May is Mental Health Awareness Month. To mark the occasion, GBH and other public radio stations across the country are airing a special live call-in program on three consecutive Thursdays from 8 to 10 p.m., starting tonight. It’s called “Hold On.” It comes to us from our friends behind the “Death, Sex and Money” podcast at WNYC in New York City. “Hold On” host Anna Sale joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss the new show. This transcript has been lightly edited.
Arun Rath: I can clearly see the need for this program after everything we’ve all been through over the last several years, but what actually prompted this to come together?
Anna Sale: We were just trying to think about how to have a different sort of conversation about this mental health crisis in America that is showing up in so many of our families and communities. The way we wanted to do this was to really have a conversation together where we asked people to be the experts on their own lived experience and to tell what they are noticing in their families, what’s helped, what’s been a frustration about engaging with the mental health care system, and to kind of bring the conversation about mental health even more out of the shadows so we can all hear that this is something so many of us are dealing with.
Rath: The live format is an interesting aspect of this. It’s challenging, of course, but it also brings in a kind of energy that I feel is often lacking in public radio conversations.
Sale: Yeah, and I just love what happens when you just give a phone number, and you don’t know who’s going to call in. You don’t know who, in that moment, just happens to be listening to their radio station.
I’m hopeful that this will bring a kind of conversation where we’re hearing not just from people in big cities but also in rural communities, where the challenges around accessing mental health care are quite different — swapping advice and stories, and commiserating. Because, you know, in some communities, it’s much more normalized to talk openly about accessing mental health care than others. So hopefully, having a live national conversation will help us all get something out of this that helps us understand what’s happening in the country a little more deeply.
Rath: Talk a little more about the national aspect of this conversation, because we’re in our East Coast bubbles in Boston and New York. And again, that’s something that is often lacking in public radio discourse. What are you going after there?
Sale: Well, I grew up in West Virginia. I spent a lot of time in Wyoming because my husband’s a wildlife ecologist. I’ve noticed some really small distinctions where everybody talks about their therapy appointments out loud when you’re in a workplace in New York City, whereas in Wyoming, if anybody is seeking mental health care, it’s like they use the word “counseling” to make it seem less like, I don’t know, there’s a problem to be solved.
I just want all of us to talk about this more together. That’s what’s so special about the public radio system. As a podcast host who’s usually talking to listeners who are pressing play and opting in, I love these opportunities to more broadly cast a net and see who raises their hand to join the conversation.
Rath: Tell us about how this is being structured. I understand each episode of “Hold On” is organized around a theme or an issue.
Sale: Yeah, I mean, it’s so difficult when you talk about mental health. Like, what in particular are we talking about? Are we talking about helping everyone thrive? Are we talking about the failures to adequately support people with severe mental illness? There’s a lot that’s part of this conversation.
We’re actually starting the first special by asking mental health professionals to be our reporters, to tell us what they are seeing at work and how they’re experiencing what most of us take in through big reports from the CDC or headlines. We’re asking, “How are you gauging the patterns of mental health and the seriousness of this crisis from what you see at work?”
Then, we’re going to follow that up with the question of how you find the right kind of care when you’re ready to say, “I need some extra support.” What are the next steps? Unfortunately, that can be a big maze for people to figure out how to navigate on their own.
