Interview

With Heather Benton, MA, LPCC

Mountains For Mental Health, mountainsformentalhealth.org

What are you passionate about?

Breaking the stigma of mental health, building community through sharing stories, making high quality mental health services available to everyone, improving how mental health providers are treated and valued.

What message do you have for women in our community?

Find community and support one another to be who you are. We live in a world that expects so much from women that is often not healthy for us or realistic. Community is needed to walk through life as a woman because the world isn’t designed for us to succeed as we deserve to succeed - there is power in community.

What message do you have on the issue of Women’s Mental Health?

The mental health field was created by men, for men. Text books are filled with male researchers and studies early on were performed on men. This means that things were not created for us and we have had to adapt. The complex layers of mental health are different for different genders, races, generations etc., and we have to continue to adapt. Now women dominate the professional counseling and social work fields. We can offer things that men are not able to, not in a “We’re better way,” but in a different and unique way. It comes back to community. We must find it and use it to make the mental health field more accessible and more helpful for women and non-binary folks of all ages and races.

Women in History

Women have only been allowed back into medical professions in the last 200 years, after being cast out during the medieval period and the rise of the church, leading to witch hunts of women who practiced medicine.

Early Healers included Isis, the Goddess of medicine in Egypt, and St. Bridget, a midwife in Ireland.

"(During male dominance of healthcare through the 1970's), a double standard of mental health existed. A healthy woman was seen as having traits which differed from those of healthy men or healthy human beings. This placed women in a double bind of either rejecting feminine behavior or being feminine at the cost of being a healthy human being… attempting to fit women back into the situation in which they became mentally ill, and failing to look at the necessity for social change." -The WHO

Letters

Dear Fighter,

Keep On in a world that's not made for you- that tells you you're wrong, and only meant for one thing- that wants to put you in their box. You are the energy of the universe, of Mother Earth. Keep your light, Shine wherever you want.

Fuck the box.

Love,

Seeing You

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you’ll be criticized anyways. You’ll be damned if you do, damned if you don't” -Eleanor Roosevelt