Mental Health Awareness Month
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. At Adopt-A-Family (AAF), we know that housing insecurity and homelessness can cause and exacerbate mental health challenges. The families that come through our doors have all experienced the stress of housing instability, and often they have experienced multiple additional traumas that impact their mental well-being.
Joan Keiffer, AAF’s in-house mental health therapist, explains that most of the agency’s adult clients believe that there is something wrong with them rather than understanding that something wrong has happened to them. Many of our families are navigating intergenerational trauma, passed down from parent to child, and they have difficulty believing that things can get better. Breaking this cycle can take time, but AAF firmly believes that the provision of free, on-site therapeutic services is a worthy investment and a critical piece of our efforts to help households achieve stability.
When Ms. Keiffer works with our children, she analyzes how their experiences and emotions come out in their play. The stories they tell and the actions they take while playing provide a meaningful look into their minds and their experiences. Ms. Keiffer says in her space, children are allowed to feel all their emotions, even the “negative” ones such as sadness and anger.
Ms. Keiffer’s sessions offer a safe and open space for clients to allow their voices to be heard. She helps adults process their experiences, develop healthy coping mechanisms, and shift to positive self-talk. Both children and parents leave her office feeling empowered and more in control of their experiences.
In addition to offering accessible therapy, the agency provides wellness activities, yoga, vision board workshops for adults, and a social-emotional curriculum to the children in Project Grow. These additional opportunities provide clients with unique approaches to mental wellbeing that work best for them.
We understand that our clients cannot focus on their mental wellbeing if they are in survival mode. At Adopt-A-Family, we help families achieve housing security, which gives our clients the capacity to focus on their mental health and wellbeing as one of the necessary steps of building a better future.
Thank you to everyone who supports our mission and makes this important work possible.