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Women Over 50 Working To Improve Our Collective Mental Health


The Covid-19 pandemic—and related economic slowdown—has produced a twin pandemic: a mental health crisis. Four in ten Americans are reporting symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, up from 1 in 10 before the pandemic; more than a third of the population has reported negative effects on their sleep or eating, while 12% say they’re consuming more alcohol than they did before 2020 happened.

While these statistics have helped further break the stigma around talking about mental health, there is still a long way to go. It’s why Mental Health Awareness month, which began in 1949, is still acknowledged every May. For this year’s edition of the observance, the National Alliance for Mental Illness is promoting a theme of “you are not alone,” to communicate to those who might be struggling that they are far from the only ones in that struggle.

And so, in honor of Mental Health Awareness month and as part of our weekly series—in partnership with Know Your Value and Mika Brzezinski—to highlight women over 50 who are changing the world, this week we want to shine a light on the women over 50 who are working to break down stigmas around mental illness while also creating solutions that will help our collective mental health. They are:

CeCe Morken, 63: For the majority of her career, Morken has worked in technology and financial services: She majored in economics at North Dakota State (where she also met her husband), got her MBA and went on to run sales at the John H. Harland Company, an office supplier business now called Harland Clarke. In 2007, she joined Intuit to run a variety of businesses, including its financial services and strategic business segments.

But in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Morken jumped to meditation giant Headspace to serve as its president and COO. Six months into the gig, she got a battlefield promotion and was named its CEO. “What I’ve been really interested in is how CEOs now view their employees’ mental health as being an important part of their responsibility,” Morken told Forbes in October. “The number of CEOs that now talk about the importance of mental health, so we get past the stigma around mental health, has really changed.”

That change has helped boost Headspace’s business: its Headspace for Work program, an employee wellness offering, signed on companies including Tesco, Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Publicis, while Microsoft is integrated the meditation service into its Teams platform.

Dr. Marsha Linehan, 78: Dr. Linehan is the creator of Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (DBT), a specific form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that is now used to help people with extreme emotional reactions, or who have borderline personality disorder. In the beginning, though, Linehan developed it to help patients with suicidal thoughts who were not getting the help they needed through traditional therapy.

DBT focuses more on emotions and relationships than CBT does, and one of its key elements is a phrase that has become almost commercial in its spread: radical acceptance. The idea is to recognize what is causing you distress (emotional or physical) and accepting it wholly rather than changing it or minimizing it.

In 2011, Linehan revealed that her quest to help those with suicidal thoughts stemmed from her own struggle with mental illness. “I honestly didn’t realize at the time that I was dealing with myself,” she said. “But I suppose it’s true that I developed a therapy that provides the things I needed for so many years and never got.”

Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, 66: President emerita of Spelman College, Dr. Tatum’s work sits at the intersection of psychology, racism, and education. A self-described “integration baby” (she was born four months after the Supreme Court outlawed race-based educational segregation through its Brown v. Board decision) who was often the only Black student in her Massachusetts grade school classes, Tatum received her Ph.D in clinical psychology in 1984 from the University of Michigan.

She worked as a clinical psychologist for a decade beginning in 1988 and became an expert in diversity training and multicultural organizational development, but the core of Tatum’s career has long lived in academia and married her interests in psychology and race relations. Her first teaching job was at the University of California at Santa Barbara teaching Black Studies; later, she’d work at Mount Holyoke College in her home state and teach a course on the psychology of racism.

It was her experience teaching that course that led to Tatum writing and publishing, in 1997, her seminal book, “Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity.” In 2020, twenty-three years after it was first published—and following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent racial justice protests—the book spent 12 weeks on the best-seller lists.

When asked about why it’s important to keep talking about racism and its effect on society, Tatum leans on one of the tenets of talk therapy: if you can’t speak it, you can’t treat it. “What’s really significant to me about this is not only that people have these negative experiences [with racism], but they’ve also internalized the idea that we shouldn’t talk about it,” she has said. “And that, I think, is really problematic if we are ever going to get beyond the issue of racism as an impediment to social justice in our society because we have to be able to talk about it order to move beyond it.”

Dr. Samantha Meltzer-Brody, 52: The chair of UNC’s psychiatry department and director of the UNC Center for Women’s Mood Disorders, Dr. Meltzer-Brody has spent the majority of her career studying postpartum depression, a medical condition that affects one in seven new mothers. But one of the biggest moments of her career happened in 2019, the year she turned 50: the FDA approved  Zulresso, the first drug developed specifically for postpartum depression. Meltzer-Brody was the academic principle investigator during the drug’s research and development.

“Given that death from suicide is one of the leading causes of maternal mortality, there’s a great need for treatment that is rapidly acting, which makes this quite amazing and unlike anything we’ve had before,” she said at the time.

Meltzer-Brody is motivated by the urge to understand the underlying biological cause of mood disorders and postpartum depression. But she’s just as motivated to break down the last remaining stigmas around maternal mental health.

“It is very difficult for someone, historically, to say ‘yeah, I have this new baby but I’m the most miserable I’ve been in my life,’” she says. “[We need to] make it acceptable to say that a psychiatric complication in fact is one of the most common complications of the perinatal period. If we diagnose and treat it, we can markedly change outcomes in a very positive way for the mom, which is markedly going to change the way we can have the best outcomes for the baby.”



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