Jamie Weil: Advocate For Youth Mental Health

As a society, we have to focus on youth mental health for our own future.

“I need help, I have a mental illness‘. That was the shriek from someone on Facebook, I have known for nearly three decades. Her husband had left her along with the kids.  For so many years everything from the outside looked great. As a society, we focus so much on financial and physical health that we forget about mental and spiritual health. I talk to Jamie Weil about these issues and in the first interview we talk about her mission, vision, youth mental health, balance, and creating sacred spaces in our lives.

Jamie Weil lives in Cottonwood, California. She writes everywhere. She has identified as a writer since third grade when her teacher sent her poem “Red” to the Record Searchlight and they published it. She has written for the children’s educational market, the adult non-fiction market, and has worked as a journalist, second-grade teacher, and mom. Her YA novel, First Break, was released on World Mental Health Day, 10/10/18. Her second YA novel “Intuition” was published almost exactly a year later on 10/2/19. She is currently in post-production on the pilot episode of “A Crazy Thought,” a groundbreaking docuseries on youth mental health and suicide which she is creating with a team of amazing award-winning female filmmakers.

Jamie, I consider it an honor to have you on my blog. I want to know a little about you and your mission?

It’s an honor to be invited to your space, and especially via Twitter! Twitter has mystified me for so long as I’m standing in front of a wall saying random things in an attempted witty way and a bunch of other people who are doing the same. When I found the #writingcommunity, I felt a new level of connection, finally made a few friends, and I am happy to call you one of those. I love people, their stories, and feel connected to one humanity. Sure, sometimes that one humanity can feel like we’re in the room with that one uncle who drinks too much at Thanksgiving and spurts out off-color remarks, but the contrast makes each of us clearer about our own shadows. It’s a great teacher! I hold a vision for a world where we can deeply embrace each other’s unique differences and in so doing, widen our own understandings of ourselves and others.

I love your focus on empowering women. This touches my heart as it is a space to which I also feel such a strong pull. I understand the vital role allies as you play in what can be a very binary and lopsided world. Empowered women empower women and yet we are not evolutionarily at a place where enough women feel empowered for so many valid reasons. We need those evolved men like you who not only get it but do something about it. Giving women a voice is one very important space as we see so clearly in the Jeffrey Epstein documentary.

Both writing on paper and in film are key places for women to become empowered which is what draws me there. I can say things on paper or in visual media as a filmmaker that I can’t say as easily in other spaces as I was one of those young girls raised to keep quiet and mind my manners. At a very young age, I discovered that as long as I wrote and got good grades, I could say what I wanted. It was a freeing space for me. Stories became a way to find a voice.

When I answered a calling to tell multicultural stories about youth mental health, I attempted to assemble a crew of female film creators, no easy task for a variety of reasons. I felt it was important that women’s voices be heard in the capturing of the story because 95% of the cases I came across over the past 2 decades of children suffering from mental illness symptoms had women at the helm trying to figure out the solutions and suffering along with the children. When I taught elementary school in Los Angeles, 95% of the teacher K-8 were women and a few men teaching middle school. With the role of the Divine Feminine rising in this world, and an understanding for a need for that, it is visionary men like you that will escort that shift in and it will be a blessing for everybody. Along the way, it is very important to recognize it was evolved men who helped me make that happen.

Thank you for finding me and for inviting me to talk about my favorite subjects. I am so grateful.

Talk to me about how to live a happy life, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually?

I have so many ideas about this! I consciously and consistently rank my own four bodies (mental, physical, spiritual, emotional) on a scale from 1-10. As a licensed spiritual practitioner (on sabbatical because I really suck at anything that looks or feels religious while simultaneously loving pieces of all religions) I dove into thoughts in practitioner training about the best ways to serve the Divine who goes by many names. I’m a 20 year-long daily meditator and sit with the idea of how to bring the sunny to the world on a daily. How can I serve today? is a daily mantra. I start with myself, by ranking those four bodies and remaining conscious about what I need to work on in myself to bring others more joy. That’s really my endgame and it’s a selfish goal because giving people joy gives me joy and I like to live in the sunny. When we have a habit of pointing to external circumstances for the reasons we aren’t fulfilled, we miss the magic of the journey and the world around us. Nobody wins. Recently, Yale put their Principles of Well Being by Dr. Laurie Santos class online and I took it. There is so much science behind this idea that each day we find ourselves connecting to ourselves and other inconsistent practices.

And yet, there is value in every state we find ourselves. It’s not realistic to think every day will be unicorns and butterflies. People we love die. Pets die. We get sick. The world shuts down. Horrible abuse happens. Contrast is all around us and some days are just unbearably hard. Remembering everything changes and reaching out for help from others is key.

Happy, then, begins at home, inside each of us, and we start with those four bodies. Each is a pillar that holds us up, and if one is off, we struggle. The weakest one for me is the physical and so I am consistently setting goals in that area while being very careful not to shame myself along the way. I think that’s key, the no shaming part. We need to give ourselves grace. We are in this Earth School to learn to walk and when we’re done, well, we’re done for this time. Not being done is part of the thing. The journey is the best part and we need to be our best cheerleader. I love the late Louise Hay’s mirror work for this where you look in the mirror and, with heartfelt feeling, say “I love you. I really, really love you.”

It’s all about balance. On my website in the right corner is a picture of a rock I have had for decades that says “balance.” My oldest son, now 32, came home from high school when he was 14, ran out back, and stuck that rock between his feet. He took a picture to remind himself of the importance of balance in his life and I see that value present in both my sons’ lives to this day. This was especially poignant as he was in the middle of a break with bipolar disorder, seeking a space of energetic (and chemical) balance where he felt he could stay alive. The balance was literally a matter of life and death. A balance between work and play. A balance between self and other. A balance in your four bodies. A balance between giving and receiving. Balance.

I appreciate that you are an advocate for youth mental health. Please talk to me about it?

Another favorite subject of mine is youth mental health!

When my oldest son was in 4^th grade, he began to show symptoms that confused me. I could tell he was unhappy, but it was beyond that. Simultaneously, I was teaching second grade in Southern California. Teaching was a second career and I had several students that were struggling with symptoms I had never seen or learned about in my Master’s program or anywhere else. This began a long journey of educating myself on what was happening and how I could help. We eventually received a diagnosis of bipolar illness, but it was very long, unnecessarily painful, and massively upsetting for everyone. I vowed I would do what I could to make the journey easier on other parents and kids, many of whom were coming to me in secret too afraid (ashamed) to tell anyone what was happening. I saw a very similar pattern that abused women feel when they don’t feel they can get help.

I used my writing to reach out. First, I began blogging in the early 2000s. Simultaneously, I started a young adult novel called First Break which was finally published by All Things That Matter Press on World Mental Health Day in 2018. That was an amazing day for me because my son and his wife, both university professors now, were able to do some great research and help me put resources in place that would speak multiculturally to transitional youth 14-26 and their parents and teachers. Having that first-person POV novel of a 17-year-old stepping onto a college campus and having the first break was a way to understand through story an experience that confused us and caused years of pain. My hope is that novel will be used in middle school classrooms to educate the next generation and prevent the many years of pain that do not have to happen.

In 2017, after two decades of print articles, books, and community service, I felt a calling to use visual media to make a change. I was frustrated by all the distraught parents and children I saw needlessly suffering, many in silence. They were missing their entire childhoods. I set out to make a documentary, but there was only one problem: I wasn’t a filmmaker and had never been to film school. Reinventing myself was something I’d done before, though, so I set out to answer this calling. To date, we have a pilot, a plan, two shorts, a ton of great footage in the can, and no money to finish that docuseries. It turns out it takes much more money to create a visual media production than it does to write a book. Though we did win a crowdfunding effort (it was awful, by the way!) to fund the pilot, I discovered fundraising is just not my jam.

I love the title of your book Chasing Sacred Spaces. I am learning to become intentional in creating space. Walk me through your book and what is it all about?

Thank you so much for that because that is a title that came to me in a dream, but someone had questioned it which made me question it. I’ve been waiting for the Universe to weigh in and you just did that for me!

This is such an interesting project for me, indeed a sacred space itself, and unlike any project, I’ve ever done. First, I wrote this as a download from the Divine. I did what I do when I blog. I meditate and pray, “Use me to tell the stories that the readers who find their way to me need to read to make their lives better and happier.” When I did this in my blogging world, I would consistently have people tell me what I said was exactly what they needed so I felt like it was working. That went on for several decades. However, with First Break and later Intuition, both YA novels, I wrote more from my head as I had learned to do at UCLA in coursework. With Chasing Sacred Spaces, I sat down and wrote this in a weekend. It’s my first book in the mind/body/spirit genre and it’s the first book I’m going to self-publish. That will come out in October 2020.

The part of what you say, being intentional about creating sacred space, is so present in this book, but as one of my life threads is clearly being in the room with mental illness and suicide, this finds its way in a bit. (I was surprised because I honestly was attempting to take a break from this theme.) What became clear is that we each want peace and happiness, and we look for that in so many places the world has told us to look. Then the world shuts down and now what? We’re back to spot where we started above, looking inside ourselves, in our own worlds, and really honestly seeing ourselves. In the spiritual circles I find myself, I feel that lots of spiritual bypassing goes on in an effort to avoid the pain, but in dodging that we make it worse. The book is an assortment of stories that flowed through as a response to the “what will really help my readers in their own lives” prompt. I’m currently in the rewriting process which is always harder than the initial writing.