ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Stacy Perin, a licensed clinical administrator and social worker who helps children and families navigate complex mental health diagnoses.
Perin is director of Adolescent and Family Services at the Mental Health Association of Central Florida. Her academic accolades are reflections of her expertise, a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Florida, a bachelor’s and master’s in social work from the University of Central Florida and a certification in mediation from the Roger Williams School of Law.
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She told Murray that she had been hired by MHACF to put her years of experience working with children — in large part, families that had experienced generational trauma, Perin said — into building the Youth and Family Services program, a way to provide one-on-one counseling, medication management and more for uninsured youth and their families. It launched Jan. 8.
“I created a model to empower children, to educate them about their individual mental health, the symptoms they had, how it impacts their behaviors, and then to start empowering them by building into their lives strategies that they could use to cope, and that could then help them make different choices and lead them to greater success in their lives,” Perin said.
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Perin advises that maintaining your mental health is just as important as getting a checkup and having your doctor listen to your heartbeat, in order to keep it and therefore other areas of your life functioning optimally. Health is wealth, and mental health is health, savvy?
She also understands that some of us may prefer not to delve and try to treat our traumas, but to them she reassuringly says, knowledge is power.
“When you know what’s going on with you, there’s always hope,” Perin said. “Years and years ago, if a family member had someone that struggled with mental health, that was a person that was kind of cast out, that was an outsider, that was the person that nobody talked about at family gatherings, they were separated from the community. We want to make sure that we create that knowledge that there is so much hope and there is so much help for mental health, and there’s no reason for individuals that are struggling with a mental health diagnosis to be separated from their community.”
Hear the full interview in Season 4, Episode 4 of “Black Men Sundays.”
Black Men Sundays talks about building generational wealth. Check out every episode in the media player below.