Krista's Story: A Mother's Battle for Compassionate Mental Health Care

People need human connection. It's a forever thing that we want to belong, and being able to physically be next to another person and maybe feel their energy or they understand what you're saying, or even they can remotely be like, 'I've had a day where one time,' and you're like, 'OK, I'm not OK.' Because when our mind is taking over, it's kind of everything else isn't there, right? It's just like a cloud in the background, but if you have that support, that community, that connection, I've been in a grief coping program before, and they match people based on age and like the type of loss they went through. It's similar to that where if maybe I have suicidal thoughts, OK, I have a friend who's had them too. And not that it's good to fuel each other with those things, but going to an art program with her is really nice because we can just paint and create and just be and not be in our heads and not think and just do and we just understand each other, but naturally, like the programs are created, it's so that naturally all of a sudden it's like, 'Hey, you remember like a year ago we were both in this psych ward?'