An Interview with Summer Lewis
Summer Lewis is a senior applied psychology major, with minors in both politics and Native American studies here at Ithaca College. She’s the Events Committee Co-Chair of Active Minds, and a huge advocate for mental health. Through Active Minds, she promotes not only the mental health resources on campus, but ways to promote positive mental health in everyday life. Acts as simple as asking a friend how they’re really doing can have an immense impact of the mental health of the people around you. Like Lewis said, we may not all have mental illness, but we all have mental health.
Sara Belcher, an editor for Distinct Magazine, sat down with Lewis to talk about her work with Active Minds, the Mental Health on Campus conference she attended, and how storytelling can help many struggling with mental illness.
So tell me about Active Minds.
Active Minds is an advocacy group on IC’s campus. It’s just one chapter. I think there’s over 400 chapters across the United States, and they work towards destigmatizing mental illness on campus and also promoting resources on campuses for mental health.
What events do you guys hold here on campus?
In the fall semester we usually hold destress fest, which is when we basically have all of these self care kind of things and people can come and play with dogs and eat cookies or draw and watch princess movies and stuff like that. We also have a spring concert every year, and we invite people to do poetry, to dance, sing, and play instruments. Whatever talent they have they’re allowed to display it. It’s about talking about how mental health is important, and overcoming mental illness, and the importance of talking about it.
Why do you think it’s important to talk about mental health?
I think it’s important to talk about it because it’s so important to us as human beings. Just our well-being in general and the fact that it’s not talked about more is really interesting to me. It’s not even so much that we need to really get into the conversations about mental illness, even though we need to. It’s that we don’t acknowledge mental health in general. So it’s as simple as asking your friend how they’re doing — how they’re really doing. And it’s checking in with yourself and asking yourself how you’re doing. And I feel that not enough people do that, and it’s just a really bad atmosphere to be in. I feel like it really is kind of promoted on college campuses because we stress out over everything so much, and I think that if we were able to cope with the amount of work that we have better than we currently do, we would all be better off.
How do you propose that we normalize the discussion about mental health?
I think it has to start with just talking to your friends about it. Usually what I have done is I have talked about my experiences with my mental health problems, but I’ve also just checked in with my friends and seen how their mental health is doing. People like you asking how they’re doing. It’s almost a pay it forward kind of system, like, “Oh, somebody asked me how I’m doing. Maybe I should ask my other friends how they’re doing.” Also education. Some events that our chapter of Active Minds host each semester are discussions. Two of our e-board members will have a presentation about certain stigmas. We just recently had one called “Scare Away the Stigma,” and it was about horror movie tropes, and how those can be damaging to people who have mental illnesses. It’s kind of like educating yourself on the issue and applying the education that you’ve perceived.
Is there anything besides just asking your friends if they’re fine that you do in your day to day life to help?
I guess what I do is more than anything I ask friends to participate in self care with me. I’ll be like, “Hey, we’ve been at the library for a really long time. Do you want to take a break and go get some ice cream, or just talk about our day?” I feel like it’s important to get people involved in doing healthy, productive things that they don’t normally do, and I think self care is one of those things — just because self care is the first step in preventing mental health problems from arising. If we can prevent these issues from becoming issues in the first place, it’s already great.
Is there anything in particular that makes you really passionate about this?
I’ve had my own experiences with mental health problems and when they initially arose, I was in high school and I just didn’t understand what was going on. They ended up being resolved, but not necessarily in maybe the best way. They arose again when I got to college, because it’s a completely new atmosphere — like a new environment — and everything is stressful, and so that time it was more like, “Okay, I understand that things are going on with my mind, but like I don’t understand where to go. I don’t know who to reach out to.” Which is part of the reason why I love Active Minds so much, because they led me to where I needed to go in order to get help for my mental health problems.
Can you tell me about the conference you went to for Active Minds?
It was the 13th Annual Mental Health on Campuses conference. Basically, people from all across the country fly or drive in. It’s a three-day event and we had workshops, we had speakers, we had lunches and dinners together. There’s always a theme with every year, and this year it was about how everybody has mental health — which is one of the core values of Active Minds — but also promoting how storytelling is probably the most proactive way to talk about mental health. Which is kind of something the Ithaca College chapter does. For the conference, I attended a workshop called “Our Stories, Our Strength,” and it was a five-hour long workshop. Maggie, who’s in charge of it, helped us write our own stories about our mental health experiences. So my game plan is to take the things that she taught us and to apply them to Ithaca College’s SYM panels. Because I think we have a thing or two we could learn from that, definitely. We also had a programming expo, where different chapters could show different programs that they’ve hosted and how other chapters can host them. I presented a programming that we did last semester in the spring called “We’re Here Too,” and it was an intersectionality panel. Basically we had like six people, including myself, tell their stories and talk about how their identities had a direct effect on their mental health. I also was on a panel at the conference called “Intersectionality 101,” and I talked a bit about the program I had. But I mainly talked about my identity, and how that affects my mental health, and how Ithaca College is trying to change the conversation to be more inclusive when we talk about mental health. Because it’s something that’s a part of everybody’s life. It doesn’t discriminate, [it] doesn’t have any boundaries, and just reiterating that to the campus as a whole is something we’re really working on now.
Can you explain the SYM panels more to me?
We have SYM panels, or Speak Your Mind panels, and professors invite students from the SYM panels to come in and talk about their stories. Then there’s a facilitated discussion between the students who have shared their mental health stories and the students in the classroom. I think we usually do it in freshman seminars, but it’s just kind of planting the seed for future conversations. We always train our own moderators and train our own panelists, and we just have these conversations.
How do you think storytelling helps mental health?
I feel like storytelling puts a face to the problem. It normalizes it, it humanizes it. Your story might not resonate completely with everybody that you’re talking to, but there’s parts of your story that everyone can relate to. Like I was feeling the severe pressures from all of my classes, and we’ve all felt that before. Just being able to be relatable to people who live with mental illness and saying, “Oh I can see parts of myself in that person. Maybe I should take steps to better take care of myself.”
What do you hope to do after graduation?
The game plan is to move to D.C. I want to take a year or two off and get some work experience under my belt, and then I want to get my masters in public policy and work on writing mental health policy.
Are there any internships you feel have been really beneficial and helping you get to where you want to get?
Probably the biggest internship I had was with the Democratic National Committee in Washington D.C. last fall. I was an Operation Assistant and I helped with internal things that went on with the building like maintenance, but I also helped with some of the planning for the Democratic debates. I was also basically in charge of all of the other interns, because my boss was the internship coordinator. So a lot of leadership skills developed then. I networked with a lot of people, met a lot of really cool people. It also secured the idea that I wanted to go into politics or policy after college, because I’d been really unsure. But since then, I’ve been pretty set on policy.
