“It Can Be Okay for You, Too”: Kelly Wofford on Promoting Mental Health with Peer Support—and Radical Transparency
Kelly Wofford, a 2021 Rubinger Fellow and seasoned community engagement professional in Buffalo, NY, knows that mental health is a critical but underrecognized basis for the overall wellbeing of people and communities. Her frank approach to mental-health skills building as a speaker, peer coach, and workshop facilitator begins by letting go of secrets and shame.
Kelly Wofford is a veteran community engagement professional in the field of health care. This past March, after five years as director of community relations at Erie County Medical Center, a major teaching hospital and Level 1 Trauma Center on Buffalo’s East Side, Wofford joined the University at Buffalo School of Nursing. There she works as community engagement coordinator in research efforts looking at how a mindfulness-based stress reduction intervention can best be delivered in marginalized communities.
Her passion is supporting mental health, especially for people of color and women. She does that as a speaker, minister, and popular podcaster, and through peer-based workshops she facilitates as founder and principal of Front Seat Life, LLC. She is a certified provider of mental health first aid, mindfulness life coaching, and mental health peer support.
To all this work Wofford brings extraordinary candor about her own experience of mental illness—including a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and a suicide attempt—and about the practices she maintains to keep herself healthy.
The message behind the name Front Seat Life: “we are the drivers.” Even in the face of enormous internal and external challenges people can take charge of upholding their own wellness and, by extension, that of their families and communities. She believes that message because she lives it.
One thing that stands out about your work is how honest and direct you are about your own mental illness, both diagnoses and experiences. Does that ever feel scary to you?
When I was interviewing for my job at the University at Buffalo, I had to figure out if I was going to tell my whole story to the interview panel. And there were about 11 people—so a large interview panel, including researchers, other employees, and community members.
And to answer your question, yes, it was scary, because now I am speaking with nurses and researchers who truly understand what my illnesses are and how they manifest. They specialize in mental health. It was a new group of people I didn’t know. But it was still necessary. It was an easy decision to make because I made a promise to be transparent and genuine, but it doesn't mean that it's not scary.
Why is that transparency so important?
In 2013 I tried to take my life by suicide, and to this day believe that I should not be here. So every day to me is borrowed time and I got nothing to lose! If I end up without a job and living out of my car, heaven forbid, but if that were the case, I know that I would still be okay because I shouldn't even be here. Why not be transparent when I know that there are people that are living that are afraid? They're afraid to even deal with and acknowledge their mental health, let alone a mental illness. I feel obligated to share that part of me because so many people cannot. So many folks believe they're alone and they're not.
You’re focused especially on breaking down silence, stigma, and barriers to mental health for people of color. How do white supremacy and racism affect the mental health of Black people?
When you deal with daily traumatization and don't even know that you're dealing with it, you just cope. You are resilient by force. We are now in a place where people are acknowledging the impact of what it means to be Black in America, but that's new. To have an open conversation and for it to be covered on the news, that's new. But people have had to survive all of these centuries, all of these decades.
I hear so many stories about grandmothers and aunties that every once in a while just disappeared into their bedrooms and nothing in the house happened. Nobody ate, you had to figure out how to fend for yourself because depression wasn't something that people spoke about. Or a loved one or a parent would just disappear and come back a couple of months later because they suffer from bipolar disorder and they were in a manic phase. And for many people I believe mental illness and mental health challenges come through in other ways, like diabetes, like high blood pressure, because the stress has to go somewhere.
So many parts of life are miscategorized and not given the adequate amount of acknowledgement because there was no understanding that acknowledgement needed to occur. It's like the saying, “black don’t crack”—you know, that's coveted information, no one should know about it. But we’re now at a place where we can talk about trauma. We’re just starting to touch and tap into post-traumatic slave syndrome. We can talk about being okay with not being okay.
Let’s talk about Front Seat Life. What are its mission and activities?
Front Seat Life is an organization that's dedicated to eliminating the stigma and barriers to women and communities of color addressing their mental health. And I say mental health because I am not a therapist, I'm a peer. There is so much work that needs to be done to understand what mental health is before you even get to mental illness. I let the professionals deal with mental illness and I work with people on mental health.
So that looks like workshops on understanding the difference between mental health and mental illness. When it comes to speaking specifically about illnesses I still take a peer perspective, and I bring others who live with diagnoses to speak from their perspective. When that occurs I always have a mental health professional or several in the audience or on a panel that can speak to the medical side of it. I want folks to see that we're all just regular people. We have a different set of challenges, and the earlier you can address those challenges usually the less the challenges interrupt your life.
Could you address the specific usefulness of this slightly less formal, peer-support setting for mental health care?
I’ve talked to a lot of therapists and many of them get into it because of a personal experience, a relative, themselves, friends. As a mental health professional you cannot share that with your clients. You could be going through the exact same thing and want to say, “Listen, it gets better, because last week let me tell you this is what happened.” But as a psychiatrist you can't do that, as a therapist you can't do that. Yet a peer, that is why we exist—to be able to share those stories so that people see that they're not alone. When you have a peer who shares their story and you see that they're making it—however you define “making it,” like I pay my bills mostly on time, I have a car, I have a job, I’m able to hold down personal relationships—you see that it can be okay for you, too.
And you can also share your strategies for maintaining wellness, right? Judging from your podcast and other work, it seems like you’ve developed a pretty comprehensive set of tools.
That comes from being an inpatient for two weeks and having to learn how to live. It has come from me losing everything, a marriage, a job. My house went into foreclosure several times while I was ill. I know that still, I am able to live a mentally healthy life because I'm in therapy twice a month, because I take medication, because I have a need to be open with my life and am open with my life, because I eat vegetables, because I cycle, because I implement all of these tools. That's why I appear mostly healthy but I'm still mentally ill. And if I stop taking my medication, if I stop going to therapy, if I just live off of chocolate (which I would love to do), then I can guarantee you I wouldn't have a home. My brain would just stop functioning in this way.
It's hard work, and even now I would love, for example, to be in a romantic relationship, but I don’t know that I ever will, because of my honesty and the need to be transparent. Where other people would just dismiss some things, I need you to know the reason why I said that yesterday is because A, B, C, D. And so you give up some things when you have decided to live a transparent lifestyle. It will manifest itself differently for each person, but it's understanding that there's still fulfillment in life without having some of those other things that you may want.
Your Rubinger project builds on some of the work you’ve done with Front Seat Life. What are your goals?
The goal was to develop a one-on-one peer coaching model that would allow me to help mentally healthy people remain mentally healthy. I want to be able to help everybody, with a goal to work primarily with women and people of color. It’s up to six sessions; the grant has allowed me to pay for 36 clients to go through the program.
I’ve worked with folks on developing mental health skills, mental health tools. And it has ranged from one person who just needed to color— coloring for them was the thing that they needed in order to gain some perspective in self-care—to clients that needed the full six sessions and we also had to find therapists because they needed more than what I could offer.
When therapy comes in, it’s being able to come alongside the medical model and assist people with their therapy. People get “homework” in therapy but they don't necessarily know how to implement it. One person didn't know how to say no, so we had to work on just being comfortable actually verbalizing the word no.
Where do you take this model from here?
I've found that sustainability is an issue, and I’ve been exploring ways to address that. I don't believe people should have to pay to be helped. It kind of defeats the purpose to me. Those that can pay, they do; I believe that can be a component of it, just not the main way in which funding comes through.
Making Front Seat Life a nonprofit [as opposed to an LLC] would allow me to apply for other grants and partner with organizations that are able to bill for peer support. But to be honest I can't sustain my lifestyle doing that. I mean, I have to put gas in my car.
I've been working with some folks at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work on taking the model to the next level. The recommendation there was the money comes in the training and implementation of the program.
So you would train facilitators and coordinators?
Right. And then they would go into practices or medical facilities and provide the service. And so that has been my learning lesson.
One last question. How does this mental health work relate to the goals of community development?
Mental health conditions rank high on the list of reasons why people are disabled. If one is not capable of really taking care of themselves, how is one capable of taking care of their home? How is one capable of taking care of their community? How can you give back? How can you volunteer? How are you able to manage your finances so that you can buy a home? There's a lot of pieces of life that are dependent upon a person being mentally healthy.
We often give and give and give, and we never pour into ourselves. And so you have civic leaders and community activists that are dying at 40 and 50 because they never took care of themselves. It goes back to self-care. Putting the mask on yourself is self-care. It may seem noble to not put the mask on yourself, but it's ridiculous for you not to because you're going to kill yourself by not taking care of you. You have to be able to take care of yourself in order to give to others.
I see the connection, but I’m not always sure other people do. And so to know that an organization like LISC saw it—I'm grateful and hope that others are able to do the same, to tie in that holistic approach to life when it comes to community development, and financial readiness, and wealth building, and community building.