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‘We’re really trying to help men': Men’s Resource Center of West Michigan focuses on men's mental health

The Men’s Resource Center of West Michigan is helping people improve their mental health.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — June is National Men’s Health Month. For a lot of men, their physical health is top priority, but it’s important to remember that mental health is equally important. And just like there are plenty of places to work on your physical health, there are a variety of places with trained professionals that focus on mental health. The Men’s Resource Center of West Michigan is one of those places.

“We have a variety of therapists at the Fountain Hill Center doing different work with men, women and children,” Randy Flood said. “But the Men's Resource Center is on the second floor, and we specialize in working with men. We provide individual and group counseling consultation and coaching services, in person in a beautiful Heritage Hill home.”

Flood is the director and cofounder of The Men’s Resource Center. For more than 20 years, he and his team have been working to change the stigma surrounding men who need counseling.

“To ask for help makes some men feel weak, like they failed,” Flood said. “And I think to reframe that, asking for help for your life, similar to how we ask for help improving our golf swing, or improving our financial portfolio, even to call your friends over to help you with your house. There are a lot of rituals that men engage in, where asking for help is not an assault on their masculinity. And so, the hope is, as we move into the 21st century at the Men's Resource Center, is to show men that asking for help is smart.”

“No one should go without support or without help, just because of finances or because they think people will think less of me,” Helen Ceballo-Hernandez said. “On the contrary, we have great respect for people who say ‘look, I can't do life alone.’ And in reality, we weren't created as an island. We were created to be social beings.”

Ceballo-Hernandez is one of more than a dozen licensed therapists with The Fountain Hill Center, which houses The Men’s Resource Center, and she said there are a wide range of clients who come through the doors.

“They’re presenting for anxiety or depression, so most of us work with that, but we also work with within our specialties,” she said. “Some of us work more with women. Others work more with men, not because of the genders, but rather because of the presenting issues that the genders specifically have. For example, I work with people who have substance abuse addictions. That involves alcohol, that involves drugs of all types, any type of substance abuse addiction. I also work with men who have addictions to pornography.”

Seeking therapy and/or counseling requires courage and vulnerability. But for most people, Flood said, it leads to healing.

“These men will tell you that this saved their marriage, saved their life,” he said. “Just being able to take that step, walk up those stairs to the second floor, where we are in the Heritage Hill home, and begin sitting down, opening up, being honest, and talking about their lives. And what they find out is that there's great relief in kind of taking the mask off, taking the armor off, pulling back that curtain and saying ‘this is what's really going on.’ And they sit with a therapist who's trained to work with men, and they find that they look forward to coming to counseling.”

“They're on a search, and so that becomes kind of a spiritual quest,” MRC therapist Al Heystek said. “We're not a religious institution, but we talk with men about developing a spiritual practice. How can they move through the problems and conflicts of their life? Not so much individually, solo, isolated. That's how men are socialized to kind of deal with things, kind of ‘buck up, don't really show how you feel, take care of it, don't show that you're hurting.’ So men need community. Men need other men to talk to.”

Studies show that nearly all of the active shooters in this country are men. The question remains: Can these acts of violence be prevented?

“Men and women have mental health issues at about the same rate — anxiety issues, depression issues, psychiatric diagnoses. But it's the men who are doing the shooting. It’s the men who seem to expel their rage. And that's not what most men do. What we see is, it shows up in other ways, the challenges of their emotional world and their difficulties that maybe they haven't been able to talk through or get it out," said Heystek. "It can show up in terms of developing a mood-altering pattern, a drinking pattern, a smoking pot problem, a pattern with an addiction of some sort, an addiction to internet pornography to deal with anxiety. So that's a lot of how their angst shows up. But some men will resort to more serious forms of violence. It's a very small percentage of men who do these horrific acts. Imagine if people who are really struggling and thinking about being violent had an opportunity to just talk about how they feel.”

“I think we oftentimes can assume that men will behave badly like it's in their nature, but we don't believe that at The Men's Resource Center,” Flood said. “We believe that it's mostly socialized in their training that causes them to act out and externalize their pain and loneliness onto other people. And so there are ways in which that happens with domestic violence, sexual acting out or sexual harassment. We work to help men work on the inner pain and the inner turmoil that's going on inside them, so it doesn't flow out and hurt other people.”

Specialized therapy and counseling costs money, but the sessions are not as much as you might think.

“Here at Fountain Hill Center, we really strongly believe that no one should be turned away,” said Ceballo-Hernandez. “So each therapist has their own sliding scale respectively, so it accommodates to the income of that individual.”

“We're really trying to help men to be healthy, to develop connections with other men, and friendships, and healthy relationships with partners, so we can have a safer world,” Heystek said.

In addition to everything else, The Men’s Resource Center is also working to launch a boy’s program where they speak with middle school students about healthy masculinity.

If you or someone you know is dealing with mental health issues or thoughts of suicide, call 1-800-273-8255 or click here.

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