Revealing Voices Tony Roberts and co-hosts - Authors, Mental Health Advocates, and Ministry Developers

On this episode of Revealing Voices, we feature contributors to Hope for Troubled Minds.Born in Kentucky, Janet Coburn now lives in Ohio with her husband of over 40 years, Dan Reily. She also lives with bipolar 2 disorder. Janet loves reading and country music. Dan loves gardening and archaeology. Together they love travel, science fiction, and cats (they have two at the moment, Toby and Dushenka). A graduate of Cornell University and the University of Dayton, Janet writes two blogs, bipolarme.blog and butidigress.blog, which she posts in every Sunday. She often contributes articles on mental health to The Mighty website. Janet has also written two books on bipolar disorder, Bipolar Me and Bipolar Us, which are based on her decades of experience with the disorder, and frequently answers questions about mental health on Quora.Jay Tapscott is a poet, author, and also a Peer Specialist dealing with schizoaffective disorder and working in an inpatient psychiatric unit where he was once a patient in Philadelphia. There, he models wellness as he visibly coexists with his psychiatric condition in that setting seeking to offer hope and encouragement by doing so.Kevin “Earleybird” Earley is a mental health advocate and hip hop producer. His father Pete Earley is a Pulitzer Prize nominated investigative journalist. Kevin is also co-producer and sound editor of Revealing Voices. 

In this episode, Tony is back in Columbus and takes the opportunity to team up with Eric in Studio E to interview Vachel Hudson, a mental health leader in the community. Vachel Hudson is the Project Manager for the Mental Health Matters initiative in Bartholomew County, Indiana. He works for Columbus Regional Health, leading the community-wide initiative to improve the mental health system for the wellbeing of all individuals of Bartholomew County. He works with various stakeholders from different sectors to design, plan, and implement projects that enhance outreach, engagement, and mobilization. He ensures the quality, compliance, and data analysis of the Mental Health Matters ambassador program. Vachel holds an MBA in Operations and Management from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota and a BA in Mass Communications and Marketing from Kentucky State University. Vachel was born in Columbus and has lived in Louisville and Minneapolis for significant portions of his life before moving back to Columbus in 2023 to help launch Mental Health Matters.

I recently went on a search for my earliest recorded haiku from what I shall call the “Opening Era”.  That era began with the death of my last grandparent, Amos Harlan Rippy. After his funeral on the hillside cemetery in Tell City, Indiana in 2013, I felt a commitment with an origin outside of myself to dive into my feelings and express them poetically.  

Rippy and Rip were the common nicknames for my grandfather, who was called “Pop” by my siblings and me. The last name of Rippy is Irish in origin. We have records dating back to the late 1700s when the Rippy family immigrated from Ireland to Orange County, North Carolina. 

Upon his death, having had 2 daughters, his surname was now locked in time as my middle name, Eric Rippy Riddle, and further honored as my son’s middle name.

While it is impossible to say the nature of the poetic calling upon my life, I do think the passing of his generation summoned in me a need to bring definition into my own emerging adulthood. Perhaps the subtle influence of the Irish ancestry beckoned an articulation of the poetic impulse. I began to call the art flowing out of me, “Openings.”

I had dabbled in poetry for years, always seeking to capture the emotions of important moments or diving into the depths of predicaments that I found myself bound. First, in the form of rhyming couplets and then in free flowing gifts to my first wife, inspired by the style of Beat generation author, Jack Kerouac.  

It never really occurred to me that I was in the minority of people who choose to use language in this way.  As one compelled to write on occasions of heightened awareness, desire, or emotional resonance, it seemed only natural that much of humanity would be ushered into the same necessity of poetic expression. That is not the case.

The longer form poetry that I was accustomed to writing became more difficult to conjure as I grew older. With adult responsibilities, even when I did feel the inspiration, I rarely had the time to capture the moment. I needed to lower my expectations to reignite my creative output. I chose haiku.

I began writing a daily haiku with a commitment to maintain the practice for a year. I started a Google Drive document that I could easily type on my phone. My formal haiku writing journey began on September 9, 2016.

However, in my recent research mission into writing “openings” following the death of my grandfather, I found scattered haiku that started in May 2014. 

The occasion of the first haiku was a trip that I took with my then 7-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter to Red River Gorge in Kentucky. It was our first big trip together, just the 3 of us. I had started camping with friends in this part of Kentucky a few years prior and instantly found it to be one of my “happy places”.  

The Red River on the day of our kayak trip was shallow. On many occasions, my kayak would bottom out. Under the much lighter weight of the kids, they even had to get out at times and drag their kayaks on the meandering stream. It wasn’t until we got to the jumping rock that we hit deep water.  

That day, at that rock, became one of those moments that I knew would last forever in my memory. It holds the joy of a hot day in the growing late spring where droves of rock jumpers and observers on the beaches huddled around a deep watering hole. Jumpers waited as kayakers like the kids and me passed through. We decided to stay. My daughter found a nice spot on the beach in view of the jumping rock. 

My son wanted to jump.  He and I climbed to the top, feeling the communal anxiety of the 40 ft drop. Many grown adults waited as others stepped to the edge, stalled with apprehension. After watching many take the leap, my son and I made our way to the spot. We joined hands, but then he wanted me to go first. I had to wrestle my own fears to take the leap, trusting he would come after me.  

And then there I was, submerged,

Co-Director and editor Erik Ewers has worked with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns for more than 30 years, including nearly all of his single and multi-episodic films. He currently serves as co-director and editor of Ewers Brothers Productions, a preferred collaborative company in the co-creation of Ken’s films.  He and his brother Chris co-directed Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness, exploring the mental health crisis in our nation’s youth and young adults, which aired on PBS June 27th and 28th to millions.  In this podcast, Erik opens up about his mental health struggles and the role tattoos played in his recovery, with interviewer Kevin, who was a subject of Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness, and fellow interviewer Tony Roberts, author of Hope For Troubled Minds.

I have a “life verse.”  Before adopting this so-called life verse, I always thought of people who said they had one as being a little woo-woo.  I didn’t understand how to claim something from the Bible as my own.  I’m sure I was a little cynical about life verses before finding mine, because I assumed that people would find something they liked without a deep personal story and just roll with it. I was dismissive of the randomness of picking a verse.  I want to apologize to anyone that I didn’t pay attention to because of that attitude.   A life verse can be consequential and anyone who claims one may have a story that is worth considering. Really, anything that is a lifelong commitment is worthy of our attention because of the great care it takes to select and cultivate.  I tend to not want to make life defining pronouncements. This is probably because they may be more of a fleeting fancy than something with the substance of a true resolution. As I write this, it is Lent in the Christian calendar. I normally honor the season by stopping or starting a habit as a way of focusing on the coming of Easter. This year, I decided to start reading the four Biblical gospels and stop eating food after dinner. Little more spiritual nourishment and a  little less dessert nourishment. I picked them as short-term commitments.  It seems logical that a long term commitment like a life verse would require even more consideration than what to do for Lent. However, what I’m about to tell you isn’t so much about me picking a verse, it's a story of a verse picking me.As I was going through graduate school, I also worked full time at our local hospital.  To manage my stress level, I gravitated towards a hybrid role that was a mix of a floor secretary (processing medical orders from doctors and nurses), a Care Partner (having direct patient care responsibilities in partnership with the nurses), and, for difficult patients, a Sitter (literally sitting with them and carefully watching so they wouldn’t fall, pull out their IVs, or commit self-harm). I sat with lots of people who were in critical condition. While I never saw someone pass away, there were a number of patients who I spent the last days or hours with - being on high alert monitoring the patients’ vital signs and taking care of the family’s needs.On my last day at the hospital - a day that I had no idea would actually be my last - I brought my Bible. It wasn’t ever my expectation to read to the patient, but some days when I was responsible for sitting, I needed a good long read. I would only read the Bible to the patient if they directly asked me to share with them. It happened to be on this day, the patient was curious about what I was reading.  So I read to them this passage:“Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.”My Bible does have lots of notes scribbled on the margins of the pages. However, it rarely lists the time and place when a verse carried indelible personal significance. I did make a note of this verse that day. March 2010. Soon after reading to the patient, I was asked to go to HR. I had been in two patient fall cases in recent weeks when I misjudged when I should give them privacy while they were using the bathroom. It was time for me to resign. Four years later, after a long bout of depression, I found myself on the edge of another resignation. I didn’t know when it was going to happen, but it definitely felt like there was a strong possibility that I would need to step down. Many of my coworkers knew t

Jen and Eric Riddle pay tribute to one another by reading their letters from Hope for Troubled Minds.Hope for Troubled Minds is a trove of tributes, collected to celebrate the lives, legacy, and strength of those who lead brave lives in the face of brain disorders and mental illness. These are testimonies and shout-outs to the ones we love who have supported us, or we have supported, through some of the most testing lifelong trials that come with having these kinds of health conditions.Throughout this anthology, you will hear from parents, children, spouses, siblings, and friends who have been inspired to share their hope for a fulfilling life, in spite of their ailments. Each tribute has been a carefully prepared gift waiting to be held in your hands to send a message of resilience in the midst of suffering, and hope in the midst of hardship. Most of all, these stories thematically resound the truth that we are here for one another, and never alone.All net proceeds from the sale of this book will be evenly distributed to three vital mental health causes: the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), and Delight in Disorder Ministries (DiDMin).For more information and to find the order link, go to https://delightindisorder.org/hftm-order/