On KJZZ's SOAPBOX, The Show turns over the the mic to listeners. For spring 2023, The Show collaborated with Rising Youth Theatre, a Phoenix-based youth-centered arts organization. The result is a series of conversations between family members and friends on one of the toughest topics around: mental health.
For the first conversation in the series, Sofia and her friend, Malia, tackle the question: What does mental health mean in your family?
SOPHIA: My name is Sofia, I'm 20 years old, and I'm Malia's roommate.
MALIA: My name is Malia, I am also 20 years old, and I'm also Sofia's roommate. I would say that in my family, we kind of have this balance of being open about some things, and then closed off about others. Kind of just depends on the topic. And then also I've, historically speaking, I've kind of minimized my own mental health struggles for the benefit of my family. So my mom can focus on my brother and my sister and you know, other, other aspects of survival as a single mother with four young kids, that combination has just made it pretty difficult for me to talk about my mental health with other people.
SOPHIA: I grew up understanding, like, possible hereditary things that I might, like, deal with in the future, when I'm older, but not really like, what does this developed support network look like? Yeah, because it's kind of always the issue of like, you see people struggling, but it's kind of harder, it’s less visible when they're working on getting help.
MALIA: You know, my, I have a lot of family members that have, have experienced mental health crises. But take, for example, my older brother, I didn't know anything about it until he was in a state of crisis. And we had to deal with an emergency. But after that fact, my mom let me know that, oh, he's actually been struggling with depression, anxiety for months, and we've been, you know, going to the doctor with him for months. I think the network of support thing is really important as well. Because when you try to do everything by yourself, you don't cultivate that network, and you don't have that support around you, which carries with it its own struggles, and consequences. So that's a pretty big thing.
SOPHIA: That's why I feel really grateful for our, like, roommate space that we've created. Because like, three years, like we've grown and learned, in our own ways, like how to kind of navigate that sort of thing.
MALIA: Yeah, I think my biggest priority with you guys has just been trying to be more open and trying to share more stuff with you guys, and try and cultivate that kind of relationship where we can just own up to the awkwardness and discomfort of, like, vulnerability and stuff like that. Because sometimes I feel like it's too late to do that with my own family because we've had so much history of silence or shame, you know, of stuff like that.
SOPHIA: The work that you've put into that definitely shows that we've, like, developed processes and structures that help us care for each other and for ourselves, and like how to create boundaries, how to solve conflicts and stuff. And I think that that's made my personal ability to communicate feelings and my mental health needs, like, very different than other friends or even my family, sometimes.
MALIA: You can't change something unless you identify what you want to change and then create, like action steps, right? So just trying to be as straightforward and open about it as possible, I think has really helped.
SOPHIA: Yeah.