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I serve as the project manager for Kids Mental Health Pierce County, a community collaborative aimed at streamlining and coordinating behavioral health services for school-age kids in crisis.

A lot of my daily interactions are through working with families that are experiencing that crisis, who need that crisis intervention, and then how do we connect them to resources in the community where they can recover and reintegrate and be safe in their communities and stay connected so that they can be well long-term.

And so we see families when they’re struggling the most, when they don’t know where to go, they don’t know who to call, their children are having thoughts of wanting to harm themselves or engaging in self-harming behavior and not knowing the local resources to help get that child support and what their options are.

This is really the earliest form of intervention. Having healthy kids is going to help us have more healthy adults in the future. And I think finally we’re seeing early investment into youth behavioral health. We’re not just an afterthought after they’ve created this robust adult mental health system but really being able to focus on that early intervention and making youth and families well before we get to that crisis.

How you feel is normal.

In terms of advice, I think it’s important for people to know there’s no manual for this. There’s no instruction guide. There’s no step-by-step guide. And I think we’re all having to learn and adjust during this. I’ve never been through a pandemic before and we’re all learning and navigating and giving ourselves grace to say, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what the next step is.” And I think through that, in giving ourselves the grace to that vulnerability to step forward, this is where our community can really step in to help build that resilience.

To support them and say, “you’re not alone in not knowing. You’re not alone in your frustrations and how you feel. How you feel is totally OK. But how do we help support you in a way that it doesn’t have to impact you and impact your family more than it has to?”

And so really building that sense of it’s OK to not be OK. It’s OK to not feel OK. How you feel is normal. We have people who work in this field who don’t know all the resources all the time.

So the expectation that you would be able to navigate this huge, complex thing and master it all through your single experience is just impossible. And really trying to acknowledge that feeling and not dismiss it. Let people know they are not alone in that feeling and that feeling is to be expected because we are all navigating a time of unknown where none of us have expertise in navigating a pandemic. And our kids and families are experiencing new things that we’ve never experienced before.