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.
For the past six months, Sue, Carly Masiroff and I have been working to figure out what the next step for the Committed eSeries was. We knew it was time to expand, time to start providing people with the tools to take this work offline and into the greater higher ed community, and time to make this more than one month long. We started the Committed eSeries by making a splash – now we’re ready to make a more permanent dent.
Today, we are launching The Committed Project, a website (and soon to be organization) devoted to two goals: supporting those in higher education who are or have been affected by mental illness and stomping out the stigma that surrounds mental illness in higher education.
It hasn’t always been easygoing. Creating an organization – or even a website – with three people who struggle with mental illness has its challenges. For every one meeting we had, the next two might be cancelled because one of us wasn’t in the right place mentally. If it’s hard for you to get up and go to your paid job in the mornings because of mental illness, you can imagine how much harder it might be to do unpaid work on a bad day.
But that same illness also drove us to keep at it and served as a constant reminder of why the work we were doing was so important. If we were challenged just to meet with other people who knew about our illnesses, how challenging is it to go to a job where you are afraid to share that about yourself? How hard is it to be there for students – whether it’s to provide a service or as an instructor? How difficult is it to deal with your own internal stigma towards mental illness when it is reinforced in your workplace every day?
For those of you who have never heard of Committed, take a look at our history and peruse some of our blog posts from the past two years. While we will continue to advocate during May – Mental Health Awareness Month – we will now also be sharing content and resources throughout the year.
For those of you who have been a part of Committed, we thank you for your continued support – without you, we wouldn’t be doing this.
We hope you’ll stay for a bit, take a look around, maybe even sign up to receive our emails, share the site with colleagues or donate something – whether it’s your time, talent or money. Most importantly, we hope you’ll become as committed as us to end the stigma surrounding mental illness in higher education and support our colleagues affected by it.