Your Mental Health: A Conversation With A Wellness Founder
This week, I’m speaking to Noah Trofimow, my business partner and Founder of The Paper Bag Mask Foundation. PBMF focuses on closing the treatment gap for mental health in teens and young adults.
Good Morning!
I hope you had a great weekend.
Mental Health is a complicated topic. To take care of one’s mental health usually requires multiple interventions, constant attention, and an evolving level of self-understanding.
The way the conversation around mental health has been stigmatized up until recently — and by recently, I mean two years ago — has created the idea in most of our heads that there shouldn’t be an open conversation about it. It’s monumental that talking about it is now becoming acceptable, but it’s taken far too many lives to get here.
Noah Trofimow believes it doesn’t have to be that way. He decide to start The Paper Bag Mask Foundation 3 years ago to help close the treatment gap for mental health treatment in young adults and teens. His mission was (and still is) to offer holistic, affordable care to those who are underserved by the current mental healthcare model.
This model, by the way, is unfortunately still taking shape and has many pitfalls, as recent policy initiatives have shown.
I was fortunate to meet Noah at a point in his journey where he was deciding on the implementation of this mission. He enlisted me to help him get the message about mental health across, reach more people, and present our business model to panels.
I’ve been fortunate to hear his passionate words about this topic in many presentations up to this point, but I wanted you all to hear his mission from him, to help understand how he got into it and what qualifies us to take this leap into the nonprofit sector.*
*This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. For the full transcript, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
My Conversation with a Mental Health Founder
F: Tell The Mental Wealth Blog who you are and how you got into caring for your mental health advocacy.
NT: Thanks for having me. I’m a marketing manager and nonprofit founder. [My advocacy] came from my own personal struggles with mental issues. I mean, just going through the whole mental health system as someone who had anxiety, it felt like a “guess and check” process.
Like “Okay, this medication might work for you. And if it doesn't, you'll come back ina few weeks and then we'll try out another medication. And if that doesn't work, we'll do the same thing.”
For me, it was the same thing with therapy; you see a therapist for a few weeks, and then oh, you know, it didn't work out with them. And it's this process that takes some people years, and some people can never actually do it.
And it's really difficult to be able to do that when if you're already depressed, it's hard to push yourself to get out of bed and go through this massive process of trial and error.
F: Talk about the outlets for dealing with your depression and anxiety that eventually led you to found an organization for everyone dealing with these same struggles.
NT: I noticed immediately when I wasn't exercising, that's when my mental health was at its lowest. I think it’s the self esteem that's attached to exercise. There's also just that social aspect that you don't think of when you're going to the gym. Social connections from the gym were actually super important to me.
I love the concept of active coping. I don’t want to seem too against the traditional mental health system, but in the “guess and check” process I didn’t feel much like a participant in my recovery. Exercise, creative action and eventually meditation became things that I could actively do and know it would instantly make me feel a little better.
These aren’t things you need to wait for appointments for, or back-test to see if they’re safe, and I wanted to show that to other people [with The Paper Bag Mask Foundation].
How to Avoid Avoidance in Mental Health Treatment
F: Three years into your journey as a nonprofit founder, you’ve hosted hundreds of workshops and personally led many breath work and meditation workshops yourself. Is there any other advice you’d give to people who still struggle with mental health that haven’t found the treatment for them yet?
NT: You have to stay as open-minded as possible. With our exercise pillar in PBM, some people might see it and think “I don’t like exercise, even if it might make me feel better.”
You might have to change your definition of exercise. In my experience, a lot of time when people tell me that they hate exercising, it's that they hate intense weightlifting or they hate running.
They might not think about Zumba class. There's yoga classes. There's spin class, there's boxing, jiu-jitsu, all these different things that you can do that count as exercise, even just walking your dog. I call it “exercise in disguise.”
With meditation, people might have trouble sitting in silence, but there’s also so many ways to meditate. Different kinds of breath work, different kinds of creativity; creative writing, drawing, and cooking.
F: Has your outlook on the mental health treatment environment changed since teaching these different coping methods?
NT: Yeah. There’s so many things that have turned into great opportunities for me that initially I was like, “I don't really feel comfortable doing that.” Like, I didn’t want to do a jiu-jitsu class once because it was pushing me out of my comfort zone. I felt weird about it. But I did it.
Keeping my own open mindedness and willingness to try new things has been huge, but also revisiting old experiences, reassessing them and giving them another chance.
For the longest time I was like, “I'm not someone who's who wants to do therapy. It doesn't work for me. I'm against it. Those people are getting paid to listen to me.”
But now I’ve thought about it. And you know, that might have just been my experience with those couple people that I talked to. So I got myself back into therapy because I thought, “that’d be ignorant of me to completely shut down therapy altogether because I had a couple negative experiences.”
F: Thank you for sharing that. What other interesting things have you learned from founding a nonprofit?
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