In September, the Hogg Foundation is celebrating National Recovery Month. Throughout the month, we’ll be highlighting the creativity, resilience, and leadership of people in recovery from mental health and substance use conditions and the many ways our grantee partners are advancing mental health recovery in their communities.
For this episode, we talk to two friends from within the Hogg Foundation’s wide network of changemakers. First, Jason Howell, executive director of RecoveryPeople, about the new film Humanly Possible, which he helped produce with funding support from the Hogg Foundation. Following Jason we speak with Hannah Szlyk, a past recipient of the Hogg Foundations Moore Fellowship for doctoral research, about her work exploring youth suicidality. Together, our guests offer valuable insight into the power of supportive relationships on the journey to recovery.
Jason Howell: RecoveryPeople
“I’m a person with lived experience with both mental health and substance use challenges. And I guess I’ve been in recovery for about 25 years now,” says Jason. “And I’m the executive director of RecoveryPeople.”
Central to the philosophy of RecoveryPeople is a commitment to leveraging the power and potential of people with lived experience of substance use
recovery. Led primarily by individuals and family members in recovery, the organization’s work ranges from policy advocacy to awareness raising to workforce development.
RecoveryPeople is also a three-time Hogg Foundation grantee partner through the Mental Health Policy Academy and Fellows initiative. This program builds both individual and organizational capacity for effective mental health policy and advocacy work by enabling nonprofit groups, like RecoveryPeople, to hire in-house policy fellows. The fellows receive intensive training, education, and experience in mental health advocacy and policy work at the state level.
History of Recovery in Texas
Jason began thinking about the need to document oral histories of recovery in Texas in response to the passing of significant members of the state’s recovery community.
“I realized we were going to lose that history,” says Jason. “We wanted to capture the history of recovery in Texas, at least on the substance use side. A lot of history has been captured nationally. But what about Texas? What did that look like in Texas?”
With the support of a Hogg Foundation grant, he began capturing those personal stories of recovery from substance use on film. The resulting documentary is called “Humanly Possible.”
“We ended up identifying five individuals, we call them our change makers, who are all individuals in recovery,” says Jason. “They all used their lived experience and their journey to make a real big impact in Texas. That’s the story we captured. We know that there’s a lot of other stories out there that are just as important, and we’re wanting this to become a film series.”
Hope and Healing
Jason anticipates that the biggest takeaway for viewers of Humanly Possible will be a sense of hope.
“Recovery is built on hope, and part of developing that hope is getting connected with our past, our forefathers and foremothers, and seeing how they overcame their substance use, what their recovery journey looked like, and how their journey has had this beautiful ripple effect on other people’s journey,” says Jason. “We really want to inspire individuals to know that they can use their journey, their recovery story as well, to pay it forward to have their own ripple effect. And collectively, we can move mountains.”
This sense of hope stands in contrast to many other documentary depictions of substance use recovery.
“To put it bluntly, a lot of that media is trauma porn. It is exploiting our disease. It is exploiting our drama and our trauma for entertainment value,” says Jason. “I’m wanting to do the opposite of that. Do we invite individuals to share a portion of their story which may have had some darker days? Yes, but it is brief and is the basis of their story arc, their hero’s journey. We focus much more on the positive things. We really want to give individuals hope.”
Hannah Szlyk: Youth Adversity and Resilience
In 2017, Hannah received a Henry E. And Bernice M. Moore Fellowship to support her dissertation research into the role of school environment and life stressors in youth suicidality. After completing her doctorate at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work, she is now an assistant professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
“My dissertation looked at the breadth of suicidal ideation and behavior among students, but also at something we call protective factors,” says Hannah. “So, looking at good things happening in their life, too.”
Her research focused on students at Austin’s Garza Independent High School, an alternative high school for students facing challenges in the traditional school setting.
“A lot of the students at Garza had been suspended, weren’t doing well with their classes, were having a lot of mental health issues or behavioral issues,” says Hannah. “They were sent to Garza as kind of a last chance to get an in-person high school diploma.”
With a focus on social emotional learning, the alternative high school environment helped students understand their own emotions as well as how their emotions impacted others.
“It really was an interesting environment, and lots of the students I worked with who were newer to the school did a lot better within months of being there,” says Hannah. “I think it was because Garza was a safe place where they could be who they were, explore their identity, but also have their needs met, which they weren’t having at the other schools.”
Overall, her research found that students who exhibited better self-efficacy and self-esteem displayed lower suicidal ideation on a standardized scale, demonstrating the possibility of buffering the risk of suicidality in students and young adults through positive protective factors.
Listening to All Voices
Hannah’s research approach also addressed some of the limitations of mainstream suicidology research she found at that time.
“A lot of the studies and the research were based on samples that were predominantly white, cisgender, heterosexual, upper middle class,” says Hannah. “Now there’s really a lot more awareness and advocacy to make sure that who we’re talking to, who we’re sampling, really represents everyone who is impacted by suicide.”
While her research focus has broadened to include substance use and co-occurring mental health issues, she continues to prioritize the voices of lived experience.
“My research shows that people have complex needs, and we need to think of really innovative solutions to help them. But we need to listen to them as well,” Hannah says. “A lot of my work is community based, making sure that people with lived experience are involved in the research and are really voicing what it’s like to be them and what support they’re wanting to lead healthy and quality lives.”
Support and Safety
Just as Jason’s creative work highlights peer-support and the healing power of sharing personal recovery stories, Hannah’s research demonstrates that safe and supportive relationships play a protective role that can help lower the risk of youth suicide.
“When young people can feel really comfortable in who they are and express themselves and feel safe, respected, and celebrated by their peers, their family, their community, that definitely is a great way to prevent suicide or suicidal behavior and ideation,” says Hannah. “I think it’s really about the relationships and belonging and feeling that there are people who really do support you having a quality life.”