors, and individual and team sports. Camp runs June 20-August 19.

J CAMPS
3506 Gwynnbrook Ave., Owings Mills, MD 21117.
410-559-2391. jcampsbaltimore.org.
The Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore has 10 camps for all ages and stages of life. JCC’s facilities include a performing arts center, ceramics studio, adventure park, nature trails, and tennis courts, plus their signature swim lesson program. In addition to before and after care options, JCC offers express bus routes. Sessions run June 20-August 12.

MARYVALE PREPARATORY SCHOOL
11300 Falls Rd., Lutherville, MD 21093.
410-308-8551. maryvale.com/about-maryvale/events/camps.
Each summer, Maryvale Preparatory School offers a variety of camps that are led by varsity coaches and esteemed professionals. These camps are open to Maryvale students as well as local middle and high school students. This year’s camps include athletic camps, musical theater programs, art camps, and architecture/technology camps. Camp sessions run June 20-July 20.

MCDONOGH SCHOOL SUMMER PROGRAMS
8600 McDonogh Rd. Owings Mills, MD 21117.
443-544-7100. mcdonogh.org.
McDonogh offers extensive summer programs for ages 4-18, including traditional day camps, arts and academic experiences, STEM-centric camps, and day and overnight sports clinics. Camps utilize the school’s many facilities including riding rings, fishing ponds, an arts center—even a rock-climbing tower and ropes course.

MERCY HIGH SCHOOL’S “MAGICAL SUMMER”
1300 E. Northern Pkwy., Baltimore, MD 21239.
410-433-8800. mercyhighschool.com/summer.
A Magical Summer is open to rising 6-8 grade girls. Campers will be coached and instructed by Mercy faculty and coaches, area professionals, and Mercy Girl athletes and artists. Weekly sessions are offered in different areas such as dance and musical theater. There are also athletic camps such as soccer, volleyball, and lacrosse. Sessions run June 20-August 11.

MICA SUMMER ART CAMP
1300 W. Mt. Royal Ave., Baltimore, MD 21217.
410-225-2219. mica.edu/artcamp.
Have a budding artist? Then the art camp at Maryland Institute College of Art may be just the place for your camper this summer. Camp is open to children in grades K-12. Sessions run June 6-July 29. Check the website for more details.

THE PARK SCHOOL OF BALTIMORE-PARK CAMPS
2425 Old Court Rd., Baltimore, MD 21208.
410-339-7070. parkcamps.com.
Park’s experienced staff welcomes children ages 3½–15 for exciting summer activities hosted on its 100-acre campus. In addition to traditional day camp activities, age-specific camps offer sports and games, nature exploration, and music and movement. June 27-July 29.

RED BARN RANCH
175 Klees Mill Rd., Sykesville, MD 21784.
301-933-6888. redbarnranch.com.
This traditional day camp is open to kids in K-6 grades. Campers engage in arts & crafts, science, sports—even high ropes. All staff have had FBI and CPS background checks, and have been trained by Kids After Hours and Maryland State licensed trainers to ensure a safe and fun summer experience. Before and after care are available. June 17-August 26.

SUMMER AT GARRISON FOREST
300 Garrison Forest Rd., Owings Mills, MD 21117.
410-559-3433. gfs.org/summer.
Summer at Garrison Forest has extensive program options, including traditional day camps, specialty camps, equestrian camps, and overnight programs. Campers can play nearly every sport, including riding and polo, express themselves in an array of arts programs, make STEM discoveries, learn to cook, and more. Before and after care, lunch, and combo camp packages available. Located on Garrison Forest School’s 110-acre campus, Summer at Garrison Forest runs from June 6-August 19.

SUMMER NATURE CAMP AT IRVINE
11201 Garrison Forest Rd., Owings Mills, MD 21117.
443-738.9200. explorenature.org/summercamp.
Campers learn about nature in Maryland by exploring and playing in the woodlands, meadows, wetlands, and streams of Irvine Nature Center’s 211-acre campus. Campers get up, get active, and get outdoors daily! Led by professional educators, offering different themed programs weekly, no two sessions are alike. Irvine Summer Nature Camp 2022 will run from June 20-August 26. Full-day and half-day options available for 3-12 year-olds, with a new Counselor in Training program for ages 13-17.

SUMMER CAMP AT THE ODYSSEY SCHOOL
3257 Bridle Ridge Ln., Lutherville, MD 21093.
410-580-5551. theodysseyschool.org.
The Odyssey School’s camp is a specialized summer program for children with language learning differences in grades 1-8. The camp incorporates an individualized, structured academic experience in the mornings, designed to promote ongoing skill development in the areas of reading, written language, and math, followed by afternoons of outdoor activities and athletics. Full and half day options. June 27-July 29.

SUMMER AT THE ST. PAUL’S SCHOOLS
111232 Falls Rd., Brooklandville, MD 21022.
443-632-1083. stpaulsmd.org/summer.
The St. Paul’s Schools offer a range of coed and single-gender programs for children ages 5-17, including Gatorland Day Camp, sports, arts, cooking, and babysitting training. June 13-August 12.

YMCA CAMP CONRAD WEISER
201 Cushion Peak Rd., Reinholds, PA
17569. 610-670-2267. smymca.org.
Part of the South Mountain YMCA camps located in Berks County, Pennsylvania, Camp Conrad Weiser offers overnight experiences for boys and girls ages 7-15. There are traditional camps as well as specialty camps like the Immersive Literary Theme Camps and Horse Riding Specialty Camp. Camp offers three-tiered pricing to serve families with different abilities to pay. Check the website for the many session dates.

For almost 40 years, National Alliance on Mental Illness Metropolitan Baltimore (NAMI Metro) has been dedicated to advocacy, education, support and eradicating stigma so that all individuals and families affected by mental illness can build better lives.

Never before has our work been more relevant. The coronavirus pandemic wrought unemployment, isolation and disruption. It increased conditions such as anxiety and depression. The need for effective resources for those living with these conditions has never been greater and with that need comes an incredible opportunity.

Until recently, those living with mental health conditions often struggled in private. Today we have a greater awareness that our mental health is nothing to hide. Now is the time to make the most of this groundswell of compassionate understanding. Let’s break down stigma. Let’s talk about our mental health. We have the tools to provide those in need with the resources required to live fulfilled, productive lives.

A hallmark of NAMI Metro is our peer-led support network. Our volunteers bravely share their stories to help others. As the area leader for mental health awareness and education we’ve provided 9,000 touch points of service to people in the Baltimore Metropolitan area in the last year alone. While we work with individuals and their families, our mission includes outreach and training with some of the most influential people in businesses, colleges and universities, and emergency services.

Whether our work brings us to a classroom or a corporate boardroom, NAMI Metro and our many community partners are committed to removing the stigma of mental illness. We are proud to share in these pages just a few stories of how our work is building healthy lives for those living with a mental health condition and our community as a whole.

Let’s raise our voices,

Kerry Graves
Executive Director, NAMI Metropolitan Baltimore

I WILL LISTEN

David K. Wilson

PRESIDENT OF MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

➜ College is a time of critical development for young adults. It’s a time of important milestones that can also be deeply stressful. Studies show anxiety and depression are on the rise among college students and suicide remains the leading cause of death on campuses. Seventy-five percent of mental health conditions develop by age 24.

Understanding the importance of student mental health, Morgan State University allied with NAMI Metro four years ago to create campus-wide programs to destigmatize mental illness and promote wellness. As part of that commitment, Morgan participates in NAMI Metro’s “I Will Listen” program, a weeklong campaign to engage college students in conversation about mental health.The 2021 initiative included a chapel service, an open mic night, and a final “day without headphones” where everyone on campus was encouraged to wear “I Will Listen” t-shirts.

“We’re making a statement to our students that we’re here to listen and share your concerns,” says Danny Molock, PhD, interim coordinator for student life and development.

The pandemic makes this work more relevant than ever, explains David K. Wilson, president of Morgan State University.

“Covid has exacerbated the normal mental and psychological challenges that we see on our campus, as it has on college campuses across the nation,” he says. “But it is further exacerbated here at Morgan because so many of our students come from communities that have been disproportionately impacted by Covid.”

Wilson created a mental health task force to engage every aspect of the university in support of mental health. The university is proactive in its programs, bringing therapeutic pets to campus at exam time, sponsoring outdoor “Yoga on the Yard,” to promote relaxation, physical wellness and a sense of community, and offering depression screening.

Importantly, Wilson led by example, asking the counseling center to give a presentation on self-care and stress management to the university’s leadership team during the worst of the pandemic shutdown.

“It’s important for us in leadership to model this and we realize that we, too, need self-care,” says Wilson.

Morgan’s “I Will Listen” week attracted record attendance in 2021. Molock says they’re expanding into more collaborations with NAMI Metro, including a walk for mental health in the spring.

“This generation of students is more willing to share and more willing to listen,” he continues. “They want to be advocates in support of one another.”

Michael Harrison | Derek Loeffler | Joann Wallace

BALTIMORE CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT

➜ Officers of the Baltimore City Police Department (BPD) interact with people experiencing mental health crises every day. From those who experience homelessness and substance use disorders to typical 911 calls, an officer may never know when a situation might be exacerbated by mental illness.

Through training organized by Behavioral Health System Baltimore and community partners, the BPD is training cadets and seasoned officers on how to better identify individuals in crisis so interactions can end in compassion, not handcuffs.

“Crisis intervention trains officers to deal with a person in crisis in a very different way that now uses de-escalation techniques, time, spatial distance and the tools available to them other than force to get people the care they need, rather than taking them into physical custody and making arrests,” said Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison.

NAMI Metro facilitates multiple training sessions as part of the mandatory three-day behavioral health training given to all cadets and helped create new curriculum and experiential learning for the specialized Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) provided to officers on a voluntary basis. NAMI Metro expanded its training to 911 operators in 2021 and has trained nearly 2,000 emergency service personnel since 2016. The program includes partnerships between police officers, social workers and community services.

“An officer might be driving down the street and witness someone in crisis, or they may get a call to a home where there’s a potential family disturbance where the family is having trouble with a loved one,” explains Major Derek Loeffler. “The more training we can give [officers] to understand and respond to those situations, the better equipped they are to serve the residents of Baltimore.”

Not only does CIT provide vital information and tools to officers, Captain Joann Wallace explains that officers enjoy the coursework, especially the role-play that concludes the 40-hour training. Officers like Wallace act out scenarios so trainees can test their skills in a controlled environment before taking it to the street. “It’s a lot of fun and interesting and we’re able to give real-time feedback and the officers can ask questions so that when they take this training out on the street it’s become real for them,” she states.

Much of the training gets to the heart of strong community policing, where communication and relationships play an important role in public safety.

“Understanding crisis and responding to it appropriately without force reduces injury to both community and officers,” says Commissioner Harrison. “It also reduces emotional harm and litigation, which in turn builds trust.”

The greatest take away for officers is that regardless of the situation, don’t rush to a judgement or action.

BREAKING the silence

Patrick Sutton

INTERIOR DESIGNER

➜ It’s impossible to miss the artistry of interior designer Patrick Sutton, whose work graces public spaces, restaurants and private homes in Baltimore and around the globe. He recently released his first book, Storied Interiors, about the stories our spaces tell about our lives and our dreams.

Sutton has his own story to tell, one that influenced the person and designer he is now. In her early 20s, Sutton’s mother began acting erratically. This was the early 1970s, a time when mental illness was simply not discussed. His mother was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and her condition became a family secret.

“As a little boy, you don’t know what’s going on you just know something is wrong. It was awful for a child such as myself because there was no support network,” says Sutton. “My mom’s illness was swept under the rug when what she needed was care. It was like living with a ticking time bomb.”

It wasn’t until later in life that Sutton understood the family secret was nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it defined him as an individual. Lacking an adult role model for “normal” life given his mother’s condition and his father’s absence due to his career as a travel journalist, Sutton grew up being a student of other people, an observer. That skill, and his desire to create beautiful healing environments, informs his work today as a preeminent designer.

“Since I couldn’t heal my mother I’m constantly trying to create environments where I can heal others through design,” says Sutton.

When Sutton took his story public he shared his experience in a speech at a Design Leadership Network conference, an international gathering of designers. At that event he offered a candid view of how his mother’s illness shaped his life and design. “Over the next two days people came up to me individually —not just one or two people, but like 25—and shared their stories from their lives,” he recalls. “Sharing what happened to me gave them license to share what happened to them. That’s what awareness does. It gives people the freedom to know they are not alone.”

When Sutton shared his story publicly, an alliance with NAMI Metro came naturally. He explains that NAMI Metro’s mission to remove the stigma from mental illness is dear to him. His hope is that through his outreach others will learn that not only is mental illness nothing to be ashamed of, sharing one’s experience candidly can be empowering.

“It’s okay to seek help, it’s okay to seek therapy, which is a powerful tool,” Sutton concludes. “What NAMI is doing is shining a light on this, making people realize this isn’t something to be hidden, it is a part of life.”

TOGETHER we support each other

Tchernavia Rocker

Chief People and Administrative Officer Under Armour

➜ As Chief People and Administrative Officer at Under Armour (UA), Tchernavia Rocker ensures that everyone from retail salespeople to executive leaders have a healthy, positive work life. To support that, UA has all the programmatic pieces in place—an employee assistance program, global mindfulness sessions, and No Meeting Friday afternoons in corporate offices, for example. While tools and programs are necessary, Rocker says creating an environment where conversations about mental health are supported has been an important shift.

“We’re creating an environment where it’s okay to engage and we talk openly about taking away stigma,” she says.

UA’s commitment to mental health is closely tied to its Teammate Resource Groups, small groups created within UA’s larger Diversity Equity and Inclusion strategy. These include Black and Latina employees and parents. UA partnered with NAMI Metro in 2019 to learn how to better support employees. Rocker can still recall the first listening session.

“It was the first safe space conversation we had,” she recalls. “We brought teammates together who, maybe for the first time, were talking about mental health. It was one of the most impactful moments of my professional career because I understood, deeply, what it meant for teammates to have a space where they didn’t need to hide anymore about the challenges they might be having…NAMI helped us facilitate those conversations, creating the runway for us to talk about how we can support psychological safety in the workplace.”

Rocker explains that storytelling and the willingness of leadership to guide from a place of their own vulnerability is critical. Rocker experienced this intimately when her husband died unexpectedly in 2021, understandably sending her life into a tailspin. When she told her boss, rather than just ask what she needed, he reached out to UA’s mental health providers to educate himself on how he could best support her.

“A month later when I returned to work he and I told that story to the workforce, of how I could go to my boss and tell him I was struggling,” she recalls. “By telling our story collectively, it opened up the door for other leaders to tell their stories and it was like freedom just ran through the door after that. It just takes one moment of vulnerability by leaders to create a safe space.”

UA advocates storytelling across its entire brand, supporting not only its employees but also its athletes, from the professional to those in youth sports, to be open about their experiences. The partnership with NAMI Metro helps the organization bring evidence-based expertise to help UA navigate this landscape in a meaningful way.

“Mental health is a broad spectrum including acute traumas and diagnoses that require a level of care,” says Rocker. “It comes down to storytelling and making sure that when people tell their story they feel supported and have the resources available to move forward. The focus has to be on creating the space and place to have these conversations.”

[Editor’s Note: This story was published in our May 2021 issue as part of our annual “Excellence in Nursing” package. See the full list of winners online on May 17, or pick up a copy of our May issue at your local newsstand.]

 

The face still haunts her. It was a busy day in the intensive care unit at Ascension Saint Agnes Medical Center, a community hospital in southwest Baltimore, and Muna Jeter stepped in to help her understaffed team of nurses transport a coronavirus sufferer. The patient looked scared and alone.

“I couldn’t get the patient’s face out of my head for days,” recalls Jeter, who generally oversees a team of 400 nurses as director of critical care and respiratory therapy at Saint Agnes. “I can’t imagine how they do this day in and day out.”

And then there are the faces of her co-workers: More than a year into the pandemic, Jeter can see the toll the experience has taken on her colleagues when they report for their shifts.

“I almost feel they’re like veterans,” Jeter says of the nurses on her team. “Some mornings when I look at their faces, it’s like they could be going to war.”

By early March of this year, COVID-19 patient volumes at Saint Agnes were at 87 percent of capacity—near their lowest since the disease first appeared, although by later in that month it was back to 96 percent, according to a New York Times study.

“Now is when they’re finally processing and responding to the trauma of not seeing patients get better—seeing patients dying—for so long,” Jeter says. “Just last week, a nurse said to me, ‘I spent all of Sunday crying because I knew that when I came in on Monday, I would have to take care of patients again. And I don’t know how much longer I can do it.’ And this is the most positive nurse in the world. She came in that Monday to another shift. And she immediately started to cry in the middle of the unit.”

Over time, the challenges faced by nurses on the frontline of COVID-19 care shifted. Worries over insufficient personal protective equipment and fears of contracting the virus or spreading it to family still lingered, but as PPE became more readily available—and safety protocols more sophisticated—those fears were eclipsed by the long-term fatigue of working short-staffed shifts with surging numbers of critically ill patients.

Add to that the heavy emotional toll of witnessing suffering and death on a scale that is unprecedented for even the most experienced nurse, and it’s a nearly unbearable burden.

“And it was just so much—I think suffering is the word, it’s not so much the deaths, it’s the prolonged ventilator, it’s seeing the 39-year-old person that can’t come off the ventilator with little children at home,” Jeter says. “The trauma is multidimensional.”

 

WORRIES OVER INSUFFICIENT PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT AND FEARS OF CONTRACTING THE VIRUS OR SPREADING IT TO FAMILY STILL LINGER.

 

An April 2020 survey of health care workers in the U.S. found that nearly half of them reported serious psychiatric symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic, including thoughts of suicide, with 14 percent screening positive for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The International Council of Nurses, a Switzerland-based federation of more than 130 nursing associations from across the globe, found that nurses working on the COVID-19 frontlines were experiencing unprecedented levels of stress and were at “high risk for full-blown stress response syndromes, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic illness, and burnout.”

The pandemic has compounded challenges in an industry that was already stretched too thin. Not only are hospitals overwhelmed with sick patients, but there is a shortage of nurses available to take care of them, leading to longer shifts and higher patient-to-nurse ratios.

By 2022, the nation will need an additional 1.1 million new nurses, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, the gap between available jobs and people graduating from nursing school continues to expand.

“Many of these issues have been challenges for nurses for a long time,” says Alison Trinkoff, a registered nurse and professor in the University of Maryland School of Nursing’s (UMSON) family and community health department who studies nurse wellness. “Nurses were already tired and having issues with schedules. Anytime you have a 24/7 type of job, those kinds of issues can come up.”

The pandemic, however, has exacerbated those problems. For one, there’s just more work and fewer people to do it. An increase of nurses hitting retirement age or taking early retirement has added to staffing issues, while the need for nurses who have been exposed to COVID-19 to isolate or quarantine makes staffing less predictable.

“Nurses who are working through the pandemic have a lot of additional responsibilities,” Trinkoff says. “And as you can imagine, such a physically exhausting and emotionally exhausting combination is challenging.”

Trinkoff began her research into nurse work-life and wellness in the 1990s with the first nationwide survey of substance use among nurses. Today, she leads a team at UMSON as they survey 4,000 registered nurses across 10 states to determine physical and psychological job demands, work schedules, healthy lifestyle behaviors, and the availability of wellness offerings through the workplace.

The survey aims to measure the pandemic’s impact in several areas—passion for nursing, ability to relax, and more—by asking if they have increased, decreased, or stayed the same during COVID-19.

Perhaps the most difficult part of the pandemic is its prolonged nature and uncertain end date, Trinkoff adds.

“Having a lot of exposure to so many people dying in such a short time is wearing on anyone’s endurance,” she says. “That sort of ‘grit our teeth and dig down’ becomes difficult if the situation continues for an extended period of time. The longer it goes on, it’s really wearing on people.”

The specific long-term effects nurses will experience from working on the frontlines of the pandemic remain to be seen, but the fallout from previous outbreaks can serve as a guide.

A recent review of psychological impacts of pandemics and endemics—including SARS, MERS, COVID-19, Ebola, and influenza A—found that depressive symptoms were reported in more than a quarter of health care workers, with insomnia in more than 34 percent and severe anxiety in 45 percent. Of those who reported post-traumatic stress symptoms, 10-40 percent reported the symptoms persisting one to three years after the outbreak ended.

 

PERHAPS THE MOST DIFFICULT PART OF THE PANDEMIC IS ITS PROLONGED NATURE AND UNCERTAIN END DATE.

 

“The majority of us who come through this pandemic are going to bounce back from this very negative experience. But there is a significant minority who will continue to have long-term struggles with anxiety, stress, PTSD,” says Dr. Aliya Jones, deputy secretary of behavioral health at the Maryland Department of Health.

“Some of them will use substances to cope, including those in the health care industry. Some will incur long-term problems with substance abuse or symptoms of suicidal thoughts. Some are going to act on those thoughts. We think that the long-term outcome for any of these behavioral health conditions warrants being as proactive as we can to help those who are helping us.”

That’s why, in January, the Maryland Department of Health launched Operation Courage, a support services program designed to address the growing and long-term mental health care needs of frontline workers and first responders amid the COVID-19 pandemic, offering assessment and therapy as needed.

“Health care workers are wonderful at taking care of other people, but they’re not always so great at taking care of themselves,” Jones says. “There’s a stigma around mental health—period—and certainly more so as a health care worker.”

“We need leadership to create environments that sup- port people reaching out for assistance, not stigmatizing someone’s proactive and brave decision to reach out for the help they need,” Jones says. “Awareness is not the problem. Stigma continues to be the problem. The stigma against mental health issues runs very deep, and it’s going to take a long time of proactive support in order for us to really embrace the reality that mental health issues are common, no one is immune, and that treatment works. We will continue to fight that fight.”

At Saint Agnes, leadership offers a variety of wellness and self-care resources designed to help nurses heal from the trauma of the past year, from meditation and yoga to virtual brunch with the hospital’s chaplain and inviting a psychologist to come in and sit in the break room.

“As a leader, I’m concerned about what the workforce will look like after this,” Jeter says. “I don’t know how nursing is going to recover. It’s not just the trauma of the pandemic, it was the sustained level at which we were expecting them to perform.”

As a faith-based hospital, the Saint Agnes staff takes comfort in pastoral services with each other and with patients and their families.

“It’s good being in a faith-based hospital, because we do a lot of prayer and moments of silence before every meeting, even on the unit floor at huddles,” Jeter says.

In the end, she says it’s nurses’ support for their colleagues that keeps them going and motivates them to continue to get up and come to work each morning or to pick up extra shifts when the team is short-staffed. “They come in for each other.”

Like so many hospitals across the nation during the COVID-19 outbreak, colorful letters stuck in the grass outside Saint Agnes spell out “Heroes Work Here.”

“It’s wonderful to think of nurses as heroes, and, in many ways, I love seeing the recognition not just as people, but of the essential role they play in the health care system,” says Alison Trinkoff. “But you have to recognize even heroes are human. And we certainly want to make sure that their human needs are taken care of, because if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s how precious nurses are in this pandemic. So whatever we can do to help them be their best selves and practice as effectively as they can, it benefits all of us.”

We’re spending all this time at home, so why are some of us more stressed than ever? Mental health experts say it’s important to periodically unplug, unwind, and check in with ourselves. So, no matter what the stresses—kids, boss, spouse, you name it—schedule some “me time.” Here are a few locally made items to get you started.

On a chilly January day at Archbishop Spalding High School in Severn, students are dressed in their standard-issue winter uniforms: chino skirts, white shirts, and black vests for the girls; black sweaters, red ties, and chino pants for the boys. Many days, the students also wear a coveted accessory: rubber wristbands—in blue, orange, red, green—bearing the emergency number for Anne Arundel Crisis Response.

“I have a bunch at my house that sit with my jewelry,” says Spalding senior Alexandra Blunk. “Everyone always wears the bracelets—they’re a hit.”

While crisis wristbands might seem an odd hot accessory, the hotline bracelets are as much a necessity as a fashion statement.

Youth suicide was once rare, but among people ages 10 to 24, it’s on the rise—with an increase of 56 percent from 2007 to 2017 in the United States, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“One thing that happened is the opioid crisis,” says Dr. Karen Swartz, director of clinical and educational programs at the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. Opioid use, explains Swartz, “unmasks or worsens mood symptoms in those with mood disorders”—and that can lead to suicide. “The other thing that happened is all of the social media stuff,” continues Swartz. “There’s growing evidence that cyberbullying is linked to suicide risk, so it’s very concerning.”

Nowhere is that concern more pressing than in Anne Arundel County, where several years ago, a string of suicides, known as a “cluster” in social-science parlance, gave the chilling nickname “Suicide High” to an area school just down the road from Spalding.

Nationally, suicide is the second most common cause of death for 10 to 24-year-olds, and between 2007 and 2017, the suicide rate nearly tripled for children aged 10 to 14, according to the CDC report.

These staggering statistics are mirrored in Arundel County, where according to a study by the Anne Arundel County Department of Health, there were 76 suicide attempts and 42 deaths among youth ages 10-24 in the Severna Park area between 2012 and 2016.

Marcie Gibbons is a counselor at Spalding, where, six years ago, the school adopted a suicide awareness and prevention program designed by Swartz and others at the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center as a reaction to what was happening not only nationwide, but in the community.

“Our administration is all about the holistic needs of the child, especially in our health and fitness class,” says Gibbons, a former hospice social worker. “This is just as important as teaching a kid CPR. They need to know the symptoms of mental illness. Mental health awareness has to be at the forefront—it’s just too scary.”

Twenty years ago, after a spate of teen suicides in the Baltimore area, Swartz, along with a small team, developed ADAP, the Adolescent Depression Awareness Program, a forward-thinking high-school curriculum to address an issue that could no longer be ignored.

“In 1998, there were three suicides in the Baltimore area within a few months, which was obviously devastating for the Baltimore community and shook people into thinking that this was a real problem,” says Swartz, sitting in her Wolfe Street office in the heart of Hopkins’ medical campus. “Leaders in the community came to us and said, ‘What are you going to do about it?’”

When Swartz visited one of the impacted schools, she recalls, “I was so struck by their willingness to learn, but by how little they knew—and these were well-educated people who didn’t understand depression and were really confused about how suicide could ever happen. It really underscored for me that we had to improve education.”

Over several years, Swartz, ADAP’s founder and director, and her cohorts, including several other psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, applied their expert clinical and research skills, visited area schools, and worked with high-school faculty and students to develop and refine the material.

In the high schools that offer ADAP (which includes training for teachers and is completely free of charge), the program—most often a component of health and wellness classes—is taught to students over the course of several days and encompasses an overview of mood disorders, informational videos, and group activities, and identifies resources within the students’ own school. It’s like a mini med-school class, scaled down for high-schoolers.

 

Youth suicide is on the rise among people ages 10-24.

 

“You can find this information, with slightly different content, in my lecture for third-year med students,” says Swartz, who herself traveled across the country to train some 3,000 high-school teachers and counselors on how to teach ADAP.

And while the grassroots program started in four area schools in its infancy, to date, ADAP has now reached more than 116,000 students across 20 states. Swartz is hoping to soon see those numbers grow.

Thanks to a new website, adapeducation.org, high school faculty members will be able to receive their training online, allowing the program to have an even wider reach.

At the outset of the program, clinical art therapist Sharon Strouse, along with her husband, Douglas, helped fund the program to honor their daughter Kristin Rita Strouse, who took her own life at the age of 17 in 2001. Strouse recalls that it was difficult to introduce the program into any schools, in part because of stigma.

“There was a lot of pushback when we wanted to go into the public schools,” recalls Strouse. “They said, ‘If you talk about suicide, it will happen.’ We even tried to offer it to MICA, they had three suicides that year, and they said, ‘No,’” she recalls.

This year, ADAP is set to be included as a component in all Baltimore county public schools, as well as many other area schools.

“I’m often asked what’s different about this program,” says Swartz. “Well, do you know any other high-school health program that’s developed by a doctor?” And the program is getting results: A study of ADAP’s effectiveness noted that, of those who participated in the program, 46 percent of teachers were later approached with concerns from students about themselves or others, an impressive figure when you consider that adolescents and young adults are notoriously private people, especially around adults.

“The way you can best prevent suicide is to recognize depression in young people and get them help, yet what people want you to do is explain how this happened,” says Swartz. “When I get questions about how this could happen to someone who was a good student, or this was someone with a wonderful family…that’s like saying someone who is a wonderful student or has a wonderful family can’t have asthma. Every one of those conversations has an underlying theme of, ‘Please tell me that my child will be protected.’ My message is that no one is immune from depression. And suicide is the most tragic outcome of mental illness that is either not treated—or not being successfully treated.”

Health class, where social media and cyberbullying issues are also discussed, is a far cry from the throwaway health-education classes of yesteryear, when a teacher, or often a coach, who drew the short straw showed the menstruation movie or reviewed the nutrition pyramid—and left it at that.

“I wrote a paper about birth order in my health class in Pittsburgh,” recalls Swartz, laughing. “It was a lot of nonsense.”

But at Spalding, on this gray January day, the Health and Fit Class is the most serious subject of the day. After pleasantries are exchanged and some 20 or so students settle into their seats, Gibbons gets down to business.

“Today, we’re going to talk about depression,” she says. “What you know, what to look for, and treatments. By tomorrow, you’ll know what to do if you’re concerned about yourself or a friend.”

In a roomful of students who would be forgiven for fidgeting—or even for disaffected boredom, given their tender teenage years—everyone sits stock-still. “What comes to mind when you hear the word, ‘depression?’” Gibbons asks the class of 14- and 15-year-olds. Students respond with various words from “sad” to “suffering” to “hopeless.”

“We need to separate, ‘I’m having a crummy day, and then I have lunch with a friend and my day is better—that’s little ‘d’ depression—from ‘Big D’ depression, which is a medical illness with particular symptoms,” says Gibbons.

Gibbons goes on to discuss the symptoms of someone who visits the doctor’s office with a cough, eventually showing the students a chest X-ray of a patient with pneumonia. “Just like high blood pressure or diabetes, depression is an illness,” she says, making the connection for them. “It’s a treatable illness.”

A few minutes later, the students watch a 1999 video, “Day for Night: Recognizing Teenage Depression,” which stresses that depression is a medical disorder and shares testimonials from teens. “What’s the big message?” she asks, as the bell rings and students grab their backpacks. “If you’re concerned about yourself or one of your friends, reach out to one of us or your parents. Don’t go it alone.”

In between classes, Gibbons lets out a sigh. “It’s such a humbling topic,” she says. “I’d like to wrap them all up in bubble wrap.”

A few weeks later, in neighboring Baltimore County at the Park School of Baltimore, a group of some 24 ninth graders are covering the same curriculum with director of middle-and upper-school counseling and wellness Krista Dhruv. Dhruv was hired by Park in 2001 after the school realized that it needed to provide more support for an increasingly vulnerable young community.

At the start of class, Dhruv emphasizes the importance of taking the subject of depression seriously. “I want you to ask questions, take risks, and be curious about this topic,” she says, “but what I also want you to be is incredibly thoughtful. Anecdotally, we know that in this room someone is potentially affected by this condition in their own life. I ask you to be thoughtful, because you may not know who among us is struggling.”

Dhruv asks the students if they have questions. “What part of the brain does it affect?” asks one student before Dhruv throws out a question of her own. “Is depression treatable?” she asks them. A handful of the students raise their hands, though somewhat tentatively. “All of you should have your hands up,” says Dhruv, “because depression is treatable.” “Can depression be cured?” she continues.

 

“MY message is that no one is immune from depression.” —Dr. Karen Swartz, ADAP founder.

 

“I don’t think so,” responds a student. “But it can be reduced so it’s barely there, but it can’t be cured.”

Dhruv gives a reassuring smile and then tells them that they’re going to watch the “Day for Night” video. But before she pushes the play button, she underscores that, “the people in the video are not actors. And the information is up-to-date, though the styles are a little dated,” she says, anticipating some laughter from an audience that could get distracted by that sort of thing. “There’s a mom with big hair—let it go.”

The lights are lowered, and the video begins. The image of a young woman flashes on the screen. “Sometimes it feels like you’re in a box,” she says. “You can’t get out.” “It feels like you’re surrounded by darkness,” says a young man in the next frame. “It’s like an anvil constantly pressing on your head and putting a lot of pressure on you, and it’s very difficult to lift up,” says another young adult.

By the time the mom with big hair comes on camera, no one lets out so much as a snicker. As class ends, the lights go up, and Dhruv tells the students that they’ll finish the video the next time they meet as a class.

Later, several students who stream in for another class share what they learned when they took the class the prior month.

“I definitely learned a lot of ways to help people who are struggling,” says Cate Cochran, a freshman at Park. “Before this program, I had no idea of how to help someone. My friend went through some things last summer, and I’ve been reaching out to her a lot more and asking her to hang out…I’ve also learned how to identify when there’s an issue, like when someone stops turning in their homework or quits a sports team.”

Just north of Park School at Hereford High School, Ellen Fitzkee, department chair of counseling, only wishes the program had been in place back in 2016 when two students took their own lives within three months of each other.

“As the counseling chair, I felt a tremendous responsibility to bring awareness and education to what was happening,” says Fitzkee. “We needed to take some accountability as a school and look for some support in figuring out how to help the community.”

After doing some research, she discovered ADAP, and, by the following fall, the school adopted it as a regular part of their health class curriculum, co-taught by a health teacher and a counselor. “I was delighted to find that we had this tremendous resource in our own backyard,” she says. “Had we had a program like this in place back then, there’s a possibility those deaths could have been prevented.”

And that’s exactly what keeps Swartz going. The gifted scientist wears many hats at Hopkins—from teaching medical students in a renowned psychiatry program to running an inpatient unit and her own clinical practice. Even so, the information that gets delivered in many high-school health and wellness classes across the country is her passion project. “ADAP is 20 percent of my job,” she says, “but it’s where my heart is.”

Standing before a group of reporters after one of the Ravens’ offseason practices yesterday, Hayden Hurst laughed and briefly looked to the sky when he heard the question. Any update on “the one that got away?”

“Haven’t heard anything back,” said the 25-year-old tight end, who will begin his second pro season this fall. Then the guy known as “Thor,” for obvious size and red-haired reasons, shrugged his big shoulders, part of a body to which he’s added 20 pounds of muscle the last few months. “Unfortunately, that’s the way of the road.”

He was referring of course to the seemingly innocuous but eventually viral tweet he thumbed last Sunday:

It’s a message that, if you or I shared it, would likely have traveled only as far as our close friends’ phones, and elicited a few jokes. For Hurst, that happened, too, but being an NFL player in a media world obsessed with clicks, his “missed connection” on a flight from his hometown of Jacksonville to Baltimore on Spirit Airlines (man of the people!) also attracted more attention than he ever imagined. The story ended up in places as far away as Good Morning America and Fox News.

A dropped ball, the headlines read. Teammates, current and former (like Terrell Suggs), ribbed him: “Shoot your shot,” they said. Strangers on the internet sent an assortment of funny memes, and others questioned the situation: “Hold on . . . NFL [player] can’t catch up with tall brunette . . . did the Ravens sign the wrong person?”

Hurst playfully responded with some details (he was busy taking a picture with a fan near a security line at BWI), as did the guy who asked for the picture. “Relax,” Hurst wrote back, summing up his reaction to the reaction.

In reality, he’s got bigger fish to fry.

For one, the reason Hurst was on a plane to Baltimore in the first place was to get here for the Ravens’ organized team activities (OTAs in NFL parlance), 10 days of voluntary practices. One of the Ravens’ two first-round picks last spring (along with quarterback Lamar Jackson), Hurst is fired up to kick off what he hopes is a rebound year from a season derailed by a stress fracture in his foot at the end of training camp last August.

He finished last season with 13 catches for 163 yards and a touchdown—stuff any person on the street would dream about doing. But it wasn’t the kind of production Hurst was looking for as a highly-touted rookie. The added weight he’s put on is intended to protect his body, so injuries like the one he sustained last season (which required a metal screw be surgically inserted in his foot) don’t happen.

“I’m kind of on a mission this year,” he said Thursday. “I’ve got a lot to prove.”

And, moreover—and unfortunately what none of the stories about his tweet said—Hurst is continuing to do great work off the field with the start of charitable foundation in his name, which focuses on helping teens with their mental health.

Hurst, as we documented last year, has struggled with anxiety and depression, like millions of Americans. And, given his platform, he’s resolved to speak openly about his experiences, to help others who might not know how to seek help or even be aware of their problems.

“In sports, you hear, ‘We have to be tough men, we can’t talk about mental health.’ Or ‘If you seek help, it’s weakness.’” Hurst told Baltimore last season. “I think that’s a load of crap now. It’s incredible that it affects so many people, and in so many different ways. It needs to be talked about.”

The Hayden Hurst Family Foundation, which officially launched in April, held a charity golf tournament this month to raise money to fund the 81 therapy sessions (Hurst’s jersey number) it will provide to 20 local student-athletes through the Better Tomorrow’s Start Today organization.

Hurst and his mother, Cathy, who runs the foundation, visited three Baltimore schools—St. Frances Academy, Poly, and Coppin State University—and one in Hagerstown to speak, take questions, and provide forms for mental health services.

“We’re trying to help kids realize it’s OK to say you’re not OK,” Cathy said. “I’m glad to see that the foundation is starting to get some traction, and people are really excited to hear that Hayden is not just a football player. He really cares.”

That’s really the moral of this whole story, tweet included. Pro football players are people, too.

When life’s stresses are weighing you down, you’ll probably feel like hitting up the bar where everybody knows your name. What might actually serve your soul in a genuine way is to go where no one does. Because when your brain is as buzzy as the city streets, you need a real reprieve.

Getting out in nature, whether it’s for a picnic or a walk in the woods, can help you reclaim your calm, find your center, or whatever zen mind trick you’re trying to pull. Luckily, you don’t have to go far to find a spot to embrace the outdoors, unplug, and recharge. Here are seven peaceful spots in Baltimore to unwind.

The Red Trail at Lake Roland: The park and nature center at Lake Roland are big hits, especially in the springtime. But off the beaten path, you’ll find tons of trails to wander. The red trail, which juts off the main part of the park (between the playground and the dog park) follows Falls Road north for two miles. On it, you’ll find streams, bridges, and art installations. Higher traffic times are in the morning and late afternoon, but around midday, only a few folks can be found snapping twigs under their heels. Whether you’re looking to have a walking meditation or a workout, this shady trail can’t be beat. 1000 Lakeside Drive

Sherwood Gardens: If you’d rather relax and snack than move and sweat, bring the blanket and the charcuterie over to Sherwood Gardens in Guilford. The six-acre park houses over 80,000 tulips which makes it the perfect place to breathe deep and let go of your troubles. The evening brings tons families to the park to play, so if you’re aiming to get your “om” on without having to worry about getting clocked in the jaw with a frisbee, an early afternoon picnic and siesta is your best bet. Yawn . . . it really does sound ideal. 4310 Underwood Rd.

Soldiers Delight: Over in Owings Mills, you’ll find another trail to cure what ails. What’s unique about the land here is that it’s a serpentine barren, meaning the rock that underlines the area is made mostly of serpentine, making it a sandy, stony, sparsely vegetated space with some rare flowers, insects, and plant species. There are about seven miles of marked trails and, because of the sensitive nature of the environment there, cyclists aren’t permitted on the trails. Wanderers, however, are more than welcome. 5100 Deer Park Rd.

Quarry Lake: If you’re in need of a nearby loop where you can walk off your lunch and still make it back to work on time, Quarry Lake is a solid midday stop. The manmade lake is one of the deepest in Maryland and makes for a beautiful reprieve for its community members and neighbors. At the quarry, you can sit and eat a bagel, have a peaceful walk, or people watch. 2700 Quarry Lake Drive

Loch Raven Reservoir: If the woods are calling, there’s no better place to find your way (or lose it) than Loch Raven Reservoir. There are lots of shady trails to hike through, though some are a bit tricky with steep inclines and bumpy terrain. Take a break for a snack or some quiet time on the rocks overlooking the water. And before you leave, make sure to feed the ducks some corn, lettuce, or duck pellets (no bread, though)! A word a to the wise: Watch out for the geese because those are huge, loud, and, uh, kind of scary. Morgan Mill Rd and Loch Raven Drive

Baltimore Waterfront Promenade: For those looking for the perfect waterfront walk, the 4.3-mile trail running from Canton Waterfront Park to Fells Point is just the one. It’s easy walking, and the water views make the time fly by. Of course, you’re bound to see some passersby here, because you’re not exactly lost in the woods. But taking a stroll while looking out over the water still makes a great getaway (if only in your head). The promenade is dog-friendly, too. Just make sure to pick after your pup and keep them on a leash. 3001 Boston St.

Patapsco Valley State Park: Whatever you’re in the mood to accomplish (or not accomplish), you can probably achieve it here. This Howard County park runs for miles along the Patapsco River and has eight developed recreation areas. Tame your mind with a hike or a bike ride along one of the many trails, or hop in a canoe and let your troubles drift away. The Cascade Falls Trail in the Orange Grove area of the park is popular spot for its waterfalls and swinging bridges. And if you’re just looking to post up in a pavilion for the day and watch the world go by, you can totally do that, too. At least until your boss calls. Or the school wonders why you haven’t picked your kids up, yet. Okay, get zen, but maybe check the time every now and then. 5120 South St.

As we dive into the new year, we’re already starting to see new fitness trends take over our Instagram feeds. People are using the calendar to reset and fuel fresh goals, pursuing all things health and wellness. There’s no shortage of new tips, tricks, and fads, but we’re taking a look at the things we think will stick around for the full year.

Body and Mind

First and foremost, we’re seeing a shift from only-fitness to all-around wellness. In 2019, you’ll focus on training your body and your mind. People are realizing they need to look at the whole picture, not just the physical. From sleep to mental health and stress to nutrition, being “well” is at the top of the list and brands are making help accessible to all. Apps like Headspace are making meditation more mainstream and we’re seeing it more in Baltimore, with events by Jason Williams of Charm City PT and others. Local legend Michael Phelps is working to lessen the stigma around therapy, sharing his story of anxiety and depression, encouraging approachable apps like Talkspace to assist with mental health.

Easy Access

Companies, trainers, and brands are building new ways to make their information more easily accessible, particularly with digital fitness. Streaming and digital-guided workouts are everywhere and apps have multiplied on your phone, on your TV and even in your Mirror. Amazon-owned audiobook seller Audible even has audio-guided fitness programs available from Aaptiv. As we see more focus on convenience and easy-to-use programming, we know this trend will only continue to grow.

Shorter Workouts

Shorter workouts are on the rise (count us in!). People are busier than ever and are looking for a short, effective workouts to help them reach their goals. The 2019 MINDBODY Wellness Index Report shared that 44 percent of Americans “try to prioritize fitness when they can” but nearly 37 percent identify time constraints as a an obstacle to living a healthier life. Studios and digital leaders are offering shorter classes and sessions to cater to the demand.

Because of the time constraints, we’re also seeing a continued rise in HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workouts, which typically involve short bursts of high-intensity bouts of exercise followed by a short period of rest. While HIIT started with elite athletes and has been growing in interest since 2014, this trend has gone fully mainstream. ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal annual Worldwide Survey of Fitness Trends ranks it in their top three of 2019 trends.

Low Impact

In an effort to balance high-intensity workouts and focus more on the long term, we’re also seeing a rise in swimming, walking, yoga, and other low-impact fitness activities. Swimming particularly has myriad benefits and can be perfect for people with osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, and even bad posture. But don’t think because it’s low impact means it’s easy—your body is working hard to move you through the water. You can even add in underwater weights like surf legend Laird Hamilton, cycle bikes like D.C.’s Splash Cycle, and much more.

According to MINDBODY, yoga and swimming topped the list of exercises Americans are most interested in trying next. Although popular across the board, when broken down further by age, swimming rises to the top with exercisers ages 45 to 65. The Washington Post reported that “baby boomers are retiring but not slowing down,” making way for specific low-impact programs tailored to their age group. While it hasn’t been in the top 10 for ACSM since 2007, they are showing that fitness clubs are capitalizing on these individuals because they generally have more discretionary money than their younger counterparts.

Recovery, Recovery, Recovery

Going along with the theme of overall wellness, you’re going to see a major emphasis on recovery in 2019. On a recent episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast, LeBron James and his trainer talked about the importance of his recovery, including sleep. While you may have seen a foam roller in the corner at your gym, you can expect to see more myofascial, stretching, and compression tools. More trainers and studios are also utilizing percussion tools, like the Theragun and Hypervolt, to add another layer to your pre and post-workout.

Blurred Lines

Lastly, in 2019 we’ll see expanded offerings from your favorite places and trainers. As we’ve seen here in Baltimore, major cities are becoming saturated with fitness options. It’s not only hard for you to choose just one, but it’s tough for studio owners to keep up with the competition. This year, you’re going to see some studios and instructors grow their offerings to accommodate and attract clients with new classes, workshops, hours, etc. On the other end of the spectrum, we’re also seeing a rise in class offerings from large gym brands—in an effort to keep up with the desire for small, unique experiences.

In the past few years, the body-positivity movement has finally started to make an impact on our culture. But the journey to self-love can be a tumultuous and sometimes lonely one.

This is why local blogger—and self-proclaimed merriment maker—Mary England started Uncustomary, a blog-turned-community where England offers everything from one-on-one coaching and e-courses to metaphysical services such as tarot readings and guided meditations.

“Uncustomary is like my alter ego, she is like my highest self, and I put forth what I want to attract,” she says. “People are looking for true connection, and sometimes I get more transparent about something deeper that’s going on.”

Born and raised in Baltimore, England was diagnosed with mental illness at the age of 8, which led her to major in psychology in college. Fittingly, it was receiving her own cognitive behavioral therapy that inspired her to document her journey of self-acceptance.

After five years, she has now reached more than 10,000 followers on Instagram and written a self-love book titled This is About You. “At times, I do struggle with wanting to have some things stay private in my life and then also living my life as a brand,” she says. “But I use the internet to reach people all over the world and teach them how to fall deeply in love with themselves and start leading the happy life they crave.”

Most recently, England has been helping her readers combat body shaming, negative comments, and low self-esteem. “In today’s political climate, it’s important for us to make sure that we are practicing radical self-acceptance in a time where institutions are trying to intimidate you to do the opposite,” she says.

Through her own experiences, England has turned her personal challenges into fuel to help others—whether they have been diagnosed or not. “Not everyone has mental illness, but we all have mental health,” she says. “It’s never something that hasn’t been important, but it’s something we’re shining more light on currently.”

Five years ago, long before he became what he is today—a rookie tight end with the Baltimore Ravens—Hayden Hurst stood alone on the elevated dirt of a pitcher’s mound in Bradenton, FL, the center of attention, as a 6-foot-5 hard-throwing major league pitching prospect making his first-ever spring training start.

The anxiety began in warmups. His thoughts raced. Who was watching him today? What would they think about him? The Pittsburgh Pirates had paid him a $400,000 signing bonus. How disappointed would they be if he didn’t live up to expectations?

Hurst’s heart pounded. His right hand trembled. His stomach was queasy. He felt blood rushing from his arms and legs. And his palm dripped an inordinate amount of sweat onto the baseball in his grip. Then he tried throwing it across home plate, 60 feet away.

Nerves rattling more than he ever felt before, Hurst walked all five batters he faced and threw two wild pitches in one terrifying inning. And that was just the beginning.

“It happened all the time, for three years. I was having panic attacks,” Hurst says. “I wanted nothing to do with being out there. I wanted to get away. I wanted to escape.”

Like he’d done as a high school star, Hurst just kept throwing hard, listening to his coaches, and hoping it would change—that what he’d always known how to do since he was an eighth-grader on the varsity team, to throw hard strikes (as a freshman he threw 90 miles per hour and was the winning pitcher in the state title game), would suddenly come back. That the dreaded yips, as the sudden loss of a skill is often called in sports, would disappear. But they never did.

Hurst’s thoughts of pitching in the major leagues quickly unraveled. That game, Hurst’s first professional start as a 19-year-old, was his last.

For the next two years, unbeknownst to even his family, any time he stepped near a mound, Hurst’s mind went haywire. But he attempted to fight through it, like he was trained to do as a young, tough, strong athlete in and around the private Bolles School in Jacksonville. He masked the type of anguish he really felt.

“Everything’s fine,” he told his parents when they called to ask how things were going. These were physical issues, he said. He believed that, too, even though the anxiety from the pitcher’s mound had begun to translate into depression off the field. By the spring of 2014, Hurst’s preferred way to spend a day was in the dark watching television inside his dorm room, avoiding people.

Then, one day in a practice game, Hurst unintentionally hit an Orioles’ prospect, coincidentally, in the helmet with a 94 mile-per-hour fastball, a pitch hard enough to knock the batter unconscious. That made everything worse. Hurst had totally lost control. Of his fastball. Of his mind. Of his body. And, with no exaggeration or hyperbole, his life.

“It’s such a darkness that comes over you,” Hurst says of the depression he sunk into, his baseball dreams disappearing with no alternative outcome in sight. “You don’t want to go anywhere or do anything, and you don’t ever think you’re going to get out of it. It’s the worst feeling in the world, and I don’t wish it upon anybody.”

Hurst’s pitching coach with the Pirates, former major leaguer Scott Elarton, phoned Hurst’s dad, Jerry: “You need to come see your son.”

“He didn’t want to disappoint us,” his mom, Cathy says. “He didn’t want to feel like a failure, so he internalized everything. We were shocked at how far down he’d gotten.”

Sitting across from Hurst at an outdoor patio table overlooking the practice field at the Ravens’ training facility, it’s clear that brighter times have now arrived. He appears more imposing than he does on television, where he runs alongside athletic giants of his similar 6-foot-5, 245-pound size.

When he’s on the football field, with a red beard and a long mane of ginger shoulder-length hair that protrudes from the back of his purple and black helmet, paired with mammoth muscular arms, Hurst is downright Viking-like. He certainly doesn’t fit Hollywood’s stereotypical description of a person who has struggled with his or her mental health.

But that’s really the point—of why he’s here on a sun-splashed afternoon in Owings Mills, calmly describing the painful details of his history with anxiety and depression, and why it’s so important for him to talk about it—instead of addressing more trivial locker room topics like curl routes, blocking assignments, or next Sunday’s game.

“In sports, you hear, ‘We have to be tough men, we can’t talk about mental health.’ Or ‘If you seek help, it’s weakness.’” Hurst says, wearing his purple number 81 jersey, his elbows on the lunch table making straight eye contact. “I think that’s a load of crap now. It’s incredible that it affects so many people, and in so many different ways. It needs to be talked about.”

So he’s talking. Hurst wants other people to learn from his story, to help rip the stigma off mental health treatment, to encourage teenagers, young adults, or anyone else to find some hope and support in his tale. He was a teenage, multi-sport, all-star athlete. “He was always the big-name guy, the big pitcher,” says his friend and former high school teammate, the Orioles’ D.J. Stewart.

Hurst felt pressure, then confusion, fright, and hopelessness, when everything he worked for slipped away. Then he found awareness, of what anxiety and depression really is, and make a choice to triumph, by finally accepting what was tearing him up inside and ditching a professional baseball career to head to college at almost 22 years old with the idea of starting over as a football player.

Just months after the official end of Hurst’s baseball flameout—when, at the start of his third year of spring training, he walked off the mound after hitting the fence with yet another pitch in a practice session and sobbed in the clubhouse, he walked on the football team at the University of South Carolina.

And after just three years there, two as a starter, Hurst became one of the top collegiate tight ends in the nation. He joined the Ravens in April when they selected him in the first round of the 2018 NFL draft, seven picks before quarterback Lamar Jackson.

Hurst may still be making his name on the field—he missed the first four games of the season with a foot injury and, as the second tight end on the Ravens’ depth chart, his stats for the year are 10 receptions for 102 yards and a touchdown. His best game came against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this past Sunday, when he caught three passes for 20 yards, and screamed and pumped his fists after one of them. He’s not a superstar (yet), but as a more mature and hardened 25-year-old rookie, he’s already embraced the visibility and platform that comes with having an NFL roster spot of any kind.

In September, Hurst launched The Hayden Hurst Family Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to help adolescents in Baltimore, as well as Columbia, SC, where Hurst went to college, and Jacksonville, his hometown, deal with mental health struggles. His mom has retired from a 30-plus-year sales career to help run the foundation.

Approximately one in five adults in the United States experiences mental illness in a given year, according to the National Alliance of Mental Illness. And one in five children ages 13 to 18 have or will have a serious mental illness, with 75 percent of all cases beginning by age 24.

Yet a stigma about addressing mental health in public, or private, remains, especially in the testosterone-inundated world of pro sports. “When I was going through it, I didn’t think that I would have ever talked about it,” Hurst says. But add his name to growing list of elite athletes that are speaking out, doing their part to soften the taboo, and shed some light on why and how to seek help.

Former Ravens players Steve Smith and Jamal Lewis, basketball’s Kevin Love and DeMar Derozan, and hockey goalie Robin Lehner of the New York Islanders have all shared their stories. Like Love, Hurst wrote a first-person account of his struggles in The Players’ Tribune. It’s titled “The Things You Can Control.” And he’s talked about it in articles for BaltimoreRavens.com and Bleacher Report. Other high-profile athletes like former world No. 1 tennis player Novak Djokovic are more private, but have cited their mental health as reasons for stepping away from their respective games.

“You never really know what someone else is going through,” Hurst says, “Even my own family.”

It wasn’t until almost two years into his pro baseball nightmare that Hurst honestly spoke to his family, first his father, about his real struggles—and that he then learned of theirs.

His father, a former Jacksonville University baseball player, still suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, that also began when he was in his 20s. “My dad told me his history, how he saw therapists, and how it helped him,” Hurst says. “My sister as well. I had no idea she had seen therapists all throughout high school.”

There were tragedies, too. Hurst’s uncle, Dennis, was an alcoholic and committed suicide. So did his cousin, D.J. Hurst. Both struggled with anxiety and depression. Becoming aware of the family history—some research suggests a majority of mental health disorders are inheritable, but they can be caused by other circumstances, too—was one of the first steps for Hurst to start addressing his own struggles.

“When I was younger, I didn’t really notice it. I thought it was just nerves,” Hurst says. “The older I got, I could see some things in myself, and some signs in my dad, but we really didn’t talk about it until I started going through it, where we felt like we could relate and we could talk about it.”

In Florida, as Hurst tried to figure out what was wrong with him, he visited eight different doctors and made more than 70 different appointments, spending thousands of dollars.

He didn’t really like talk therapy, but it helped. “I didn’t want to admit that I was weak,” Hurst says. “But the biggest thing is just talking to people, getting it out there, and addressing the issue.” He tried anything in addition, though, even hypnotism. That didn’t work, nor did another technique called tapping—on his forehead to unlock his mind.

A psychiatrist that the Pirates recommended diagnosed Hurst with attention deficit disorder, and recommended he take Prozac. Hurst balked at medication, primarily because he thought antidepressants had contributed to his cousin’s suicide, though Hurst understands that antidepressants have helped other people.

The Pirates’ sports psychologist suggested that Hurst keep a journal as a way to express his emotions. Of all the suggestions for addressing his mental pain, that’s the one that worked most for him. He wrote every day for two and a half years, “just to get it out, kind of like I was talking to somebody,” he says.

A sampling: “I do not know why but I feel as though everything has gone to shit,” Hurst wrote in mid-June 2014. “I feel nervous and unable to focus. I can’t get remotely close to obtaining the badass in me. And I have been doing a poor job at separating it on and off the field. I am lost, losing faith, and searching for answers and stability in my life. This is getting hard to face each day and to be honest I feel like giving up. Why me? What have I done to deserve these 2 years of confirmed hell?”

Hurst signed himself up for a third and final year of spring training to try to make things right in his baseball life one more time, afraid of disappointing the organization and his family. He tried and tried until he finally gave up after yet another unsuccessful throwing session. He and Elarton cried when Hurst couldn’t even have a simple catch. He’d had enough.

In May 2014, he called the Pirates’ director of minor league operations Larry Broadway to tell him he was quitting. “Well, I hope there’s something you can stick to in your life,” Broadway said. The words stung.

By this time, Hurst had already started to seriously think about playing football. He bulked up by 20 pounds lifting weights in the Pirates weight room, and had already called one of his childhood friends, Perry Orth, who was the backup quarterback at the University of South Carolina, to ask him how things were going there, and float the idea of joining him.

Hurst played only one year of football in high school, as a junior at Bolles, before his mom told him he should really decide between baseball and football, in case he got hurt in the latter, which would have prevented him from pursuing the former. And baseball, after all, was what everyone told him he would make millions playing, his natural talent for throwing a 95 mile-per-hour fastball and all. It was an ambitious pivot.

“You’re crazy,” Cathy Hurst told her son when he said he wanted to head to college and try to play football. But it was what he wanted to do. She now reflects back on the turning point and says, “It gave him hope.”

“I knew that I wasn’t ready to stop dreaming,” Hurst wrote in The Players’ Tribune. “As long as there was the smallest chance that I could keep playing sports, that was enough.”

Given Hurst’s size and speed—he could run the 40-yard dash in about 4.55 seconds—Orth convinced South Carolina assistant coach Steve Spurrier Jr. to consider giving Hurst a chance, and he was offered a walk-on spot.

“I always had a feeling deep down that I was going to be really good at football,” Hurst says. “I got burned out from baseball, going through that for three years. And maybe having baseball taken away from me fueled my fire for football. It made me pretty determined. That’s kind of why I play the way that I do.”

At South Carolina, Hurst played wide receiver for a year before a new coaching staff led by Will Muschamp took over and moved Hurst to tight end. He put his natural athleticism to work right away, setting program single-season records for catches (48) and receiving yards (616) by a tight end, and was the first sophomore to be named a captain in team history.

“The fear and anxiety I’d at one point associated with pitching had been replaced by a sense of joy and freedom I experienced on the football field,” Hurst says. “I felt in my element again.”

After catching 44 passes for 559 yards as junior, with one year of college eligibility remaining, he declared for the NFL draft, and was considered one of the best prospects at his position. He was a captain again and a first-team All-SEC pick. Former Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow, a college football TV analyst, even named Hurst his “Freak of the Week,”—a compliment—during the season.

On draft day, he hugged his mom and dad hard after Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome called, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced Hurst’s name on television as the 25th overall selection. The millions he thought he’d always make in baseball now came from a football team, and he was happier. His four-year contract guarantees him $10 million.

“As awful as it was for those three years in baseball,” Hurst says. “I’m kind of thankful I went through it, because it made me stronger, that’s for sure.”

The foot injury, a stress fracture which occurred at the end of an impressive preseason, set Hurst back and he’s essentially blended in this year as part of a four-man tight end rotation, but just this week coach John Harbaugh spoke with optimism about Hurst’s future, and his three catches last Sunday.

“His confidence has been good all along, but he was chomping at the bit for an opportunity to prove it,” Harbaugh said. “He made a couple big, tough catches out there, and you could see it in his emotions [that] it mattered to him. Like, ‘Finally, I had a chance to show what I can do here!’ That’s just going to make him even more hungry to do more. That’s what you want to see as a coach.”

About three months ago, on a warm mid-September Monday night, an off day for the Ravens, Hurst stood inside on the basketball court at Towson University’s SECU Arena, looking up in the bleachers at close to 500 of the school’s athletes, not at all much younger than his 25 years.

He was there as part of an event put on by the “We’re All A Little Crazy” Global Health Mental Alliance, which has visited college campuses nationwide to raise awareness and break the stigma associated with talking about mental health. Hurst is one of many athletes and celebrities to serve as ambassadors.

“How do you work through your depression and anxiety now?” Darren Rovell, the former ESPN sports business reporter and the event’s moderator, asked Hurst as part of a question-and-answer session.

He leans on his family—The Core Four, they call themselves—of his parents and sister. And his dog helps, too, a Border Collie. Hurst also talked about his journal, the pages and pages he began writing at rock-bottom in Florida.

Afterward, students asked questions and Hurst fielded one from a Towson softball player.

“How do you find time to write in a journal?”

Hurst, on this night his Viking hair tied back in a bun, looked right at her.

“You make time,” he said. “For me, that’s my therapy.”

So is football.

Back at the Ravens’ training facility after a mid-week practice, Hurst explains that for as nervous, anxious, and panicked he was on the pitcher’s mound all those years ago, he’s just as excited to wear a helmet and pads and run out onto M&T Bank Stadium’s field.

“I never had an issue in football with it,” Hurst says. “It’s two separate sports. Baseball is slow. When you’re a pitcher, you have the ball in your hand and you control the flow of the game. For me, tight end is different, and football is such a different sport. You get to run around and hit people, catch a pass. I feel like I can take out my aggression out there.”

When he returned home to Jacksonville after quitting baseball, broken-hearted, gut-wrenched, and unsure exactly where he was headed, Hurst had one question: “Can I have that picture?”

He was looking at a painting that had been in the family for decades. A Phoenix, the mythical bird that symbolized rebirth and renewed youth. A friend of Hurst’s parents painted it when they were all in high school together. The Phoenix was their mascot.

“Absolutely,” his mom said, and the painting now hangs in Hurst’s house in Baltimore. He walks by it after every practice and game. The Phoenix, rising again.

“It’s a reminder of how strong he was,” Cathy Hurst says, “that he could pull himself out of the embers, and have this opportunity in a whole new life.”

You’ve gained attention for incorporating self-empowerment and activism into your eighth-grade English classes, which are made up of students from across the city. How do you work in those kinds of lessons?
It always goes back to the text. If I read a story, I’m going to find something that relates to [some of] my students’ trauma. We read about a woman who did not speak for years because she saw someone get killed. I asked the kids, “Why did she feel that way?” Once I get them talking about her, I can then ask, “Have you ever felt that way? Do you know anyone who feels that way?” If I can figure out a way to pull out the social-emotional discussion points, then I can get them to open up enough for me to motivate them. I’m all about doing what I feel our curriculum is missing.

How does that compare to how other schools approach emotional learning?
A lot of schools are adopting social-emotional learning curriculums that are supplementary to [their normal] work, such as 10 minutes of meditation in the middle of the school day. There are so many ways to implement social-emotional stuff into every class, but no one’s doing it yet. So that’s what I’m modeling through my curriculum, and eventually I’m going to bleed that throughout the entire nation—that’s my plan.

You’re so open about your struggles with depression on Instagram and in your classroom.
Yeah, I’m pretty open about everything. The only thing I do not share is my love life. I’d rather have something I can keep for myself. But the depression—I don’t feel like it’s mine to keep. Depression is really our fight—it’s an American fight; it’s a universal issue; it’s something that so many of us saw our parents try to live through. We didn’t know what we were looking at. Now for everyone who understands it and has the courage to speak about it, it’s our responsibility to do so.

How does that relate to your relationship with reading?
I didn’t fall in love with reading until a few years ago when I didn’t get into my PhD program at the University of Maryland. I’ve always been a strong teacher because I love teaching and I love kids, but I was not grounded in theory. My professor was so upset when I didn’t get into the program, but she gave me a book by bell hooks and said, “Start with this—this is critical race theory.” And bell hooks not only helped me begin to read theory, but she helped me forgive my family members who had hurt me. She talks about mental health, shame in the black community, lack of love, and things that are direct results of post-traumatic slave syndrome. I read that and thought, “Woah! This is everybody that I’m around!” There were so many nuanced things that I began to see when I got into theory, and I got addicted to that fast.

Then I fell into my deepest depression in 2015 and I was unable to do anything but read. I found my sanity in reading about people who are bipolar and schizophrenic, and I was like, “Oh my god—this is me, this is my mother, this is my grandmother.” Reading really healed me. And these weren’t just books by black authors. You gotta read everybody. Because our stories are in everybody’s stories. I don’t give my kids as many books by black authors as people assume that I do. I used to do that before I began reading as much because I thought that’s what my students needed. Now I’m like, ‘I want you to read about this child in India whose mother was killed, and this little boy in Africa who had to escape, and this little girl in Mexico.’ I want them to see themselves in all of these people. And then we can bring it back to Baltimore.

What are some of the books that you’re teaching this year? How do you motivate students to read extra books that are outside of the curriculum?
We have to teach The Crossover, which is a narrative poem about a kid who plays basketball and his dad dies at the end. I think it’s a good book, but I don’t love it so I added three more. I have this chart that says Master Reader, and if you read five books in the marking period, then you’re a master. If you only read one, then you’re a reader. It’s not a competition; it’s more of a discussion. I let them know that not everyone is going to [read] five books. You may only do one, and that’s okay. And why did you only do one and someone else did five? When you go home, you have to help your mom; when they go home, they’re chillin’, so they have more time. We have these open discussions where we talk about how intimate reading is and how diverse we are as learners.

Tell us about last year’s after-school trip to the new Baltimore City Correctional Center with your Reading Club students.
The jail trip was big for me because we didn’t have books [in my classroom] last year. All the books I have this year came from a book drive on Instagram, and now there are enough for kids to read at home in addition to the class set. How does the city give the jail $32 million, but our schools are lacking? So I walked the kids down to the jail and let them see. Where are the playgrounds? Why do we have all these Chinese restaurants and liquor stores and carryouts? Where’s the actual supermarket? For the kids, it was eye-opening. I let them ask all of the questions.

How have your students affected your life?
The children that I’m teaching are my family. I don’t know how, and I honestly don’t care how, but the work that I’m doing is beyond me, and I take a lot of pride in that. It’s really an honor, and it allows me to trust the process. I had a student who was murdered at barely 22 years old and had a 6-year-old daughter. I can hear his voice saying, “Now I’m actually with you, Ms. Clay, while you’re dealing with these boys. You won’t lose another one.” I can feel that, I can hear that, I can see it in the butterflies, I can feel it in the wind, and I know that everything’s going to be good. That’s why, for me, I would call Baltimore ‘Charm City’. It’s like that witchy charm. And not witchy with a notion of scary, harmful magic. It’s the magic that most people don’t know is inside of them. And I get to pull that out of these kids, and they pull it out of me.

Emmy Award-winning actor Željko Ivanek has played dozens of parts on stage (“The Caine-Mutiny Court Martial,” “Brighton Beach Memoirs”), as well as big and small screen (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Madam Secretary, Damages). But this week, on Thursday, September 27, the Yale University graduate will appear as himself when he hosts the 35th anniversary of the nonprofit NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) at Center Stage.

While preparing to serve as the narrator for the event in which speakers share their stories, we caught up with the actor who lives in New York with his partner, Greg Pierce (introduced to each other by Greg’s uncle David Hyde Pierce). We talk about Homicide, typecasting, and why, in some ways, this is the actor’s hardest role yet.

Why does this particular cause speak to you and why did you agree to narrate the evening at NAMI?
Originally, I said no. That kind of thing—standing up in front of people as myself—gives me the hebbie jebbies. It scared me off initially, but the contact person was [board member] Mary O’Byrne and I went to college [at Yale] with Mary. I also have some affection for Baltimore having spent time working there on Homicide.

I’ve also had my own experiences with people in my extended family and have seen what it’s like to deal with mental-health issues. The idea of anyone or their family members having to struggle through without any resources, or just knowledge at the ready, is overwhelming. You can be at sea if you don’t have resources to draw on. It’s way too much to tackle yourself without any support or information—it was important for me to contribute.

I’m surprised to hear that someone who is the very definition of a working actor experiences stage fright.
I get very self-conscious going to parties and events where I just have to chitchat. What am I going to talk about? I’m always stunned by actors who can do that. A lot of actors do share my fear. It’s just a completely different thing when you have lines and a character and a context—that doesn’t phase me—but to just stand up there and give a speech suddenly you feel like all eyes are on you. . . . Someone said that I should just act like someone who is comfortable being the emcee and just play that character.

What have you learned from watching loved one’s suffer?
When things are good, you forget what pain actually is. When you’re not in a crisis, you get lulled back into your everyday life. Any brush with health issues and mortality and anything that can take away the things you take for granted, you want to hold closer to you. It makes even mundane things all the more precious.

How has seeing suffering so up close informed you as an actor?
I hadn’t thought of it specifically, but any encounter with human suffering is bound to elicit empathy, and empathy is at the core of understanding human behavior, and that is, in turn, essential to acting.

Now that you no longer come to Baltimore regularly to shoot Homicide, is there something you miss about the city?
I’ve always just loved walking around Baltimore. There’s so much history in the architecture and the streets and such a sense of place. It clearly trying to invent itself in some ways. It was to fun to see that start to happen. Of course, Fells Point was the center of my Baltimore universe, and is still what I think of most fondly. I’ll be curious to see how much it has changed.

You’ve had so much success as an actor. To what do you owe your success?
I’m not sure I know. I just came back from the 40th reunion of my drama class in London [at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art] and most of my classmates are not working in the business anymore and there were so many talented people. I started playing slightly smarmy men in suits or powerful men in suits. At some point you just fill a niche or a certain kind of category I fell into what’s useful and needed and I’ve managed to keep going.

I have also always appreciated working with people repeatedly and building on those connections. One of those people who got me started is Tom Fontana, who created Homicide. He became my mentor in terms of the business. He was working on St. Elsewhere and then created Homicide and cast me as a recurring character. That’s probably the first man in a suit I got to play. But the rest of my [success] has been a great mystery to me.

Your IMDb describes you as an actor who is “frequently cast as political or business middlemen of corrupt, shady natures who often end up stabbing somebody in the back.” Why do you think the casting directors believe these are the roles you should play?
A lot of times people see the last thing that you did. When I’ve been on the other side of the camera trying to cast a reading or help someone finance a movie, your mind works in the same way and you ask yourself, “Who do I know who has played that kind of part before?” If you’re lucky, you get to step out of that once in while, but it’s also incredibly gratifying to keep working and to belong to something. We are in our fifth season of Madam Secretary. I like the continuity and love going to work. Whenever that’s over, it will be a shock to go back out and get a call from my agent saying, “You have an appointment.”

Working in the restaurant industry has long been known to be a pressure cooker, but the recent deaths of Anthony Bourdain to suicide; Miami’s Sweet Liberty bar co-founder John Lermayer, who was found dead in his apartment in June; and, closer to home, former CEO for Bagby Restaurant Group Chris Becker—who allegedly lost a long battle with drug addiction—have all served as tragic reminders.

“It’s high stress and late nights,” says Blue Fork Marketing founder Dave Seel, who worked with Chris Becker at Bagby. “If you’ve ever stood in the line of the kitchen in a busy restaurant, it’s boom, boom, boom. It’s go, go, go, go for three, four, five hours, and you’re firing off stuff and always have to be on point.”

Those not working “the line” have pressures, too, says Cyrus Keefer, who has worked at several restaurants in Baltimore and is currently chef du cuisine at Cunningham’s.

“Once you get a title or become management, the stresses are worse,” says Keefer. “It’s all about the bottom line for the owner. And if that means cutting a few people to keep costs down, the chef has to work the hours to make the difference. When I was at Fork & Wrench, I worked 30 to 40 days straight without a break because half the staff had left as I was taking the job there.”

Sadly, abuse of alcohol and drugs is a far too common coping mechanism in kitchen culture—and addiction is rampant. In fact, a 2015 study by the Rockville-based Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported that the hospitality and food service industry has the highest rates of substance use disorders and the third-highest rates of heavy alcohol use of all employment sectors.

“In past jobs, from Adderall to cocaine to heroin, I’ve worked with people who’ve been on every drug in the business,” says Keefer, as he ticks off a list of well-known chefs who’ve struggled, not to mention the bartender he knew in Rehoboth who died of a heart attack after using “bad cocaine.”

“[Husk’s] Sean Brock went to rehab,” he says. “[Cockscomb’s] Chris Consentino came out and talked about his struggles with mental illness. I don’t know one chef who doesn’t have a therapist. When Bourdain’s book came out, people thought it was amusing, but this stuff is real and ugly.”

Seel says that, to some extent, some of those who choose kitchen work are already vulnerable. “One of the great things about the restaurant industry is that it’s all-inclusive of these culturally fringe human beings,” he says. “Young, blue collar kids are drawn to working in restaurants—it’s a communal atmosphere, you’re dating servers, you’re part of a team, you can have a whole bunch of tattoos that are not going to fly in the corporate world. But with that there come these realities.”

Of course, it’s an irony of the service industry that those whose job it is to take care of others are not necessarily good at taking care of themselves, though that seems to be changing.

Seel says that he’s also known people in the industry to be proactive about making better choices, as was the case with a cook who recently left a stressful kitchen job. “He switched lifestyles,” says Seel. “Now he’s up early in the morning and leads much more of a meditative lifestyle—it works for him. I know a lot of people who don’t want to work the line.”

Three years ago, executive chef Sarah Acconcia decided to take a stand by leaving her demanding job at a trendy Baltimore cocktail bar to take care of herself.

“Stress-wise, I was really finding the environment to be unmanageable,” says Acconcia. “And I had health issues on top of it.”

Though it wasn’t easy to walk away from a high-profile gig, Acconcia did some serious soul-searching. “I came to the conclusion that I needed to take a break from being at the executive management level,” she says. “A small restaurant did not have the resources to support their staff in having a work-life balance. I was working 60 hours a week. Every day was like fight or flight, not general work stress but that heart-racing flight or flight stress—the kind of stress that I think a lot of chefs feel every day.”

Making matters worse was the machismo culture of the kitchen. “I’d be too embarrassed saying that it was too stressful or too unmanageable,” Acconcia says. “That’s not accepted, that’s the culture teaching me that I’m weak.” Acconcia acknowledges that in some ways, she, too, contributed to that culture.

“I have some regrets about the way that I managed kitchens,” she says. “I was part of that culture that said you can’t take a day off just because you have a cold—‘Here’s a bottle of DayQuil, now get back to your station.’”

These days, Acconcia runs Juniper Culinary Apothecary, an e-business that takes a holistic approach to spices. Recently, she also became the general manager of 13.5% Wine Bar in Hampden, a job she says offers a “good work-life balance.”

Given her own struggles and former management style, Acconcia wants to help others and right some wrongs with her newfound wisdom. She created Self-Care for the Service Industry, a private Facebook discussion group, offering self-care tips and even meal planning for those in hospitality.

“There are so many toxic restaurant groups in Baltimore,” she says. “If I could reach out and grab them, that would be great. I want to inspire a young cook who struggles. I want to show them how to make their place and learn and let them know that putting everything aside for work is not life. I just want people to know that it’s 2018—it doesn’t have to be like that anymore.”

Restaurateur Tony Foreman of the Foreman Wolf Restaurant Group also adheres to the open-door policy with the thousands of employees he’s hired in his decades working in the industry.

“I feel the same way about mental health as I do about my own cardiac health,” says Foreman. “Everyone has something that could kill them. Those things need to be treated and people need to be cared for. Just listening to them is a gigantic thing—so many people are relieved to tell someone that they have this stuff going on and are vulnerable. Sometimes just having done that empowers them to seek the treatment that they need.”

As these issues come to the fore, a number of support groups have sprung up around the country such as Ben’s Friends, an open forum for discussing the difficulties of working in the restaurant industry and a sort of AA tailored to restaurant workers. The group was founded after South Carolina’s Charleston Grill chef Ben Murray died by suicide after struggling with addiction and depression.

Bartenders, in particular, have their own set of issues that are unique to their craft.

“Customers will sometimes tell you a lot of things about their lives that you shouldn’t know,” says Amie Ward, beverage director at R. Bar. “At one of my jobs, a couple of regulars were having an affair with each other and I kept that a secret for many years—that didn’t exactly make me feel like a great person. I’ve had to kick people out of bars, I’ve had barstools thrown at me—the job can take a lot out on you, especially if you don’t understand the basic premise of self-care.”

Other industry leaders, such as Lindsey Johnson, of Louisville, Kentucky-based Lush Life Productions points to the problems.

“With the way that the current landscape is set up for bartenders, there are a million occasions to have a drink and to maybe make choices that aren’t the best for their long- or short-term health,” says Johnson, who runs bartending education classes all over the country while also emphasizing mental health. “Almost every day, there’s an opportunity to go to a sponsored event at someone else’s bar where alcohol and drugs are flowing freely. There’s a lot of social pressure that goes along with these events, not only to be open to trying the drinks presented, but to take every one of the shots that’s put in front of you—there’s a deep-seated social pressure that we see is pervasive.”

But Johnson also sees the tide turning.

“I’m seeing this less and less with this new generation of bartenders,” she says. “The deaths and suicides and overdoses have prompted bartenders to look at what we’re doing to ourselves and make better choices every day. You have to set boundaries. If someone is pouring you all these shots, give some to a friend or just leave it. You have not failed your community—you’ve propped up your community and helped yourself by saying no.”

Ward, who studied exercise physiology, travels across the country with Johnson offering healthy lifestyle advice to bartenders.

She shares what she has seen, including plenty of cautionary tales like the time at a former restaurant when “one of the line cooks accidentally overdosed and it crushed the kitchen.”

“I encourage people to rethink what it means to be a bartender,” she says. “Why does it mean that you have to be out every night until four in the morning?”

Locally, she has become a healthy lifestyle warrior in the bartending community, offering free weekly workout classes at Movement Lab to those working in the service industry.

“We do lots of core work so that people have the strength to stand up all day long and have good posture,” she says. “We make it fun and do things like trampoline rebounding that helps increase circulation in areas of trauma, especially our feet and hips and back.”

Ward also keeps healthy snacks at the bar to help her “bar children” get through a shift during which thousands of drinks are often made. In a previous job, she says, “I’d drink while I was at work the entire time. We only got paid in tips, so the balance was being able to drink. I wasn’t trying to get drunk, but if you’re taking a shot once an hour for eight hours or more with your favorite guests, it adds up. And there’s a culture of greeting your fellow bartender with a shot.”

At R. Bar, full-time bartenders only work four days a week and, with the exception of one night, the bar closes by midnight. Ward does not allow shift drinks and forbids drinking on the job. “When my kids clock out, they can change their clothes and buy a drink at the bar if that’s what they want. But I remove the temptation.”

And when one bartender quit so that he could go to rehab, Ward was supportive. “I encouraged him,” she says. “It was the best inconvenience I could have. You have to set people up for healthy habits and provide the right environment if anything is going to change. These are the only children I’m ever going to have—I want them to be healthy and happy and safe and here for a very long time.”

Most people know that exercising is an instant mood-booster (hello, endorphins!), but there are plenty of other ways to join the Happiness Club. And while Norway tops the list of happiest countries on Earth (and, sadly, the U.S. fell from No. 13 to 14), according to the 2017 World Happiness Report (yes, there is such a thing), there’s no need for despair. You can still find happiness here at home. Here are our top feel-good tips and how to achieve them. Illustrations by Danielle Dernoga.

Adopt a Pet
The Centers for Disease Control lists many benefits of having a pet, including decreases in blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and feelings of loneliness and increased opportunities for exercise and socialization. Adopt at: Maryland SPCA.

Take a Hike 
While some hardcore calorie busters might not consider gentle walking exercise, the experts do. Thirty minutes a day of daily walking improves circulation, lowers weight, and loosens stiff joints. Go into the woods at: Patapsco Valley State Park.

Read a Book

Think of reading as medication for the mind. Go deep with Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, or read Gwendy’s Button Box, the latest page-turning tome by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar. Buy it: The Ivy Bookshop.

Get a Massage

Reach out—and have someone touch you. Getting a massage isn’t just good for stress, as the human touch can also reduce blood pressure and cortisol. Book it: Ojas Wellness Center.

Volunteer
Beauty is more than skin deep. Altruism is actually good for your health, so say Harvard researchers, who attribute volunteerism to lower blood pressure and longer lifespans. Volunteer at: Our Daily Bread.

Bake Like a Pro 
Researchers say there’s a link between creative expression and well-being. Activities such as baking can reap the same benefits as meditation. Take a class: Charm City Cakes.

Take a Bath  
For soft, supple skin and a bit of luxury, consider a bath with a chemical-free, homemade bar of vegan soap. Buy it: Sarah & June Handmade Soaps.

Laura Pogliano lost her son, Zac, twice. She’ll tell you this freely, looking you straight in the eye with tears rolling down her cheeks, defying you to look away. She’ll tell you both losses were traumatic, but they were different. She’ll describe how one unfurled over the course of six and a half years as her once vibrant son slipped into the ever tightening noose of schizophrenia, while the other happened suddenly, in January 2015, as he lay sleeping in his Towson apartment.

Ask her what happened in between and she’ll tell you about the year he called 911 at least 25 times because of his delusions—which included being shot in the head and choking on spiders—and how, at one point, he became so paranoid he slept with kitchen knives under his pillow to prevent an attack. She’ll inform you that she went broke—“gladly,” she’ll say—paying her son’s medical expenses, and she’ll relate how long it took to find good care for him, including a story about a clinic in Idaho that bullied him and called him lazy. She will fume at the scorn heaped upon her from others, including a therapist who blamed her son’s illness on bad parenting and a supervisor at work who dismissed her ordeal by saying, “Golden boy gone bad. Same old story. Get over it.”

But she also will praise the many devoted health care professionals who eventually formed the core of her son’s treatment team, and she will tell you about the compassionate way in which a Baltimore County police officer talked her son out of a delusion. She’ll tell you that, coincidentally, it was that same officer who responded to her call asking if someone could enter her son’s apartment and check on him because she hadn’t been able to reach him for a few days. She’ll note that her son was found dead in his bed, with his arms folded across his chest, the way he always slept. She’ll say that his cause of death is listed as cardiomegaly—or an enlarged heart—but that she knows it’s more complicated than that. Whether directly or indirectly, schizophrenia killed her son. And then—and this is the most important part—she’ll tell you how devoted she is to making sure it never happens to anyone else ever again.

Zaccaria “Zac” Pogliano was born Aug. 1, 1991—“a healthy, fat baby,” says Laura, as she sits at the dining room table in her Loch Raven Village townhouse, spring sunlight pouring in through the windows. Her sister, Angie, who moved from the Poglianos’ native Chicago last year to help in the wake of Zac’s death, bustles around the kitchen preparing a lunch of toasted salami and cheese hoagies, chips, and pasta salad. Both women agree that Zac was an exceptionally sensitive child with a strong moral compass, but was otherwise typical.

“There’s so much judgment around it that you don’t see in other illnesses.”

“One thing [doctors do] is try to go back and say, ‘Was there anything wrong? Was there something we should have seen?’” explains Laura. “He was fine. He was healthy. He ate and slept. He didn’t have any irregularities. He had no childhood illnesses. There was really nothing to say.”

While there might not be anything to say about Zac’s early health, there’s plenty to say about Zac himself, whom Laura describes as having a “peace, love, hippie flare.”

“He was a little social-justice type person, and he was that way after he got sick, too, even when he was paranoid or psychotic,” she says. “He’d say, ‘I’m the last peaceful man on Earth.’ He would cry for the rape victims of the world.”

She remembers that when Zac’s fourth grade teacher made racially insensitive remarks in class, Zac responded by refusing to do homework for the woman.

“I had to go to the school and say, ‘You have to apologize to him. He’s on a one-man boycott of you, and I can’t get it to end because you don’t deserve homework as far as he’s concerned!’”

This is the Zac that his family—which includes an older half-sister, Leah—wishes more people knew—the one who played baseball, drums, and piano, who had friends and a girlfriend, and who would volunteer to partner with social outcasts on school projects. But the truth is, as his illness worsened, all of that fell away, leaving Zac with what Laura calls “a medical life.”

Says Laura: “Honestly, when I cry about my child now, it’s not because he passed away, because all of us are going to pass away. It’s because of all the things he suffered while he was here: friendlessness, hopelessness, his sense of being abandoned. . . . All that stuff comes with long-term illness.”

The first hint that anything was amiss came in the summer of 2008. Zac had just finished up his junior year at Calvert Hall College High School when, in the course of a few weeks, he totaled the car, quit the baseball team, dumped all his friends, and began suspecting people—including Laura—of dishonesty.

Though Laura knew something was off, she initially attributed his behavior to typical teenage angst. “I started thinking, here comes the bad year,” she says with a rueful laugh. But by the end of the summer, Zac’s behavior had only become stranger. He had frequent temper tantrums followed by periods of intense moroseness. As his birthday approached, he told his mother, “I don’t even know why I’m having a birthday. There’s no point in birthdays. There’s no point in getting older or living your life.”

In August, Laura took Zac to see the first of many psychiatrists, who provided the first of many misdiagnoses and prescribed the first of many largely unhelpful drugs. Ultimately, in 2011, doctors settled on a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which the National Institute of Mental Health characterizes as “a chronic, severe, and disabling mental disorder characterized by deficits in thought processes, perceptions, and emotional responsiveness.” But to get to that point required many dead-end trips through a mental health system Laura calls “disconnected, jarring, and hostile.”

“Over and over I would say, ‘Oh my gosh, how could my son navigate this himself?’” she says.

And yet, that is, in many ways, what the law asks patients to do. In Maryland, starting at age 16, individuals have the right to make their own decisions regarding psychiatric care, a sizable obstacle in providing treatment to the mentally ill, who often don’t realize they are sick. Furthermore, even if they were to seek treatment, figuring out where to get care—or how to pay for it—would remain challenging.

Since the passage in 1963 of the Community Mental Health Act, the federal government has phased out its once pervasive system of state-run mental hospitals in favor of private or community-based facilities. The act—a response to the widespread abuse of patients in government facilities—was well intentioned, but Laura believes it went too far. “Instead of fixing the system, we dismantled it,” she says. Now, options for those without private insurance and/or immense wealth are limited. This is one reason it is estimated that up to a third of the homeless population suffers from some form of mental illness, and that a Justice Department report from 2006 found that “more than half of all prison and jail inmates had a mental health problem.”

Indeed, even Laura, a fully competent adult who has worked as a training consultant for organizations including the U.S. Navy and The Johns Hopkins University, found herself overwhelmed. So relentless was the stress of her son’s illness that she developed a panic disorder, severe depression, and a nervous tick.

“When I cry about my child now . . . it’s because of all the things he suffered while he was here.”

“She went through this with him,” says Krista Baker, the program supervisor for outpatient schizophrenia services at Johns Hopkins Bayview, where Zac received treatment during the last two-and-a-half years of his life. “When I first met her, she was struggling with her own reaction to what was happening, and she sort of developed this head-twitch-nod thing. So we had this series of meetings about it. I was like, ‘You have to get better because you have to be able to provide the support to him.’”

Heeding Baker’s advice, Laura sought therapy for herself and began taking antidepressants, a regimen she continues today.

“I got better,” she says. “In a handful of weeks I was back at work. That’s not the same as being diagnosed with a chronic, progressive debilitating brain disease like schizophrenia.

“I mean, he was never really well,” she continues with a sigh. “He got sick and then he got sicker. Each time it takes more and more medicine to restore competency. Each time they lose a little bit more. They don’t come all the way back, especially when you’re floridly psychotic, like he was. He had periods of recovery . . . but with the stress of daily living, he would have another episode.”

According to Baker, Zac’s chances of improvement were inhibited by his intermittent use of illegal drugs and resistance to some treatment options.

“The next step was clozapine,” says Baker, referencing the antipsychotic often used to treat schizophrenia. Zac had been prescribed the medication before, but hadn’t liked it. As a result, says Baker, “he adamantly refused to ever let us initiate it.”

With no more medications to try, Zac was discharged from his 13th and final hospitalization in mid-September 2014. In November, Laura acquiesced to his constant demands and paid for him to move into his own apartment nearby, hiring a house helper and house cleaner to perform chores and monitor his behavior.

“I just decided . . . for however long he has, I’m going to set him up and let him be the cool guy, let him have a normal 23-year-old’s life,” she says.

His death from heart failure came as a shock, of course, especially since, to monitor how his medications were affecting his overall health, Hopkins regularly administered electrocardiograms, none of which detected any irregularities. And yet, there was a part of Laura that had been bracing for his death for more than six years.

“When [the police officer] first told me he was passed I said, ‘Well, that’s just about enough of that then,’” recalls Laura, tears welling in her eyes.

“I mean that kid had such a tough time. That was plenty. Enough is enough. He really, really suffered, and he was looking at 40 more years of it.”

What’s striking about the Poglianos’ story is how common it is. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, more than 16 million people in the U.S. have a serious mental illness. Factor in other mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder, and the number further balloons. Schizophrenia alone affects about 3.2 million people. That’s more than are afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) combined.

But for all their ubiquity, severe mental illnesses remain mysterious. For instance, there is no diagnostic test for schizophrenia. And beyond identifying some contributing factors—genetics, brain structure and chemistry, prenatal and/or birth-related difficulties, extreme stressors/trauma—medical experts don’t understand why one person develops schizophrenia and another doesn’t. It is also difficult to know how treatment will affect patients. Psychiatric drugs can cause severe side effects, and as a result, medication is administered with a “go low and go slow approach that is trial and error,” says Baker. While prudent, this also means that some patients can take years to stabilize.

Says Laura, “Every time I meet a person [with mental illness] who’s doing well, there’s a million factors—and luck—that made it happen: time, money, quality care, wraparound services, a supportive family who doesn’t give up. Most families don’t have all that. They might have one piece or two pieces [but] they don’t have all five or six things going for them.”

Even before Zac’s death, Laura began soliciting donations online and distributing them to fellow caregivers who were struggling to pay bills. Now, she has formalized that practice as the nonprofit Parents for Care, which she runs with Angie. In addition to handing out donations, the organization advocates for mental health law reform, runs a monthly support group, and partners with the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center to get medical information and resources to caregivers. Eventually, Laura and Angie say they’d like to build affordable custodial care homes for the mentally ill in Baltimore and beyond.

If the plans seem ambitious, that’s because they are. Laura has no patience for anything less.

“I really believe that the way we treat mentally ill people in this country is the human rights crisis of our times,” she says. “There’s so much judgment around it . . . that you don’t see in other illnesses. . . . [People with mental illness] are somebody’s boyfriend, somebody’s husband, somebody’s wife, mother, grandma—all unlucky enough to get sick.

“I’m never going to stop talking about it,” she declares. “It’s too important.”