WMH 14: An Innovative Approach to Mental Health

This is a transcript of Watching Mental Health Episode 14 with Bianca McCall which you can watch and listen to here:

Katie Waechter: Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Watching Mental Health. This is actually our last episode of season one, so thank you to everyone who has stuck with us from the beginning. We are only six months or so into the show, and I'm really excited about where it's going and the caliber of guests that we've been able to bring onto the show. And with that, I'm really excited because today's guest is another really outstanding person in our mental health community.

She's been making waves and so I'm so honored to bring her on. And this is Bianca McCall and she is a retired professional women's basketball player. She is a renowned Ted, X speaker, TED speaker, and a mental health expert with 25 years in behavioral health and 12 years as a healthcare CEO. So she has seen a lot and she's really made an impact. She's developed a pioneering social emotional platform that's called ReachIn Now. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that. And really what it does is it enhances health span focusing on mental injury prevention, on existential isolation solutions, which is I'm particularly interested in. And she's really just a passionate leader in integrating technology, data analytics and culturally sensitive crisis interventions into a community that needs it. And so with that, she's been also included on the Suicide Prevention Resource Center.

She's been on multiple national and local committees. I've seen her speak at really large scale mental health events, and she's an esteemed curriculum developer and instructor for C-A-S-A-T Cassat. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that with the University of Nevada Reno. So without further ado, let's bring her on and talk about mental health with Bianca McCall. I, hello. Hi. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm really excited to have you here. Like I said, just because you have made such an impact in our community, a lot of people, you've been speaking on a lot of amazing stages, so I'm just grateful that you made time for us here today.

Bianca McCall: Oh, thank you so much for having me and getting through that mouthful of an intro bio. When anybody asks for my summary or my resume, I'm like, I wear a lot of hats. But no, I'm very excited to be here and speaking to you and your audience as well. Thank you for having this type of platform and raising awareness about mental health and all of the amazing things that are going on in our community. Nevada's a great place with a lot of great passionate people doing some amazing things in the space.

Katie: Yes, absolutely. And I like that you said that because Nevada, I mean, people can look at our stats and say that we really struggle and I think that we do have a lot of work that we can do, but we have people here who are willing to put in the work. I know that you're one of them. And so like you said, you wear a lot of hats. I think that comes with the territory. So tell us in your own words who you are and why this work really matters to you.

Bianca: Well, gosh, I always lead with answering that question with, I'm a retired professional women's basketball player. And the reason why I lead with that is because if you know me, especially you know this to be true, but when you're an athlete and you compete at an elite level, and for me, I've been fortunate enough to be challenged and to compete at every level in my sport. And I recognize that that's something that a very small percentage of global pop could say. But when you have those types of experiences that are pretty unique, it tends to be a filter right on your lens of life and language in life and how I process information, how I process my own lived experience. And kind of tying that back to Nevada being also a unique state, I think that we have a lot of experience, a lot of lived experience, and from the lens of personal lived experience or relational lived experience, you've got some cities, some big cities.

I reside in Las Vegas, Nevada, known for being transient, known for attracting people from all over the world. And so when you talk about relational lived experience, when you've got so many people in this melting pot, you've got varying degrees of separation, but not too many of knowing somebody whose life has been impacted by mental health. And then you've also got the professional experience. I think that Nevada is a place that homegrown, and we've also attracted from other states experts in the space and experts by lived experience, experts by doing some incredible research and discovery on innovative ways to be able to address, they say that the elephant in the room, the big beast or the underlying pandemic of mental health crises today.

Katie: Yeah, that's true. It is an elephant in the room and a lot of people don't know how to address it. And I have found that you have taken some really innovative ways of addressing it. But before we get there, let's just start with, yeah, you were an athlete and I think that a lot of people, and I think it's becoming less of an issue these days, but in the past a lot of people have really not combined mental health, mental wellness with athletes. And I feel like honestly, to be the best athlete that you need to be, you have to have a strong mental health gain. You have to really do the work, do the hard work, not just physically, but also mentally. And so just talk a little bit about that. I saw a lot when the Super Bowl came into town, I saw a lot of athletes really get vulnerable and say, yeah, I have struggled, or my friends, they have struggled and I have really had to work through in order to be the best that I can be. Some of these mental health struggles. So talk a little bit more about your experience around that.

Bianca: Sure. I think it's an interesting concept to say, okay, to be an athlete, to compete at an elite level, you have to have strong mental health. I think that that's kind of the first point of contention that I'd like to go into. And this also kind of helps tell the story a little bit of who I am and why mental health means so much to me. For me, being an elite athlete, since I was very young, I was a young person and experiencing a lot of success in sports, my entire identity was the basketball player, Bianca, the basketball player, and it's where I got my socialization from. It's where I got my experience to be able to travel. I've got opportunities that I would not have had if I did not play sports opportunities to have my pick of higher educations, institutions of higher education.

So all the things, right. I'd like to kind of sum it up and say I lived a little bit like a rockstar when I was just a teenager and I was on a recruiting trip to one of the universities that wanted me to come play, and I was playing some pickup basketball with a few of the girls. And during that competition, I ended up going up to block a shot and blowing out my knee in the process, tearing my ACL, my MCL, my meniscus. And I tell everybody when I tell the story that I still block the shot, but what I would experience from then on was a complete loss of identity and a complete fracture of my mental wellbeing. And I would experience the onset, well, I would say that prior to the injury I experienced some anxiety related to performance and experienced some depression and things related to just kind of an inability to kind of manage the highs and the lows, the highs of the highs and the lows of the lows.

And then also just with identity as I described, everything was all on the court and off the court. I didn't possess that same level of what I described as irrational confidence. So going back to my first statement of to be an elite athlete, you have to have strong mental health. My experience as an athlete, I really learned from personal lived experience and then later in professional experience that to be an elite athlete, we're almost training and grooming our athletes to not have strong mental health. Because when you talk about training an athlete to operate in what we call hyper arousal, hyper arousal, and being alert and ready for competition to get into that space where you're activating fight, flight, freeze, and you want your athletes to fight or if they flight, you want them to flee into a role that benefits the team, that benefits the organization.

And so we're teaching these principles of getting elite performers. The reason why I'll switch it from athletes to performers is because I think the language is important and the language is what connects all of us, whether you played sports or not, we're all performing in these different roles in our lives and any of us that our challenge challenged to perform optimally as a parent, as a spouse or a partner, as an employee or as an entrepreneur, we're all kind of pushing ourselves to operate in arousal, to be ready for anything to operate in. Again, that irrational confidence that we can overcome the physical reality and achieve whatever we have to do. We might be tired, we might be fatigued, we might be physically impaired, but most of us, we wake up every morning and before we put our feet on the ground out of bed, it's kind of like I've got to push through.

And for whatever reasons we've got people depending on us, got to earn a living, all of the things. And so when you talk about hyper arousal, when you talk about irrational confidence, you're talking in the same family as things of delusion, right? Delusion, and then also agitation. Violence lives within that area of hyper arousal mania or manic behaviors. And that's why you see the coping strategies for a lot of people that are consistently operating in hyper arousal are things like substance use or substance misuse or things to cope with just kind of the mania, the chaos of everyday life. And so myself being an athlete, experiencing, like I said, some of the traits and the symptoms related to mental health, challenges related to my identity, feeling like foster feeling like I'm not good enough, feeling like, Hey, I know that I've been trained to operate in arousal, but at some point when can you no longer ignore the physical reality of situations or at some point, how do you cope with the physical reality, not being able to overcome that, right?

If somebody's just stronger, more talented in sport or just if the circumstances of our environment, the cards that we've been dealt does not deal us a winning hand, how do you cope with that? And so for me, I had the tragic experience of losing a teammate and somebody that I was close to suicide and I was at a very young age and experiencing mental health challenges myself. And so I had a very internal struggle with my own mental health and in the feeling of if I had done something, if I had said something, if I was better, and then also doing the comparing, comparing culture. And so this person, she seemed awesome, but I'm dealing with imposter syndrome. I'm thinking I'm not good enough. So there's a why am I here? What's my purpose? And so I was trained again to just do my job, to lace up my sneakers and to play ball.

I did that, I did that very well. I had a great career, but when my body broke down and I was no longer able to ignore what was going on with me mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and spiritually in reference to kind of that purpose and having those questions of existence and what am I going to do now? I came to the very most difficult part of anybody's sports career, and that transition is retirement. I had to hang in New Jersey. And so when I was confronted with that decision point of what do I do now, seeking a purpose and transforming through the pain into a space of purpose, and I say that intentionally instead of paying to purpose, it's just kind of this process or this flip of a switch. No, it's not. It's embracing your opportunity to transform and become a new identity. And so when I transform through the pain and arrived at my purpose, it was to prevent tragedies such as suicide, the ones that I experienced, right?

Relational experience of suicide to prevent the tragedies that I myself was experiencing. Suicideality was experiencing the anxiety, the depression, and all the things. But I didn't have anybody to talk to about it. And I didn't have the language because that wasn't supported. And it still, still today isn't supported. When we talk about high performing, high achieving spaces, we've come a long way and we've established that mental health is important and it's a part of everybody's performance. We've made those connections, but there's still something, there's still something that holds us back, right from, it's okay for you, Katie, to not be okay, but really arrived at it's okay for me, for my to not be okay. I dunno that we're there. And so that's why the work that I do is so important. And to me, it's such an important piece of my identity, mental health, raising mental health awareness, creating safe spaces and platforms for people to have those courageous conversations with regards to what we'll talk about, the existential isolation and that sort of thing. It's so important to me because to me, it's healing my youthful self, my child, my inner child, and it's healing what I see are all the adults. We're all kind of just avatars inner of our inner child. And so that's my focus, my passion is to heal the child.

Katie: Yeah, I think that's beautiful. And you're right, we are just all walking around not paying attention to our inner children, and we really should be. I just think that you said so many really valuable things there, and I think that when it comes to athletes in particular, we probably all get to a place where there's an identity kind of struggle, like you versus an athlete versus you as a human being, and what are you contributing to the world beyond your career? And for you in particular, you went all the way. You seem like a person, not only because you were an athlete at that top level, but because of where you are now, that once you decide something, you go for a full force and you really did with mental health. And then you transitioned from my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, from more mental health on a one-to-one basis into kind of broader communities and teaching and speaking on mental health. Is that the kind of direction that you have gone with your journey?

Bianca: Yeah, no, and I'm so glad that you brought this up first. I'm glad that you said that I went all the way and then you immediately talked about where I am today or where I am now. And I think that's so important for the listeners especially to, I hope this resonates with you because we oftentimes, and in sports, just like in any other thing that we are, any other goals that we have or any other performance roles, we think going all the way is reaching the next level. And so for sports, one would think that going all the way is that I got to play professionally. I got to play at every level, but going all the way, what that has meant for me is retirement and the days after, right? Because if you think of that next level as your ceiling, I've made it, I've arrived. Then what do you do when you feel like you've had an achievement or you've arrived somewhere, you've reached your destination, you start to relax, right? You stop. You may pull back on kind of the hard work that it took for you to get somewhere because you thrive. And for me, the work on myself, the work on my own mental health, the work on my personal development, my identity shaping my professional development, that literally never stops. That's a destination that I don't see arriving at until I'm ready to transition from this lifetime.

I wanted to make sure that I emphasized your brilliant point about going all the way and talking about what I'm doing in the present moment. And yes, retiring from basketball, I went into, I furthered my education, got the master's level in marriage, family and child counseling. I completed internship hours during my undergrad and then in my master's level with some brilliant professionals in the space, one, Dr. Harris, Dr. Elliot Harris, who's no longer with us, but was a brilliant man and really is the one that kind of lit that fire under me to learn more about the neuropathology of mental illness, what's going on in the brain, what's going on in the body that's manifesting into the presentation of behaviors and of all the things.

And I went into the clinical space as a licensed clinical therapist. I owned and operated an integrated behavioral healthcare clinic, integrated meaning that I worked with multidisciplinary teams of doctors, nurses, behavioral health techs, other clinicians, residential services and departments to provide wraparound care for behavioral health concerns. And I really zeroed in on the suicide prevention piece, that being a passion for me. So we work with hospitals, we work with jails, we work with shelters. And what we aim to do with our clinical practice was to bridge the gaps throughout our continuum of care where we saw people really falling through these gaps and not, they were creating barriers to access quality care, to access passionate quality care. So that was prior to doing assessment, strong assessment of people in crisis to determine whether or not the hospital was actually matching fidelity for their acute crisis.

It was working with people after they were discharged from larger systems like the hospital to determine what supports they needed to continue stabilization. We were all over the place doing great clinical work. And then at the start of the pandemic, the landscape of healthcare changed when we had to be very much focused on the novel Coronavirus pandemic and those symptoms. And so when we talked about mental health, I mean, we literally stopped talking about mental health and people that were having those mental health crises were being turned away. And so for me, I saw this huge growth and telehealth and as well as the digital health kind of application. That's kind of when the calms and the headspace and those guys kind of came onto the scene.

And for me, I wanted to provide a solution for the communities that I'd come to know to serve and to love. I wanted to provide a solution and meet them where they were. And if we were engaging communities in telehealth practices, in technologies and in the applications, then I needed to first learn about best practices as far as technologies and telehealth go. I needed to surround myself. I approached it just like I would a game. I needed to train, I need to practice, I need to have the best coaches. I needed to identify my teammates. I needed a shooter. I needed somebody that could bang down in the paint and get rebound. So I did that. And for me that that was very much in alignment with this transition into higher education, higher education and training. And so that's where I really got to find, again, that reshaping identity.

I found myself again in the spaces of being passionate about education, seeing how significant education and training are in the prevention space. When we talk about prevention, and especially when we talk about the lack of advocacy and the lack of funding for prevention programming, the reason why that is just, it's such a detriment to the momentum that we have, whether it be as the state of Nevada, as prevention programming, the detriment is that we don't have advocacy and support because it's going towards education and training and preparation. Because we learned from the pandemic that these things can happen that can completely shut down systems, entire ecosystems. We learned a lot about our reliance on the education, the ecosystem of education, and we turned to our education systems and said, you let us know when we're post pandemic because that means our kids can go back to school.

So that means you got to go back to work. And we treated the education system as a commodity without really offering support and resources to what they were going through as people, as people that are performing. And so I noticed all of these things, and I really just inserted myself in the discussions, in the training, in the education, and really aiming to insert myself as a solution for systems like education, for systems like sports, for systems like the workforces, because the workforce has been significantly impacted by post pandemic conditions. So yeah, that's been my journey a bit is from direct clinical service into training, education, support of larger community.

Katie: And is that where your platform reach in now? Is that where it really, the idea really gained steam and that things started to come together as you were making this transition in this post pandemic world?

Bianca: Yeah, ReachIn Now as a concept was really born. It was actually shortly before the pandemic, I was working with City of Henderson on a critical incident response involving the suicide death of a firefighter and Captain White. He did something unprecedented that got the attention of the entire nation, and he identified the suicide death as a line of duty death. And that was so incredible because it really emphasized that the trauma exposure of our first responders, of the men and women that are first on tragic scenes, the things they're saying, and the fact that we just expect them to go there, clean up, report

Katie: Back, get back out there.

Bianca: Yeah, captain White, he made a national point, which I thought was so important and such an advocate for first responders that this is a consequence of the job. So I was participating in the response, talking to the families, talking to the community, and the sister of the deceased, she took the podium and I felt like she called me out and she wasn't talking directly to me, but she said, why are we waiting for people to reach out when they're in crisis? And instantly, everything of my being, I thought, we need to reach in. You're right. We need to stop waiting for people to reach out with the assumption that people know when they're in crisis, that they have great self-identification or that they have great help seeking behavior. These things are just not the case. And so reaching now, it definitely took off at the start of the pandemic because like I said, the reliance on telehealth and technology platforms, but I wanted, and it's still my desire, it's still my vision to create a community.

I think it's more important than just creating the technology to connect people with a therapist or a doctor, but really it's the community. It's the social community of trusted messengers. Because when we're in crisis, the first person that we think to talk to about this is going to be our family member. It's going to be a friend, it's going to be a community member. So I'm not saying as a therapist and my peers, I promise you, I'm not saying that we should be out of a job with this, but I'm saying that we should dedicate our digital resources, anything that we can to empower community, because the community are going to be the trusted messengers that carry that bridge people in crisis to our services. And so there needs to be more connections, there needs to be more education and training and supervision and support from the community aspect. And so my vision is to have a platform that supports that.

Katie: That makes sense now that you're really explaining it, because in your bio it's saying that it's focusing on mental injury prevention and it's prevention. It's that prevention piece, and it's for all of us because we're all performers in this world. It's not just for people who are first responders or athletes. And then you also mentioned that idea of existential isolation solutions. So talk a little, we're about out of time, but I don't care. I want to keep talking. So talk a little bit about why that is important to address this kind of existential isolation. It feels like in a world where we're so connected that so many of us feel more alone than ever before.

Bianca: And first I had like to correct myself, chief white, chief white, not captain White, excuse me. And then I'd like to say with existential isolation first, defining it that existential isolation is the feeling or the belief that no one else understands, truly understands can truly connect with your unique lived experience, whatever that may be. And there are groups of people that are at higher risk of experiencing existential isolation because their circumstances of which they have form their identity and the rules and the roles of their particular community are so unique that in general, it is very difficult for people to understand, right? It's difficult for people to understand the experiences of a professional athlete because such a small percentage is there. And then when you talk about women in sports, even less than 1% of women play their sport professionally. And so the experience of existential isolation is just such a risk factor for certain groups.

The same would go for first responders, for military personnel, you name it. Certain communities have unique experiences, and so it's important one to understand that and to honor that we all have unique lived experiences and some of the solutions to how do we remain connected? How do we avoid ending up on an island, so to speak, feeling alone in a crowded room. I talk a lot about the space that we all go to where our inner dialogue, our self-talk, it basically controls our experience of reality. What we're telling ourselves in those moments when we're looking in the mirror, when we're deciding who we are, defining who we are has such a power of influence over our experience and our relationship with the world. So the solutions are how do we ensure that that self-talk is constructive? How do we shift? Because if you're like me, I say some pretty horrible things to myself, totally Stein, I'm like, oh gosh, you're so stupid.

Or why did you do? And those are more automatic than not. And so it's learning how to, and I frame it as reintegration, and I actually, I developed a training for different groups, for special groups to learn reintegration because when I was talking about elite performers separating from reality from the physical reality, in order to possess this irrational confidence in that separation, it requires healing or reintegration because if we just maintain separation, if we operate with that injury, then it worsens, it becomes chronic, a chronic experience. And so as far as solutions to existential isolation, it really is reintegration. It's coming back together. It's connection. It's honoring and acknowledging the unique experience.

It involves a discovery, taking personal inventory of what resources do you have internally, what resources exist in your environment, and how do you activate those resources, right? What's your love language, so to speak, in activating those internal and environmental resources. And so it's hard work. I'm not going to say it's, Hey, it's easy. It's a quick fix. It's a pill you can take or you could take one training and be good. It's hard work. It takes practice and training, much like your physical fitness, going to the gym to train your body, to withstand all of the trauma and things that we put our bodies through in a given day. It's the same thing with our mental fitness. And that's the reason why I use that language, not because it's trendy, but really it takes a regimented kind of daily to be able to train that muscle memory to withstand all of the injuries that we're exposed to every day.

And so the platform reaching now, we recently launched a platform called Go Mental and Mental spelled MNTL. And this platform, we've created affinity groups because that's also a known intervention for existential isolation is engaging in affinity groups, meaning find your tribe, right? You find connections with people that share, historically share in those lived experiences. And so on the platform, we've got 40 plus channels for you to find your tribe, and it covers all eight domains of wellness. And so we say, Hey, domain a day keeps the doctor away. Essentially, if I'm going to work on my physical wellness on one day, and I'm going to work on my emotional wellness, another financial wellness, spiritual wellness, vocational wellness, environmental wellness. If you do a domain a day and engage in conversation sharing of resources and information in one of those affinity groups, it's proven to improve your health span, which is your quality of life and wellbeing, not just the number of days that you're walking the earth.

Katie: Yeah, exactly. I think that's beautiful. What an amazing app. It's an app essentially, right?

Bianca: Yeah. So we launched the beta app that's available on the app stores, but what we did for Go Mental is we actually, we launched with a Discord server. And so free, you just got to download the Discord, the Discord app, and we have ambassadors. So we have other people that are passionate about this movement, this initiative that have some pretty unique and custom links. And so we say it's invite only. I mean we want it to be for everybody, but because the foundation is connection, we want you to be connected to somebody in the community. And this is a community of just positive wellbeing, mental positive activity and tourism, joining groups and doing things in person. So it's not just a virtual solution. It's encouraging in-person connections as well. And so if you follow at ReachIn Now on all of the social platforms, and then we also like to celebrate our ambassadors, so you follow them as well. Get a custom link invite to our Discord server. And yeah, we welcome one and all to come in and like I said, join conversations, drop resources information, and help us to grow our community.

Katie: That's beautiful. I am so excited. I'm going to go get a custom link, and I was just going to ask how do people connect if people want to get involved? And so that would be it. We go and follow ReachIn Now and all the social platforms, reach out and get that custom link, but also just start connecting with the community. I think it's valuable. I think it's so important that we not just have these conversations, but that we build our community to have these conversations together. And so I'm just so grateful that you joined me today. Thank you so much for sharing some of your wisdom. I'd love to have you back anytime we went over today. I feel like that's fine because it was so good, and I feel like what you have to say is really important, and I just really appreciate your time.

Bianca: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I did warn you to my defense. I did warn you. I'm a talker, so yes, I would love to come back as long as I'm still allowed and continue the conversation. But thank you so much for having me.

Katie: Of course. Thank you. That would be amazing. And I'm just looking forward to connecting with you and the community doing stuff together with NAMI Southern Nevada with all of the organizations that you're working with. So thanks again and join us every first and third Wednesday of the month for watching Mental Health Live. But then also follow me@katierosewecter.com and all of my socials, and you can catch all the episodes. And so we'll definitely be airing Bianca's episode next Wednesday, and we're just so excited to have you here and to have you being such a leader in our community.

Bianca: Thank you again. Take care everyone.

Katie: Thanks. Bye-Bye everyone.

Bianca: Bye.