happiness and joy are not the same (and why it matters for parents), with Alex Stavros, CEO of Embark Behavioral Health
Host: Brenda Zane, brenda@brendazane.com
Guest: Alex Stavros, CEO, Embark Behavioral Health
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about this episode:
Sometimes, parents seeking guidance and comfort during difficult times are told to “choose happiness”. My guest today believes instead, we should be choosing joy. Alex Stavros is the CEO of Embark Behavioral Health, a leading network of premiere youth outpatient centers and residential programs. Their “big hairy audacious goal” is driving down youth anxiety, depression, and suicide from all-time highs of today to all-time lows by 2028.
episode resources:
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BRENDA
I hope your start of the year has been undramatic, but I also know there's a good chance you've been buckle up tight on the roller coaster.
So it's amazing that you're here. I know I might say this a lot, but in case you're new to the podcast, I think it's important for you to hear on a fairly regular basis that you are doing an incredible job at this challenge.
And I wanna [00:01:30] encourage you to take a few deep breaths and recognize all the incredibly hard and brave things you do on the regular that most parents have no clue.
You are navigating through conversations and situations in your family that I know because I hear them are sometimes worthy of their own Netflix series. You're making decisions that have really big impacts, big, big impacts on your child, your finances, your own mental and physical wellbeing. And you're doing this all while you're juggling everything else in life.
Because life as much as we would like it to does not slow down or stop when our kids are in need of some extra attention.
So that's my goal is just to make sure you're hearing in your ears how much you're doing because the world at large and even your own family and friends don't always understand or can't even comprehend.
What you're doing and often you're doing it before 8:00 AM so heads up, back straight and in the stream we say, tuck in your cape so you don't trip on it and go about your day knowing that you are absolutely. The most amazing parent on the planet. For today's episode, I got the chance to sit down with Alex Stavros, who for the past 10 years has been the c e O of Embark Behavioral Health.
Embark is an organization that's dedicated to [00:03:00] premier mental health treatment for teens and young adults across the us. So if you're listening in Australia or New Zealand or the uk. This, uh, organization is not available in your country, but it is available in the us. While he was at Stanford, Alex earned an MBA that was specialized in social entrepreneurship and a public management certificate.
He was a rising fellow at the Hoover Institution, which is a world renowned public policy think tank. You're gonna hear about Alex's very unique upbringing. as the son of missionaries in war ravaged Lima, Peru, and how that has really influenced his career. We have a great conversation about joy versus happiness.
We talk about the role of stigma and the impact it has on parents, which then trickles down to our kids, and we talk about why he believes that by connecting at a personal human level. We can heal generations and how that all starts with humility and gratitude. Alex shares three core areas of focus Embark holds in order to achieve their mission and the goal of leading the way in driving teen and young adult anxiety, depression, and suicide.
From today's all-time highs to all-time lows by 2028. It's a beautiful conversation and helps provide a view of the human side of he. So I'm really happy to share [00:04:30] this conversation with Alex Stavos, CEO of Embark Behavioral Health. Enjoy.
Welcome to Hope's Dream. I'm very excited to finally get you on here and to have a really great conversation. So I appreciate you taking the time. I know, um, as a c e O you are one busy guy, so thanks for taking a little time out with us.
ALEX
Yeah, of course. My pleasure. Brenda. Really love all the great work you're doing for, for parents, for mothers and fathers, and so happy to be on here and, and share a little bit, hopefully helpful for your, uh, listeners and, and parents that are going through challenging times with their, with their children.
I'm excited to get your viewpoint on some of these things because you are in a unique position where you're seeing more of a, a global overview of what's going on, so you're not like in one program or one, you know, modality. You see all of them. So I think that's really, really cool and we'll get some some good in um, perspective there.
But before we do that, let's just kind of rewind for you. and just tell us a little bit about your background, your professional path. How did you end up in this world of mental health and substance use and treatment and helping families? Um, tell us that story. Yeah. It's, it's, it's kind of a, a roundabout story.
I, my parents and, and their family, they're all from the northwest from. Washington State and Oregon and all of their siblings and extended family, they still live up there in Idaho. [00:06:00] Uh, my parents were the first to move away. They moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and that's where my sister and I were born.
Uh, but then they took an, an even bigger step and my dad went out there as a youth pastor. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. Their, their parents, my mom's dad was a, a firefighter and policeman, and my dad's dad was, uh, also a pastor minister. And so they ended up deciding to move to South America, to Peru in the eighties.
And we ended up in Peru when I was in, uh, kindergarten, the first grade. And at the time at Peru, Lima's a city of 12 million people. Now, back then it was about 10 million people. So we were living in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota and moved to huge, uh, city. And actually at the time, The shining path, one of the bloodiest terrorist movements to ever exist was running rampant under their reign of terror.
Over 70,000 people were killed. And also the, the, well, not only was the country at the brink of societal collapse, but also economic collapse because inflation ended up being as high as 7200%. And oh my gosh. So it was, it was an interesting. Of scenery. There were, uh, car bombs that would go off by our houses and our windows were shattered.
The bomb, the electrical pylons were bombed, so we didn't have electricity at home. We'd have, we'd have bomb siren alerts at school and drills to know what to do if the terras planted a bomb there, and my parents had moved there to dedicate their lives. To the poor and to those that live in the abject poverty and the slums and the outskirts of Lima that had moved down from the Andes Mountains due to these terrorists and set [00:07:30] up their, uh, shanny town, uh, on these garbage dumps and the outskirts of this major developing country city, Lima, Peru, and decades later, they're still, they're still down there, still committed to that community.
And so that, that initially I think, is an important story just because of foundationally. That gave me a desire to wanna serve, to want to give back, to wanna love others, to wanna be with others that are experiencing pain, struggle, and suffering to do life alongside them. That firstly, then secondly, just the idea of doing hard things of, of going to the difficult places, uh, as going to where the challenge is going to where the war is going, to where the pain and suffering is.
That was, that was all I knew growing. Wow. So I can see how that would've formed your sort of base relationship with. Others with yourself and looking at that, so you, so you graduate from high school, you go to college. Do you know that you wanna work sort of in the humanitarian area or did you just find that Yeah, a little bit.
So what I, what I knew is that particularly Channy Town, which was called uh, Flores de Villa, which is ironic name for a slum that was built on a garbage dump because it meets flowers in the valley and there aren't any flowers, no running water. There's no sewer, there are no property rights, no electricity.
Now there, now there is decades later in that, in that community, but what ended up happening over the time I was in [00:09:00] Peru is that communities started to develop and there is a lot of special projects that my parents were involved with. There's donors from the United States, and that's a medical post, early childhood development center.
A lot of the mothers don't know how. Encourage and nurture their child in toward their development. Some kind of young adult transitional programs to help 17 year olds that have graduated from high school, be supported from an American who's paying for them to live in a house where they're mentored, still in the slum, and then studied a, a trade to become a carpenter or a cook or a chef.
And so I saw that community develop from an economic perspective and people kind of starting to rise up over out of poverty. So I felt like I wanted to become an economist and I wanted to solve world poverty. I wanted to do this at a global level and address the poverty issues in in the world. So I ended up going to school in Washington, DC and I wanted to work for a large multilateral organization like the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.
These multilateral non-governmental organizations as an economist. So I went to school in Washington, dc. I worked on Capitol Hill sometime. I worked for some other quasi-governmental organizations. I became an economist. I wanted to solve world poverty. Uh, what I realized in school in particular was I did a honors thesis that was titled The Impact that large multinational corporations have on economic development in Latin America.
So I started to learn [00:10:30] while in school the impact that for-profit businesses can have on a societal problem and, and what I learned. It's both positive and negative. Mm. And depending on what extent that business thinks about their positive impact in society as core to their strategy and why they exist, or they think about it as something that's just kind of gets in the way that the core purpose is to maximize shareholder value or profit.
And I definitely wasn't in that camp, and I always thought business as business and I'm, I'm never gonna be a businessman. I don't wanna work in a business. I wanna work in government, public service, a nonprofit. I wanna give, I wanna serve. But I started to see an opportunity to use business as a force for good.
And so while I was there in college, I started to shift my understanding of what I wanted to do. And I said, this is unique. And I started to learn a lot, read a lot. The other thing I realized that I, that I started to learn just with growing with age is that what my parents work really was, and they probably always stated that is that never was about the poverty of resources.
It was about the poverty of the. That at the end of the day, their commitment, decades long commitment to that particular slum in that community was about relationships, was about connection. Mm. Not about poverty. And that the people that lived in that slum in the community, Was also about relationship that all they had was each other in their home and where they lived in that Shany and that and that hut was just them and that there was purpose in that.
There wasn't happiness per se. There wasn't this [00:12:00] pursuit of, Hey, if we do this, maybe we can get this. We can move out to another neighborhood. We can buy this. It was just about them and surviving their relationship and my parents being there, cuz they decided, even though they brought their kids from all the security of the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota to.
Um, war torn Lima, Peru. They had this bigger sense of purpose as to why they were there committed to a community over generations and decades. They wanted these long-term relationships. They wanted to be in these slums showing unconditional love and acceptance to them. And that would create hope and it would create the sense of belonging.
It would create the sense of relationship and worth. Mm-hmm. . And that's really what they were doing. And I started to develop a passion for wanting to, um, then use business as a force for good. But find a business that was people intensive, that was service intensive, and that was helping people when they were at the worst, the worst.
I wanted to walk alongside others that were hurting and show them too unconditional acceptance. Create a culture and organization, hire people who also wanted to do that, and that the service itself was actually that. Us being more of who we wanted to be as human being made our service more compelling and allowed us to de deliver better results from the product or service we were selling.
So I started to formulate in my mind, How I could live an integrated life where being more of the person I wanted to be at work would make me more the per husband. I wanted to be more the father I wanted to be. That all that you know would align from a core values and core purpose, uh, [00:13:30] perspective. So it's about relationships, about serving.
It's about giving. It's about helping those that are in pain and suffering. It's about creating joy, uh, not happiness, which is often what comes from resources, what comes from stuff, what comes from having more money is, is, is happiness. But I wasn. Really about that. My parents' work was never and isn't really about that.
So interesting. Talk a little bit more about the joy versus happiness, because I think that's a very unique mindset and especially for the people who are listening. They might not be feeling a ton of happiness right now, but I, I would love to have you just dig in a little bit to the difference, how you see that and how you see that translating to what you guys are doing.
Embarks core purpose. Our fundamental reason for existing is to create joy and heal generations. And so this word joy is really important. To us. So the question is joy, well, well what does joy mean? And often I think people think that joy is simply a more intense form of happiness. Yeah. So it's really like, Hey, happy.
No, I really experienced joy. That was like so much happiness. And yes, you can experience joy while you experience happiness, but what's different between joy and happiness is that happiness is based on circumstances. Hence the word happiness hap happiness happen. Stance. If things happen to go well, then I feel good, right?
If things happen to go poorly, then I [00:15:00] don't feel good. I'm not happy. So the happenings determine my happiness. There's nothing wrong with happiness, but we need to understand that it's based off circumstances and that therefore when we're trying to be happy, it ends up being something IUs. because it's based on circumstances, it's harder to create.
So often people talk about choose happiness. It's really hard to choose happiness. Yes. . Because? Because you don't control your circumstances. You control your response. Yeah. To the circumstances. And so the circumstance. Will create happiness or a lack of happiness. Your response is what creates joy When you focus your life on pursuing and try to keep it have happiness, you at the same time are trying to avoid pain and suffering.
And if we live in a world where it says that if you experience pain and suffering and you're not happy, something's wrong with you, that can create anxiety, can create depression, and create all sorts of other. Whereas joy is more of a way of being is not an emotion that comes and goes. Happiness is a great emotion, but our belief is that sadness is a great emotion too.
That grief is a great emotion. Sorrow is a great emotion. Anger's an okay emotion. These emotions are okay. Feelings are okay. It's actually what makes us human. And that the reality of life is, is that life is. There's gonna be [00:16:30] sacrifice, pain, suffering, struggle, and at the end of the day, you can never avoid it.
And you can never live a life without grief, sorrow, or loss. It will come, it will happen. It's inherent in life. Yeah. It's inherent in being a human being. It's actually unique. To human beings versus other types of beings is these other experiences, but so much in life. We try to avoid these. You experience joy when you bring it all together.
When you start to think about wholeness, and we start to understand that joy comes about through a shared experience, through relationship, by putting others first. And when we live life with the heart of gratitude and humility, and it's really hard to have gratitude if you don't start with humility. We have humility gives us this heart from gratitude.
So we're humble. We give gratitude. We serve others with a selfless heart. And what that allows us to do is then respond. If we have humility, we have gratitude, we have a heart of selflessness and service. When pain and suffering comes because there is pain and suffering is sacrifice in service and in giving to others and being selfless.
That we embrace it because that's core to who we are. And, and so therefore, what ends up happening is that joy can be experienced. And we believe that in fact, the deepest forms of joy are during times of pain, suffering, struggle, grief and loss when we're experiencing with somebody else. And what happens is when we don't have joy in those moments, it's because we're fighting that pain and suffering versus accepting it.
And what, what we want to [00:18:00] happen is, Uh, with the parents we serve, for example, we like to say we don't promise the white Pickett fence family. We don't promise the Disneyland family. Life's gonna be hard. Relationships are hard. It's difficult that it's meant to be that way. We want you to embrace those struggles, that pain, that sacrifice, that suffering.
We want to embrace it while relationship. We wanna teach you skills on how to regulate, on how to find joy in those stressful moments. or you're comfortable with who you are and your wellbeing, so that no matter the circumstance, you can engage it. That circumstance with love and with acceptance versus judging that situation of how much of my life right now is happy versus sadness, it's, it's neither good nor bad, nor bad, and that's how we start to create joy in the world and starts to create.
For families. And it's actually, if you think back to, uh, my upbringing for those people that have lived in the, uh, or been to slums or chinatowns anywhere in the world, often people will say they see the kids playing on the streets with kicking plastic bottles and saying, wow, why, how are the kids so happy they don't have anything.
Yeah. And the argument is that you're not seeing happiness, you're seeing joy, and it's because all they. Is that is their family, is their house. They're not thinking about the next thing. They're not thinking about keeping up, uh, not even what the Jones is. And much less the Kardashians. They don't have access to that , right?
So they're living in the moment and they're focused on the relationships and serving their mom and making sure their grandma lives at home. And that ends up bringing so much purpose and meaning their life, even though their life [00:19:30] is so hard, living in abject poverty, not a lot of happiness, it's life is so hard and struggles.
Am I gonna be able to eat tomorrow? Am I gonna be freezing cold tonight? But they have joy and, and, and hence, well, how do we come to our country in the United States? And there's a lot of kids that have everything, but then they feel so empty. They feel so empty that why we have, uh, uh, extreme levels and all time highs of anxiety and depression and suicide, even though they have so much, it's because of this culture of pursue happiness, individual happiness at all costs, avoid pain and suffering at all costs.
And if you're not able to do that well, cuz everybody else is on social media, something must be wrong.
Hi, I'm taking a quick break because I wanna let you know about the private online community I created and host for moms who have kids misusing drugs or alcohol. It's where I hang out between the episodes, so I wanted to share a little bit about it. This place is called This Stream, and it isn't a Facebook group.
It's completely private away from all social media sites where you start to take care of yourself because through all of this, who is taking care of. The Stream is a place where we teach the craft approach and skills to help you have better conversations and relationships, and we help you get as physically, mentally, and spiritually healthy as possible so that you can be even stronger for your son or daughter.[00:21:00]
You can join us free for two weeks to see if it's the right kind of support for you and learn more about all the benefits that you get as a member@thestreamcommunity.com, and I'll see you there. Now let's get back to the convers.
I am just curious to know, so you as a company embrace this idea around joy, and I'm sure that that then translates to the families that you work with are families like. Well, that's an interesting concept. I mean, is this something that you really actively try to communicate and instill in the families that you're working with, or is it more just like an underlying ethos That is how Embark works and then, and then the programs that work with families are also sending that message?
We not only talk about it all of our programs and with our parents, but it's, but it's built into the clinical treatment, built into the treatment framework. Because our goal isn't to fix your child. Our goal isn't for you to be happy. And so often what happens with parents, which is tough, is you ask a parent, it's like, all I want for my child, all I want for my daughter, my son, is for them to be happy.
Yes. And what happens is it puts so much pressure on them because they're not, and, and, and they, well, then something must be wrong. And so if you think about all the different ways the trainings and the embark treatment approach, the CASA model. We talk about the importance of, uh, being committed to your child, but [00:22:30] then we talk about the importance of acceptance.
Uh, and these are the acronym of, of CASA starts with commitment. Then it goes through acceptance, then it's security, then it's attunement, attunement, and that creates co-regulation. , which allows for joy and co-regulation is the joy. And so o and that security part is really important. Cause security means a lot of security is boundaries and limits.
Yeah. Like so often for parents, how do I create happy? How do I ensure my kids' happy? It's not boundaries, limits, just giving them the phone or letting them do their thing or buying them something because now they're happy, but they're happy based on that circumstance, in that moment. But they don't have joy, security.
For true attunement, which allows for co-regulation, which is this relationship of where our emotional states are feeding off each each other in a regulating way. And in that moment of grief, loss, sorrow, happiness, sadness, whatever it may be, it doesn't matter what that emotion is because when we're co-ed, we're able to engage together in that emotion.
So, uh, the, the idea of creating joy is fundamental. And even when we talk about acceptance, We talk about this idea of unconditional acceptance, and we define it for parents as the belief that in any given moment your child is doing their best and, and so, so often with parents, what we wanna do or for anybody we love and care about, that we believe can do more and they probably can't.
But not in that moment. Yeah, that exact moment that they did the best they could with what they had based off everything [00:24:00] that if, if they could have done better, they would have and um, and be it that they sabotage or be it that they make a wrong decision. And so often what happens with kids, humans in general, the kids in particular, who haven't developed a sense of self, is that they can't differentiate their behavior from their sense of self.
They can't say, what I did is bad. Whatever happens that they do is bad, just. I'm bad, right? Why did that happen? Because I'm bad. And even more so when shame starts to really, uh, devolve, when it really starts to expand, it's that when others are doing things that end up being bad, that you might aren't even involved in that.
Also because I'm around and a habit is also because of me, and that also, so everything bad, negative, it happens reinforces I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad. So we help families understand that their communication styles, their emotional. , if they provide boundaries and limits, the security, all of this can reinforce that shame or resolve that shame.
And once we resolve shame, we're able to, cuz one of the things we like to talk about is shame is a joy blocker. Yes. It's really hard to live with joy, if not happiness, joy, cuz joy is this sense of. Sense of regulation and calm, to engage with all of these emotions, feel them intensely and not then spiral out control, but feel them intensely.
Shame blocks your ability to go there. Yeah. It's really unique because I think that's an aspect, and I, I find this a lot too, and talking with parents is we, we do kind of stay at this high [00:25:30] level and we're, we're very surface about, well I just need this to get fixed and I just need him to stop using weed every day.
And, and that's kind of where it stops and. , those are good goals, but if you don't get down to that root of it like you're talking about, I think we can just keep in this cycle of over and over and over, coming back to the same problem and not really understanding why we're doing that. So I think that's really, um, a fascinating.
uh, approach that you take, and I imagine it's very different than what families have maybe heard in the past when they're looking for help. I wonder if you zoom out just because of your unique perspective on everything in this kind of adolescent and young adult world of mental health and substance use.
The numbers, and I saw the statistics, statistics on your website and I recently did an episode about suicide and was. , I was just mind blown by the statistics around mental health for our young people. What do you see happening with this? Is the, and especially from your background, I think really unique perspective what.
is going on. Like, what are you seeing or what are you hearing from parents because you're, you're looking at this over a wide swath of different family types and treatment types and, um, and even geographical locations. It's really disturbing to see what's going on with our, with our young people. Uh, maybe you can talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, it is, it is. [00:27:00] Um, we feel convicted about it. This is, this is the work we do. Yeah. This is the problem we're trying to solve and address, and it's just getting worse and worse and it's piling out. And we, we wanna be accountable for being, uh, part of the solution here. And right now we're not curbing it.
So what we actually did back in 2018 is, We set what we call our big, hairy audacious goal. That's to lead the way in taking adolescent and young adult anxiety, depression, and suicide from the all time highs of today to all time lows by 2028. And so we're a few years in. There's really three issues.
Number one is there's stigma and the stigmas compounded when we're talking about. Families, because it's not only the stigma of the person with the challenges, but also the stigma of the person who's gonna be making the decisions. Yes, it can feel like, Hey, maybe it was my fault. This is happening. Now I have stigma around bringing it up for them, that who has stigma?
So the stigma compounds when we're talking about teens and kids, and the, the parent will feel judged and feel shame, and feel like maybe I'm a bad parent, maybe. And then a lot of parents don't know how to react. So then your friends and your family are gonna give you a lot of advice and most of it's bad advice.
And then you, and then it just, and it, so I'd rather just not tell anybody. We'll keep it on wraps, we'll keep it together and we'll white knuckle it and, and it, it will just get better on its own. But then it's just, it's kind of like a, a little pain in your tooth if you don't get your clean teeth cleaned every, every six months.
What ends up [00:28:30] happening eventually is that you have a pretty bad cavity, eventually a root canal, and you have to intervene in a level much more serious than you ever had to at the beginning, if there wasn't. So that's the first issue is one of stigma. The second issue is one of awareness. So first of all, we want to end the stigma.
Second of all, we want to increase awareness. And the awareness issue is one of, often we have a panic attack and we think it's our heart. And so there's a challenge of awareness of, well, what does anxiety feel like? What does depression feel like? Often depression feels like not sleeping well. It feels, uh, like always being tired.
And it's not necessarily like, oh, I hate myself. Yeah. , I just feel kind of off and you don't know that you're depressed. That's an awareness issue of mental health. A little bit more challenging. It's not like I have a pain in my tooth and I know it's right here, and so I can go to the dentist. It's hard to understand if there is something or not.
And the second issue is if there is something. What do I do? What? What do I Google, right? Who do I call? Where do I go if I think it is something more serious? And this is the reason why 9 8 88 was created versus 9 1 1 cuz some, and also an issue with emergency rooms, one out of three of all non infant emergency room admissions.
Are mental health crisis for teens, for kids. Wow. One outta three. One in emergency rooms, not psych hospitals, emergency rooms. That's not what they do. They don't know how to do it. They don't have professionals to handle it. And, and that's an awareness issue. I don't know what to do. My kid, oh my gosh, this happened.
I'm gonna take them to the emergency room. [00:30:00] And there's awareness issue. The third issue is one of, uh, a lack of access to high quality services. And this all builds because, Let's say if there's stigma, then none of this matters. But let's say we can address the stigma. Now that we address the stigma, there's still an awareness issue, so I don't have any stigmas around it.
I just don't know who to ask or where to go or what to do, and it's so confusing. Yeah. And then, and then if I know what my child needs, Hey, my child really needs an intensive outpatient program, then I go look for it and it doesn't exist. Or my child really needs a psychiatrist and I go to look for it.
There's a six month wait list and it's $300 for 15 minutes, and it, so it's not accessible. So even if I can get over the stigma and, and I figure out the awareness and I'm aware. Their services still don't exist. So they're inaccessible until the crisis is so severe that you'll do whatever for your child and you end up paying money, but you're at now at a level of care and service from a healthcare perspective that's costing everybody too much money and it's too much emotional cost, and it never had to be that way.
And so when we think about, well, what's happening with this crisis, those are the issues. And until those three issues are address, This crisis is, is gonna continue to snowball. Yeah. And I think the third, on your third point there about the lack of access. When, when you are looking for these types of services, you are so vulnerable as a parent because you just want this to get fixed.
And a lot of times it is a matter of safety, right? So it's [00:31:30] not even that you have the luxury of time. You might be, and I was in this position, we had like 24 hours to. somewhere for our son to go, or he was gonna probably be dead or in jail. So there's that added le level of, you know, if you're looking for services for a broken arm, it's a little different than if you're looking for, you know, a mental health or a substance use, um, service.
So those, those make a ton of sense. I love how you broke those down. And I mean, I'm just thinking, I talk about stigma pretty much every day. And I just don't know how we're going to tackle that one because, and, and maybe there's a little bit of progress from Covid because now people are talking about, at least talk, talking about mental health a little bit more.
I think people are a little bit more aware of substances and I think the fentanyl messages getting out there a bit, but that is just such a huge one. And even myself, I find myself, I was, I was trying to book a, a house or a retreat for our moms, and I'm thinking, do I tell them that we're 20 moms of kids who struggle with drugs and alcohol.
are they gonna let me rent the house? Like, that's terrible. . So it's real. I think the stigma's such a hard one to get over, you know? Yeah. Yeah. We, well, we, we are, we're opening up, um, outpatient clinics across the country and it's not uncommon for us to go to a landlord who says, no, we don't, we don't allow that now.
We don't want that. Well, we don't want kids, [00:33:00] you know, creating issues or stealing or robbing or smoking or doing this. And they're like, cuz we have our other tenants. So there's just a, there's just that, that stigma. And the issue is we can't get to this place where going to the dentist, if we're at work and we go to our boss and we say, Hey, I need to leave at three cause I got, um, a dentist appointment.
Usually we, we just communicate that we don't, we aren't vague about it's, I, I was like, I'm just going to the dentist and, and in fact, insurance pays for clean every six months. So like everybody goes to the dentist. So this isn't like, Something that is just like, oh, you, you have issues with your teeth.
It's like, no, we all go to the dentist every six months. Most of us pass a cavity at one point and we get a cap. A lot of us fed root canals. I mean, there's no stigma around it, and a big part of it is around. Insurance coverages, just the mature, it's insurance coverage and a continuum of services, and they're on every corner so you see them.
So you see dentist offices everywhere and you meet dentists all the time and, and you, when you see like in particular cities or towns, there's like in the newspaper, Every six months, there's the best of X, Y, Z count. Best of Phoenix, the dentist. But do you ever see a youth mental health outpatient clinic on there?
Or you go to a little league game and it's usually the local dentist that all the kids go to. They have a banner to say, X, Y, Z dentist is sponsoring this little league game or on the T-shirt. And so there's lots of different things that need to happen to start. Address the stigma that I think goes beyond just talking to people.
So just convincing a parent not to have stigma. Our, our belief is that [00:34:30] the, the, the infrastructure, the healthcare system has to change, meaning that we have every level of care that people, people are aware of what level of care they need, they know who to call or where to call to get help. It's very accessible.
You see it all the time. It's visible. So a lot of times what people are trying to do is they're trying to address stigma first. I think that stigma gets addressed last. Hmm. By first creating that healthcare system that just naturally people know how to, they're aware of, they know how to engage, but if the services aren't even available, cuz even when we talk about the types of services that are available, you often need to know somebody who knows somebody, which this program and this place.
And it's like, well what is that and how does that work? And then are you sure I should send my kid there? And that that's not mainstream. And those programs are still great and should. But there should be something a lot more accessible early on. So that's why it embarks really about when we think about the big area, audacious goal, what can we do when we think about business as a force for good.
It's creating that continuum of care. The, the, the best thing we can do is to create a national brand where people are able to say, you should just call at bark. You can trust embark, trust me, give them a call. They're gonna be able to help you out. And what we wanna be able to do is so often, uh, and it doesn't work this way to the dentist.
Cause when you go at the dentist, they'll help you out. It's not like they can only do one thing so much in behavioral health is these organizations only provided one. What if I need something else? Okay, now you need to go talk to somebody else. Yeah. And it's disjointed, so we felt like we need more [00:36:00] organizations that offer that full continuum so that when you go to the dentist, you don't have to jump around.
They can do everything from that initial check and cleaning. To, uh, a cavity, a cap to a root canal, they can do all that. Now, if we need to do some sort of jaw surgery, we might refer you out, but we do it all the time and we have a relationship and it's kind of smooth, and maybe it's part of the same organization, maybe it's not.
Our view is if we start to create that continuum of services so that when a family calls us, we don't feel like that. You need the one service we have, but we're free to connect you with the most relevant service at the lowest level of care possible. That's the least expensive for you for insurance and everybody else.
That's how all insurance, that's how all healthcare works. And if we have a healthcare crisis, we have to solve it. Be the same way all other healthcare issues are solved, not outside of it, not non-profits. And raising money to pay for my cuts kids' treatment. That's good and that's great important, but we need it to be a real healthcare issue just like every other one.
So we need a continuum of care, continuum of services that are out there, that are visible, that are accessible, that people understand, they know, but it needs to start with an organization. And then eventually lots of organizations that have a brand that's trusted, that's respected, that's recognized that I'm comfortable calling, that I'm comfortable trusting, just like I trust my dentist to say, yeah, you do have a cavity.
I don't challenge them. I don't go. Once I know a good one, I don't go to get a second opinion. We just usually just kind of follow through with the steps there. So that's the key I think [00:37:30] to, when we think about the crisis. We need more organizations to do that. Partner with payers, partner with insurance, create more high quality services.
Measure the outcomes, evidence-based, every level of care from outpatient psychiatry to testing to intensive outpatient program, therapeutic day program, residential treatment, yeah. All that. Yeah. And that's, that's so important to know that there are so many services because I think you, you know, when you land in this world, you hear about,
Okay, well the therapist thing didn't work, so now I have to like send them out to wilderness therapy and we just sort of go from A to Z and I love wilderness therapy and it like saved my son's life, I believe. So I'm not saying that that's not the right thing, but I think there's so much in between that now parents can take advantage of that probably didn't either exist or you know, it's just like you said, it's so hard to find.
So I love, I love hearing about that. Well, I know I need to let you go. I would love to hear if you could just talk to. Thousand parents standing in front of you with a word of inspiration or wisdom or anything, what would you tell 'em? I think it goes back to just embracing this idea of joy and that the deepest forms of joy comes in time of pain and suffering being present in the moments in that moment when we think about if we, you know, have, have a teen son who makes a another bad decision and feels.
Helpless and and feels [00:39:00] full of shame, and you as a parent feel also hopeless and helpless and feel like you're a bad parent and you don't really know what to do. When I'm a parent, I'm supposed to know, and you're in that moment with your child. Often we would call such awful feelings if we accept those feelings and we're able to embrace in that moment, and we're both able to cry together and just saying, we don't know, but we're here and we hold each other.
That's what it means to be human. It's not that I need to fix what hap it's okay that I don't know how to fix it, but I love you unconditionally and I accept you no matter what decision you make right now or you make tomorrow and, and what we have. and what nobody can ever take away is this moment and what we're doing and how responding to this.
And you should know that tomorrow we have the ability to respond the same way again. That way we don't try to fix things that way. We don't try to, to to make our child happy, to make ourselves happy, and that way we find joy. Love it. Well, I think that's a beautiful way to wrap up. So thank you so much for your time.
Yeah, thank you Brenda. Really, really appreciate, appreciate you and appreciate all the great work you're doing. This is such an important message. When we talk about the stigma, when we talk about awareness, this is, this is where it starts having these types of conversations, so I appreciate. Okay, that is it for today.
If you would like to get the show notes for this episode, you can go to brenda zane.com/podcast. All of the episodes are listed there and you can also find [00:40:30] curated playlists there, so that's very helpful. You might also wanna download a free ebook, ie. It's called hindsight. Three things I Wish I knew When My Son was misusing Drugs.
It'll give you some insight as to why your son or daughter might be doing what they are, and importantly, it gives you tips on how to cope and how to be more healthy through this rough time. You can grab that free from brenda zane.com/hindsight. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it and I hope that these episodes are helping.
Stay strong and be very, very good to yourself, and I will meet you right back here next week.