Mental Health Program
Let's start the conversation
Mental Health Program
With the gracious support of its founder, Eric Kussin and much appreciation to Theo Fleury for his contributions, we are proud to bring you a unique mental health program known as SameHere.
The idea that 1 in 5 suffer from mental health is first cast aside, as we all experience events in our lives that affect our emotions. We all fluctuate through sadness and anxiety at times, and we are all indeed The Same. Supporting your mental health, or that of your child, is not something to be shamed or labeled, it is something that we all need to do.
Everyone can benefit from learning the coping strategies taught in these sessions. You will gain valuable tools to help yourself cope and to strengthen your connections with your health, and your family. You will gain a better understanding of how to guide and help your child navigate life’s challenges.
The SameHere scale is a must-have tool for all parents as it truly is a way to connect and start the conversation with your child.
The expertise shared throughout these sessions, by the many contributors, represents a vast treasure of experience. We are so very grateful for their willingness to share their wisdom freely to help you and your family.
Please watch and enjoy, share, and above all remember to be kind to yourself.
Six Sessions
#SamehereScale
The #SameHere Scale App is a peer-to-peer personal tool that will allow your child or teen to gauge how they are truly feeling, and to observe how these feelings change over time.
Let's Start the Conversation
Mental Health Series
Mental Health Program
Mental Health Session #1
Theo Fluerry & Eric Kussin – A Path To Victory
In the first session, the founders of #SameHere, Eric Kussin and Theo Fleury, show us how “we are all the same”. They believe the statistic which states that ‘1 in 5 individuals suffer from mental health’ causes unnecessary division and separation between those that suffer and those that ‘don’t’. In reality, we all experience events in our lives that affect our emotions. We have all fluctuated through sadness or anxiety at times in our lives, thus everyone can benefit from learning these coping strategies.
Eric and Theo’s stories are truly examples of victory over life’s challenges, and in the coming sessions they will teach us the strategies they used to rise above those experiences. The techniques they used to overcome their own challenges led them to be doing exactly what they were called to do – helping people through the lens of genuine understanding and empathy.
Mental Health Session #2
Science Behind Tracking Our Feeling
Our second session with Dr. Andrew Pleener was a wonderful compliment to the first week of our program. In week one, Eric Kussin and Theo Fleury told their individual stories of unique struggles. By authentically showing their vulnerability, others felt open to sharing theirs as well. The statistic which states that ‘1 in 5 people suffer from mental illness’ continues to be broken down, as we can all honestly say that we experience lifes’ struggles at times. We truly are more the same than many of us have realized due to widely-used misconceptions. As we break down this narrative together, we create a safe space built around common feelings and a common language.
During this session, Dr. Andrew Pleener explained the science behind tracking our feelings. Using the #SameHere Scale helps us to identify how we are feeling and how that relates to what is going on in our lives on a deeper level. By doing this, over time we can help ourselves move into a healthier and more self-regulating emotional state. The Scale starts the conversation that connects us to each other in a way that we would not normally think of engaging through. What a simple and beautiful way to start the conversation with your child!
The colours and images used on the Scale, a gauging method within the app that shows how someone is feeling, makes it appealing for those as young as 4 or 5 years of age. It gives them the tools to carry the conversation from their baseline feelings, to the reasoning behind why they are feeling them. It is a way to bring parent and child closer on an emotional level, allowing you to connect in a way than enables the both of you to navigate these feelings of sadness, anger or isolation that can be experienced on a day-to-day basis. Children love the colours and images, making them more willing to engage.
Mental Health Session # 3
Gut Health and Mental Health Connection
Our third session with Dr. Michael Gruttadauria, an internationally renowned Chiropractic neurologist, was incredibly interesting and thoroughly informative. He presented some very thought provoking information. Why is it that when you suffer from migraines you see a Neurologist, but when you suffer from depression you seek out a physiatrist? We all know lack of sunshine, fresh air and exercise can impact our mental health, but we learned on a deeper level how inflammation in the body can impact our brains and neurological function. A major key component to the brain/body connection is hidden in the gut, and this is something that is so commonly and detrimentally overlooked.
He went on to explain how there is a difference between “being well” and “being un-sick” – something we could all delve more heavily into in order to truly learn how to not only survive, but to thrive as we are meant to. Throughout the session, he showed us so many different physical factors that can have an impact a childs mental health.
We are grateful for the time Dr. Gruttadauria took to speak with all of us about these incredible factors which support our health, so that we are able to better understand how to help our children grow healthy and strong from the inside out. There is a lot of information out there about how to be healthy. What is so vital to focus on are the root causes to the issues that we face in order to take control early on. This is something we can truthfully all benefit from while teaching our children to do the same.
Mental Health Session #4
Tapping and Havening As a Family Affair
Our fourth Mental Health session is deeply relevant and eye-opening. Erica Cuni brought us through some incredibly enlightening and helpful information to support our mental health. We learned how acute stress and chronic stress affect the body, the connection between mind and HRV (Heart Rate Variable), the reaction of fight or flight, and how to respond to those stresses rather than react. Western medicine is slowly recognizing what those in Eastern medicine practices have been successfully utilizing for years; that energy flows fluidly throughout the body, and by tapping into those meridian points we can release our stress and return to a more harmonized mind/body relationship.
Most importantly, we learned vital tools that adults and children can utilize in order to relieve their stress. ‘Havening’ is a simple yet effective strategy that is quite easy for children to use, as well as EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), another source of creating and maintaining a healthy flow of energy. Erica showed us how to use these techniques, how to make them fun for children, and how parents and their kids can practice them together. What a wonderful bonding opportunity this can be for parents and their children – having fun and getting healthier at the same time.
Mental Health Session #5
Dealing with Emotional and Mental distress without Medication
For our 5th Mental Health session, we were blessed with the presence of Dr. Aruna Tummala. As a Board Certified Integrative Psychiatrist, Dr. Tummala taught us how to look at the root cause of our emotional and mental distress, and provided us with tools to deal with those stresses. As a Psychiatrist, looking at the whole person as opposed to simply handing over a prescription, Dr. Tummala felt the pull to leave the conventional setting of a hospital and open her own practice, where she has been able to help thousands of patients start and move along their healing journey in a more substantial way.
As we learned from Dr. Gruttadauria in our third session, gut health plays a massive role in the body. It is where inflammation in the body and brain begin to accumulate, and in turn, affects our emotional wellbeing. We learned some vital strategies to bring us back to our center, to calm ourselves, and to tune into our body and mind and be more regularly self aware. It is from this place where we can then begin to heal.
As parents, we need to tap into our intuition and wisdom in order to guide and help our children thrive, and we need to trust in that innate guidance we all have. The importance of our children feeling that they are heard is far reaching, and they need to be reminded regularly of the joy they bring into our homes and into our daily lives. This truly is the root of where we need to return; the simple act of being with and appreciating our children – always ensuring that they know they are heard and loved, and have a safe space to be in both physically and emotionally. We want to thank Dr. Tummala for giving us a deep look into this vital perspective.
Mental Health Session #6
Subconscious Programing and the Love Connection
Dr. Samuel Lee, Board Certified Integral Psychiatrist, shared his expertise and knowledge around the connection between our breath, our mind and being centered within ourselves. Through this connective movement, we allow our mind to naturally follow our breath, and the breath will then follow our minds, creating a flow that lets us feel grounded, calm and whole – truly our natural state where we are able to come back to ourselves. He gave us a deep dive into how mastering our breath allows us to master our mind, and thus the empowering knowing of being able to master just about anything we face.
Along with this, we were led through a short 3 minute meditation for connecting with and healing our children. He explained his NEW START philosophy to mental health, which stands for; Nutrition, Exercise, Water – Sunlight, Trust, Rest, Air, and Tenacity. Additionally, Dr. Lee had some interesting information for those suffering from schizophrenia.
We want to thank Dr. Lee for ending this Mental Health series with such enlightening information for us, providing us with specific and doable tools to utilize in order to make positive changes for ourselves, our children and our families as a whole.
To learn more about the #SameHere Global Mental Health Movement, please visit https://samehereglobal.org
Same Here Scale App
A must have tool for every parent. Have you ever had this dialogue with your child?
The #SameHere Scale App is a peer-to-peer personal tool that will allow your child or teen to gauge how they are truly feeling, and to observe how these feelings change over time. They have the option to either privately track it for themselves, or to share them with others. Tracking can be done daily, weekly and monthly, and they are able to engage in private, secured chats related to those feelings with their family and friends.
The #SameHere Scale App will allow them to both request and share their feelings with anyone they choose, using the “Scale”. They can choose to record, comment and/or journal about these feelings, which prompts them to notice their own personal feeling trends and how they can change over time. The initiative states how all of us have feelings and emotions that fluctuate over time, and that this is what it means to be human. We completely agree, and believe that this is the type of language that will help young people feel safer expressing their own fluctuations as time goes on, so that they do not have a chance to be repressed and to build up.