[audio logo] ANNOUNCER: The following program is a production of Ozarks Public Television.

Welcome to "Sense of Community."

I'm Michelle Skalicky.

The pandemic not only affected physical health, it also shined a light on mental health as people dealt with anxiety about a new deadly virus, job loss, and isolation.

Joining us tonight is Dr. Shelly Farnan, Licensed Clinical Psychologist, and Vice President of Be Well Initiatives at Burrell Behavioral Health.

Stay tuned.

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to "Sense of Community."

"Sense of Community" is a public affairs presentation of Ozarks Public Television.

Welcome Dr. Shelly Farnan, and thanks for joining us for "Sense of Community" here on Ozarks Public Television.

Thank you, Michelle.

We appreciate you.

Well, today, we're going to talk about the Burell Behavioral Health Be Well Initiatives, but first, I want you to tell us about yourself and what you do at Burrell.

Yeah, so first and foremost, I am human just like everyone else out there watching.

I'm a mama of three little girls who are phenomenal and were pretty excited to hear I was coming in today.

And at Burrell, I am the Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as well as Be Well Initiatives.

I'm a licensed psychologist and a DEI practitioner.

How long have you been with Burrell?

In July, it will be five years, so I'm closing in on that five-year mark at Burrell.

The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll not only on people's physical health but on mental health as well.

Just how impactful was the COVID-19 pandemic on our collective mental health here in Southwest Missouri?

Yeah, the COVID-19 pandemic totally rocked all of our worlds uniquely and collectively if we all just reflect on all of the unknowns that we faced and changes and immediate pivots that we had to make.

And our brains weren't really equipped to do all of that.

We had never lived through a pandemic before.

So what the result of that was was increasing anxiety, increasing depression, drastic increases in death by overdose, and death by suicide.

If we remember if we kind of reflect back in 2021, the Surgeon General put out a warning about our youth mental health call to action and really focusing us in on youth mental health.

And so to summarize, the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not something that we could plan for.

There were a lot of changes.

We were removed from a lot of the things that keep us well and take care of our brain health, had a drastic loss, significant loss that we all faced collectively and uniquely, and it really took a toll on our mental health.

Because at first, the only tools that were known to be effective were isolation and quarantine, so we were in our homes by ourselves.

There were people that were just basically alone.

So there were people that faced that loneliness struggle and just things that they hadn't had to deal with before.

So is that something that we're still dealing with today after the pandemic is over?

Absolutely, I think we were all thrilled earlier in May that we know that the concern is over.

We're through the pandemic.

And that doesn't mean that the mental health consequences are over, and are expected to last probably for years to come.

But I think we're all so thrilled that that's over.

Look forward.

What else can we do moving forward?

And sometimes it's that necessary reminder of the long-term mental health impacts.

Just earlier this month, Surgeon General put out a new advisory this time about loneliness and the true impacts of loneliness on our success as communities, on our successes as business leaders, on our success as just being human.

So I think that is one of many examples of how we know the pandemic is going to continue to impact mental health.

So one thing you are doing about it is you've started this Be Well Initiatives at Burrell.

Talk a little bit about how that got started because I understand it was in the beginning of the pandemic that this came about, Isn't it interesting to think back?

I can say March 2020, and every one of us that hear that, we have something that goes through our mind, March 2020.

March 16th of 2020 is when I received that text message.

We were-- none of us doing what we were hired to do at that point because we knew we were up against just all of the unknowns.

So I received a text message from our leadership team that says we need something to support our Burrell colleagues through the unknowns that lie ahead.

And that was really our green light.

Thankfully, I'm a dreamer and I surround myself by other practitioners who are dreamers, and so that was a green light for us to really put into action dreams that we had had for years that weren't necessarily-- it wasn't a good time for it.

It was truly the time for it in March of 2020.

So we spent about a week, myself, Dr. Karen Shipley, Dr. Sara Wilson, Dr. Rachel Johnson, our marketing and communication team, really just bringing those dreams together.

And five days later, we launched what is now Be Well Initiatives for our own Burrell team.

And we asked for a chance, executive leadership team, can we please try to launch this for our community, and we did.

Five days later, we launched for our Burrell colleagues and for the community.

And I want to talk about what it looked like in the beginning for the Burrell staff.

And then how did you morph that over to something that is available to the whole community?

It's really funny.

We've kept that first-day episode live because it was literally me on my phone recording my computer.

So we had Zoom for our colleagues.

We went live for our colleagues.

And there were over 300 of us that really came together in that first day.

About 30 minutes after our team segment, we went live to Facebook.

That's where I was recording from my phone to the computer, which just looking back, it's embarrassing, but we didn't care.

Like what we knew is that people needed us and we were ready to arrive and serve.

And so we did that for one year every single day for our team, and then we turned around 30 minutes later and went live for our community as well on Facebook Live.

And yeah, that's still going today.

Talk about some of the programs that you offer through Facebook Live.

If someone wants to tune in, what are some of the topics that you cover?

We try to bring the best evidence-based practice top-of-the-line literature to life so that we're not just reading about it and internalizing it, but we're actually putting that best-practice literature into practice.

We're practicing together in community.

And so May, for example, is Mental Health Month.

We took Mental Health America, a best-practice-leading organization, we took their tool kit, their 2023 tool kit, and we brought that to life in our May Be Well experience.

So again, it's taking the content that is deemed best practice and we move that into action with the folks that want to join in to the Be Well community.

In April, it's Earth Day, and so we celebrated and honored environmental wellness.

And so we brought environmental wellness practices to life, partnered with city of Springfield, brought in Saki Urushidani who is an engineer in city of Springfield, that talked to us about recycling and just long-term impacts on our environment and how we can take action every single day, and the interconnectedness between who we are as humans and how we connect with our Earth's well-being as well.

And something that I have found is that when I'm stressed out or anxious, I just go for a walk and it helps immensely.

How important is it to get outside when you can to just kind of clear your head and really address that mental health issue that you may be going through at that moment?

Nature has limitless potential on positively impacting brain health.

We have to know ourselves.

If we don't like outdoors and we don't like bugs and we don't like the heat time of year, we have to know that.

But generally speaking, nature is healing.

And so as often as we can get out in nature in the ways that we want to.

Some of us want to be in the middle of the city where it's busy and noisy and some of us want to be out on the river, Ozark's trails, and really in the calm and the quiet.

But nature has profound impacts on mental health well-being.

And like you said, each of us has our own thing that really makes a difference for us.

How do you take-- and we'll talk more about this program in depth here in a moment-- but how do you take a program that was, first of all, geared toward Burrell employees, to a community where there's so many different people out there with different needs?

It makes me laugh just a little bit.

Our philosophy from the beginning is to keep it simple and to keep it rooted in what we have known to be effective throughout our history.

So again, we're keeping up with the times, keeping up with the literature, but not wavering on those practices that have been found effective throughout time.

And so we really want to offer-- so we offer those foundational best practices such as self-care, and mindfulness, and expression.

We've got to get it out in some way with people that we trust or anonymously is something that we've also done.

So we've got to do that.

We've got to learn how to tune in to our bodies and our minds versus tuning out and avoiding, so we address that with self-assessment.

And then we move into that mindfulness practice that has been proven effective for regulatory reasons for centuries.

And then we facilitate that expression, and then we bring in novelty.

Our brains love and thrive on novelty, so we've tried to bring in a new content area.

We have a lot of common themes and common requests, but we try to bring in something new.

And even if it's an old concept, we bring it to life in new at different ways just to try to learn differently each time.

And you talk a lot about brain health through the Be Well Initiatives.

What is brain health?

How would you define that?

Brain health is synonymous to mental health.

Historically, mental health has developed such a stigma.

And what we are ultimately trying-- so the message we are trying to communicate is every human has a brain.

Mental health, we assume mental health is just for those of us with a mental health illness.

Of course, it's for those of us with mental health illness, but every brain has health.

Every human has a brain, therefore, we are calling it brain health as many leaders in the field are.

it's not unique to Be Well or to Burrell.

But our brains are organs.

Every organ has health.

And for some reason, there is a stigma associated with our brain as an organ.

And we're trying to rework that, create a new narrative so that every human is equipped at least foundationally with understanding how their brain, how our unique brains work and how to care for it.

Let's talk more about the program and what it offers.

I know one thing that you offer is Be Well for Business or Businesses.

What does that entail?

And I know that you don't go in just to for-profit businesses, but you go into organizations, nonprofits.

Talk a little bit more about that, and who can benefit from that program.

SHELLY FARNAN: So if we stay with that common theme every human has a brain, that brain goes with us everywhere.

Our brain goes with us to work every day.

Our brain goes with us into the community every single day, to our kiddos schools, to sporting events, everywhere.

Our brains walk with us, walk in with us everywhere.

And so what we are hoping to do with Be Well for Business and Be Well, in general, is that anyone that has a group of people or a person with a brain, they invite us in to collaborate on caring for that, for the brain health of that team, of that community.

So Be Well for Business is really equipping.

That was a large number of the requests that we got in the early days, which sounds like it's like 20 years ago, but it's just three.

But a lot of those requests were, OK, Burrell, I am not a mental health company and my employees are struggling.

And absolutely, we're the Community Mental Health Center.

We are honored to help.

So that is our duty.

We are honored.

That is our obligation as a Community Mental Health Center to support those in our community, including businesses, including churches, including schools.

Whoever is willing and in need of brain health supports, we want to partner, we want to team up.

And what does that look like?

What does teaming up with a business look like?

Really assessing.

We have these pre-meetings.

If someone says, we need your help, we can say 100%, but I don't know that we will be the best fit.

So we hold these pre-meetings to really understand, OK, you're calling on Burrell to come in and care for brain health.

Tell us a little bit about what's going on.

So we do a very brief conversation, I about said assessment.

That sounds a little too formal.

But we hold this conversation really to hear the needs of the organization to assess if we are the best fit or if we need to connect with other agencies.

And then from there, we start curating unique brain health experiences for that team because we serve across industries.

So we're not going to serve an accounting firm the same way we're going to care for educators or healthcare providers.

So we really try to work to understand-- or engineers for that matter-- we try to understand the industry we try to understand the unique organization, we take the brain science, the best practices, and we curate those unique experiences for the team.

Give some examples of some programs that you might take into an organization.

We've had a ton of requests for burnout, around the holidays, holiday stress, and simultaneously right now, financial stress has continued to be one of the top stressors across the nation.

And so we've had a lot of requests, and we've recommended a lot that we offer a financial stress Be Well experience.

And so again, instead of just telling people about financial stress, we actually engage them in their own self-exploration and assessment about financial stress.

And then also taking action.

So not just self-assessment, but then asking, what do I need, what's possible, what's not possible, and then coming up with a brief tangible action plan OK. What are the benefits for both the-- talking about even nonprofits-- what are the benefits for both the employer and the employee?

I mean, do they see maybe an increased production value-- Yeah.

--because of this?

Absolutely.

I'll talk specifically about Be Well, and then we can kind of go in those general outcomes.

What we're ecstatic to be finding through the data with Be Well is at least a 30% reduction in distress in that 45-to-60-minute experience.

We've had organizations that have shown 50% reduction in distress, 45 to 60 minutes, and that's once a quarter.

I mean, it's not every day for this big amount of time.

So number one is that reduction of distress.

What we're seeing specifically with Be Well is a 30% to 50% reduction in distress during that experience.

Now, generally speaking, overall, it's improving our productivity.

It's reducing absenteeism.

It's increasing satisfaction, both employee satisfaction and leadership satisfaction.

You're preventing those dynamics that really cause delays or disrupt the flow of productivity.

If someone is interested in having the Burrell Be Well Initiative's team come into their organization, what do they need to do?

Hopefully, we all know somebody that works at Burrell, so there's really no wrong way.

I think we can be guided to Be Well, but emailing us at bewell@burrellcenter.com would be a quick way for us to get connected.

All right, so that's one part of the Be Well Initiatives.

There's also the Be Well community movement, and you have a strong presence as you said on Facebook and Instagram.

So that's one thing that you do.

If somebody wants to find out more to tune into your Facebook Live programs, how can they find you on there?

Yeah, Google us.

Our website is going to be the best way to find out about what we're doing every month, where we're at in the community, what bell activity, we'll chat through.

that.

Yeah, I'll talk about that here in a minute.

Yeah, our website is really going to be where we just have that wealth of knowledge.

So if nothing else, just Google search Burrell Center, Be Well.

And I'm wondering too about the bells.

You mentioned the bells.

They're called Be Well Bells.

Some of our viewers may have seen those painted bells across the community.

SHELLY FARNAN: I hope so.

I recall seeing one in front of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks downtown.

I know there's one at least of these in Ozark.

What is the idea behind the Be Well Bells?

Be Well Bells are a signal of hope and healing and just change for the better in the future, modeled after Mental Health America's one and only Mental Health America Bell.

In the 50s, Mental Health America put out a call to the historic psychiatric asylums.

In those asylums, as we know, mental health professionals use shackles and chains, and in the 50s, Mental Health America said send in those shackles and chains and melted those down into the one and only Mental Health America Bell.

And we were looking for something as a Community Mental Health Center to have visible representation in the community and fell in love with the Mental Health America Bell, reached out to them, and said here's the concept.

We will not steal or say that we are in any way affiliated with Mental Health America.

And they said how about you do this?

Say that, and then keep us posted on your outcomes.

We would love to hear how you're doing and then help to elevate your story if and when it takes off in your communities.

So modeled after that Mental Health America Bell, and now we are just hopeful and thankful to have the bells in our communities that we can access at any time of day walking by them.

And how are those helping to address mental illness and brain health in our community?

I know that they're painted.

We're going to talk about that here in just a moment.

But what specifically are they doing to help our mental wellness?

What we really hope to do is to use those bells for quick access to life-saving measures.

So if you can't think of your provider's number or you can't think of a mental health facility, that you could access the QR code that's on that bell, whether it's 2 PM or 2:00 AM, and you can get connected to crisis services, mental health services, reputable-- that we have vetted as the Community Mental Health Center-- reputable mental health services.

That was our number one priority is to create that access in community.

How many bells are out there in the community right now?

There are 11 currently, and we're launching five this summer through the fall.

Oh, wow.

OK. And you choose the artists to paint these bells.

How are those artists chosen?

How we thought this was going to happen, we launched with a call to artists.

We received a number of artists that the only expectation really is that the artist was committed to brain health.

And so we discussed what brain health meant.

And we wanted the design to represent mental health, whatever that meant for the artist.

So that's how we started, and then word of mouth.

And then as you had mentioned, least of these organizations have their own team members, their own clients that they serve, or community members that they want to paint their Be Well Bell because they understand the mission, they understand how that connects to brain health and well-being.

So it started out one way, and then we have just let it unfold as our partners want it to be.

This summer, we're excited.

We're actually welcoming clients and staff that want to participate in the development of a Be Well Bell.

This summer they'll be painting bells as well.

Oh, that's exciting.

Where will that bell end up?

There will be a few.

There will be a few.

So we're going to have a couple in St. Louis, Missouri, launching in St. Louis, Missouri.

We'll have one here in Springfield at Schaible Lake as we had discussed, another one in Columbia in our Burrell locations.

So there will be a few throughout Missouri.

So I'm curious just to sum it up.

We've just got a few minutes left.

What is the ultimate goal of the Be Well Initiatives at Burrell?

Reducing suffering, increasing our experience of living resilient lives that we want to be living in community because community is so necessary for our brain health and well-being.

One of the second most important factors for our brain health is to have trusting healing relationships.

We want to reduce suffering, increase that experience of lives worth living, and we do that within a community setting.

What does the future of the program look like?

Are there any new plans?

Any new things that you have planned?

We have a lot of requests.

We will continue to serve our community.

Again, we're going to keep it simple.

We appreciate and acknowledge we are the Community Mental Health Center, so we're not going to be super fancy or going outside of scope.

What we do hope to do is meet our community wherever they are.

And what we've noticed recently last summer, we received several requests to launch retreats for organizations.

And so those have gone over really well and we're getting more and more of those instead of quarterly experiences, those annual Be Well retreats for organizations.

So hopefully, that's coming soon.

And I also want to mention, of course, because this is so important, your website lists numbers for 24-hour crisis lines for people who are experiencing mental health or substance use crisis.

What number can someone call if they really need help right away?

Thank goodness now we can dial 988.

We've learned for years to dial 911 for emergencies.

For brain health emergencies, 988.

OK, so 988.

So much easier to remember than the old line.

So yeah, that launched last July I believe.

So what do you want the community to know about brain health and the importance of self-care?

I want the community to know that you deserve to understand how your brain works.

You have a brain.

It has health.

It is an organ.

And you deserve education not just by seeking mental health care, all of us, every human with a brain deserves to understand basics of neuroscience.

You have a Community Mental Health Center right here in your community.

Call us to action to help equip to the best of our ability, to help equip understanding that foundational neuroscience, and then connecting you to care even if that's beyond our Burrell walls so to speak.

But that's what we're here to do.

I'm curious, why did you go into this field?

I learned early on and it was noticed early on that peopling was about the best thing that I can do.

So I had great advisors, great mentors.

I was raised essentially in inpatient mental health clinics and hospitals, and really I fell in love with the resiliency, and how when you got past the unknowns, the fear of mental health illness, there was tons of hope.

And I think that takes if that is your calling and that is your gift, than it is deserved to provide that to the community.

Well, Dr. Farnan, thank you so much for coming in to talk to me today.

Thank you.

MICHELLE SKALICKY: I appreciate it.

Thank you, Michelle.

Here's how you can find out more.

I'm Michelle Skalicky.

Have a good evening.

ANNOUNCER: Here is where you can find more information about the topics covered in this program.

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