Our friend Amma Marfo has been at it again – writing about how mental illness, or specifically anxiety and depression, can affect creativity. She also quotes The Committed Project co-founder and Executive Director of Awareness and Advocacy, Kristen Abell, on how her depression has affected her ability to write.
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The Committed Project in WIHE
Recently, the organizers of The Committed Project sat down with the talented and amazing Amma Marfo to talk more about how the project came about and our goals. Read more about what we had to say in the Women in Higher Education journal from July 2016.
The Right Thing
by Kristen Abell
On Saturday night, Santa Ono, the president of the University of Cincinnati, shared with an audience of 200 people – and then later with his Twitter audience of 70,000 – that he had tried to commit suicide at two different points in his life. Because of the work I do with mental illness in the higher education profession, it doesn’t feel like I can let this pass without comment. That being said, there’s something absurd about the fact that we get excited and celebrate someone in a position of power sharing such a difficult personal story of mental illness. Continue reading
The Committed Project
by Kristen Abell
A little over two years ago, Sue Caulfield messaged me through Google Chat with an idea and a dilemma. After seeing some of my blog posts about my struggles with depression and talking with a number of other folks in student affairs struggling from mental illness, she felt that it was time to do something. Together, we developed the Committed eSeries on the Student Affairs Collective blog – a series of blog posts with drawings by Sue (or suedles) written by a number of people within the field of student affairs about their struggles with mental illness. We had no idea then that this small attempt to do something would have such a huge impact on our lives.