April 19, 2017
Yesterday afternoon, as the halls swarmed with students rushing to their 7th hour classes, I met with parent volunteer and mental health activist June Thiemann to discuss the current state of wellness in the Southwest Community. As the buzz of anxious students drifted and the crowded hallways thinned, June looked me in the eyes and asked, simply, “How are you doing?”
A self proclaimed 'mental health proactivist', June knows that this question, particularly in a high school where stress is a typical part of day to day life, is not only meaningful, but crucial. While you may recognize June as the smiling woman who hands out bread during ‘Bread and Jam’ on Friday mornings in the Southwest cafeteria, she is more notably Southwest’s Wellness Committee (SWWC) chair, as well as the primary organizer of Southwest’s annual Wellness Day, a school day dedicated to workshops about mental, physical, and emotional health. As I spoke with June about her passion behind activism for mental health, her mind drifted to her own past as she recalled her personal experiences with mental illness.
“I grew up in a big family with a ton of love, and a ton of mental illness,” she claimed. “There was so much, I didn’t even know that I had it. It took decades to finally get effective treatment for my undiagnosed depression. Once I did, I kind of understood, ‘Hey-- the problem is that we don’t get ahead of it’, and that’s what led to [me] being a mental health proactivist.”
As she went on to discuss the establishment of Wellness Day, June recalled the fear that, for a large chunk of her life, prevented her from speaking out.
“For years and years and years, I did everything I possibly could to avoid Southwest High School, to avoid Lake Harriet,” she continued. “I was incredibly intimidated and also sort of antisocial. When you have depression, this looks like a place where people function well. And [you think], ‘you can’t go there’, ‘you’re not allowed’. So I just steered clear of these places. That all changed, once I got better. When Willa, my youngest, was a freshman, there was a mental health crisis [at Southwest]. That got me to speak out and to share this perspective with the administration, and that led to Wellness Day.”
Due to the Southwest Wellness Committee’s fantastic promotion of wellness within the Southwest community, they have been selected to receive a ‘Water, Wellness, and Worldview’ grant from the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District. The grant aims to bring attention to the intersection of personal wellness and social issues, which June and the SWWC plan to do through their new project that calls to create a culture of wellness by building connections between teachers and student leaders, allowing students to teach workshops on social issues within the classroom. With the student leaders’ permission, the SWWC, with the help of Southwest teacher Gabriel Pass, will be recording these workshops so they can be used as teaching tools for years to come. So far, workshops such as ‘White Allyship’ and ‘Whitewashed Black Music’ have been taught in various history and language classes.
“Right now,” said June, “it’s just sort of a race to capture as many of the workshops that seniors did as possible. What to do with them, once they’re preserved, I don’t know. It just seems to me that they’re excellent teaching tools. Parent could use a lot of what’s being said: parents are the ones who could [learn] the most. So, theres got to be some way to make those widely available.”
As our conversation drew to a close, June reiterated the importance of wellness, and emphasized the role that it plays in our everyday lives.
“I would say, again, [a crucial step is] trying to learn how to treat your mental health like any other aspect of your health. [Step] 1 is probably making sure you have a mental health professional that you really trust, feel free to consult with, and see on a regular basis-- the same way you would find a dentist. If you find a dentist and they caused you a lot of pain, you probably wouldn’t go back.” At this she laughed, regaining seriousness only to say, “Getting mental health care should feel good, no matter when, no matter what. And then, incorporate [mental health care] into your wellness plan whatever way you like. [Focus on] doing it somewhat regularly like you do other stuff, if not more so, because it is your brain, which is probably the most complicated and important part of your whole being.”
If you are interested in teaching a student-led social justice workshop, please contact June Thiemann at june@visi.com.