Editor’s Letter – 11/15/17

Since January, I’ve worked out two (sometimes three, sometimes zero) times a week at 6:30 a.m. with a friend. We joke about not being in perfect shape, whatever that is, after almost a full year of hitting the gym. It may have something to do with our favorite foods being pizza, schnitzel sandwiches, Mexican beers, chips and queso, etc. Whatever the case, every time I go—and especially if I manage to eat well that day—my posture and mood and brain feel much improved.

“Self-care,” as you’ll read in this issue’s feature, has both increased in popularity over the last year and gotten a bad rap, as if it’s some liberal millennial froufrou concept. But the “Drink plenty of water, eat your fruits and vegetables, and exercise” logic has been around for a while. It also follows that, if you take care of yourself, you’re better able to care for others.

The guide is meant to inspire you—whether your version of self-care is drinking juice, overcoming addiction, swimming laps, or meditating. (Or eating pizza.) We hope you care for yourselves so we all might be better equipped to help meet the many needs of our community.

One such need is for mental health advocacy. Zack Reeves dives into discussion with Mental Health Association Oklahoma CEO Mike Brose about the drastic funding cuts facing his organization and many others around the state. For 60 years, the Tulsa-based MHAOK has advocated for Oklahomans impacted by mental illness and homelessness by providing affordable housing, mental health screenings and referrals, counseling, support groups, mental health education, and suicide prevention, among other services. With the Oklahoma legislature’s most recent failure to fix our state’s tanked budget, many of these necessary programs may soon be gone.

From Reeves’s extended interview, which you can find here:

Everyone who works [in the peer-run drop-in centers] lives in recovery with some kind of a serious mental illness, histories of substance abuse, histories of incarceration, or all of the above. So, people would lose their jobs, those programs would close.

We have a program we contract the state with called Creating Connections … for people who live in recovery, doing peer-to-peer work with other people who have serious mental illness and histories of substance abuse.

Even when the Department of Mental Health has had other cuts in previous years, they’ve never cut those programs. … Now, they wouldn’t have any choice.

Brose asks Oklahomans to be advocates for change. So—rest up, be well, and, as Garrison Keillor says, do good work!