This commentary is by Julie Bomengen of Elmore, a mental health counselor and a board member for Lamoille Community Food Share and the Elmore Community Trust.
I’d like to give a shout of gratitude to my mental health colleagues here in Lamoille County and beyond. The work we do is hard in the best of times. Add the pandemic into the mix and these past 18-plus months or so have been downright overwhelming and numbing as more and more of society’s ills are kicked down the road for mental health professionals, special educators, teachers, addiction specialists, and the like to manage and resolve.
I have many friends and colleagues who are full-time mental health practitioners, offering unwavering support and education to the growing number of individuals, students and families in need. The impact of all things Covid, particularly the growing anxiety, fear and divisiveness, has us all on a dangerous and unsustainable course.
These and other hard-working, devoted and often underpaid professionals are burning out. What will we all do when they too begin to leave these undervalued professions?
While there are some privileged few who have been able to find the “silver linings” of these past 18-plus months, most people are not finding much, if anything, to be celebrating. The collateral damage is ever growing.
The increased burden projected onto children and adolescents coming from forced isolation (many children are left home alone while parents work and most are also secluded from their peers) and the incessant messages of fear and paranoia of others is adding to what was already a blossoming pandemic of anxiety and other mental health issues in our young population. Just this month, the CDC added mood disorders to the growing list of risk factors that make us more susceptible to severe Covid outcomes.
Contributing to this is the overwhelming truth that our young people are becoming more metabolically unhealthy, obese, sleep-deprived and sedentary — all serious and avoidable risk factors that increase the incidence of critical health issues and outcomes in general.
Eating refined, ultra-processed, sugary (remember how frequently sugar and flour were sold out at the stores?) frankenfoods , binge-watching shows, or obsessively gaming and looking at social media may serve as a balm for a brief moment in time, but the damage these behaviors have on our physical and mental health sets our young people up for a lifetime of issues and struggles — physical, mental, social, emotional and behavioral.
Instead of incentivizing getting vaccinated with rewards of doughnuts, snacks and pizza (this is happening across the U.S.) that undermine our immune systems and ironically make us more susceptible to Covid and all other viruses, why aren’t we as a society aggressively incentivizing and promoting equitable and affordable access to and consumption of healthy foods, exercise and movement options, insurance-supported nutrition consults, health coaching, immune-boosting herbs, vitamins, and supplements, therapeutic massage, stress-management classes, and the like?
We have seen what people can do when they are motivated to help. Why can’t we collectively — doctors, scientists, public health and policy makers, mental health and addictions, allied health professionals, and individual communities — work collaboratively to fix health from the ground up?
It is long overdue that we engage in the hard but critically important conversations about individual responsibility for everyday choices that extend beyond the idea that a vaccine is a panacea and all one needs to do to be “safe and healthy.” Our conversations must also hold corporations responsible for prioritizing profits over health, address our broken “sick-care system” in the U.S., and examine the massive inequity issues in terms of access to healthy foods, lifestyles, water, support groups, resources, etc.
Preventive approaches that promote health prevent disease.
Feeling helpless and beholden to imperfect remedies — waiting in fear and isolation with increasing paranoia, hostility and untenable, divisive and ineffective policies — is not going to move our individual or collective health forward.
Let’s begin a robust, comprehensive empowering and positive public health campaign where we can work collaboratively to change the messaging and the opportunities to protect and promote foundational health for all, particularly our young. Taking actionable steps each and every day makes us feel vital, improves our mental and emotional well-being, boosts our immune system, and gives us hope in a time when there has been so much collateral damage, disempowerment and suffering.
We need to reclaim our health back — each and every one of us — so that we are more robust, resilient and ready for whatever life has in store for us. By virtue of being human, we will always be susceptible to viruses of all sorts. To reduce casualties (from covid viruses, as well as from the growing list of lethal conditions in America — obesity, hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc.), we can and should be helping ourselves and each other be the most optimally healthy we can be. No vaccine alone will achieve this. Only through our individual and collective actions, and with private and public support, will this be possible.
We keep hearing “We’re in this together.” To this end, engage your representatives and public health officials and ask for all-inclusive, foundational and effective approaches to mitigation that empower each person to take actionable, positive, pro-health steps. Lastly, please consider taking an easy action step by personally thanking your many amazing local mental health and addictions professionals (and others), provide them with gifts of service (such as gift certificates for massage, yoga classes, a dinner out, gym memberships, etc.), and volunteer or donate to Lamoille County Mental Health or North Central Recovery Center this year, and every year.
