ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray sits down once again with Stacy Perin, a licensed clinical administrator and social worker who helps children and families navigate complex mental health diagnoses.
It’s extra special that we meet Perin again, too, as Murray announces an official partnership between “Black Men Sundays” and the Mental Health Association of Central Florida — where Perin serves as director of Adolescent and Family Services — to destigmatize conversations about mental health.
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Murray asks Perin about emotional intelligence and resilience, seeking straightforward ways for Black people to overcome apprehension in seeking help for mental health issues. It’s difficult to find success and build wealth without a clear head, after all.
“Emotional intelligence are the skills you have (in order) to be aware of your emotions, to be aware of other people’s emotions and to be able to navigate those emotions to manage yourself,” Perin said. “Resilience refers more to overcoming adversity, right? Being able to deal with it and overcome it and not have it define you. So that’s, you know, that’s why emotional intelligence is so important because those are your ability to navigate adversity, to be aware of things like how you react to adverse situations, to know what things are triggers for you, how would you normally react so if maybe your reaction isn’t so great, having that self awareness to know, ‘This is something I need to get some skills to do a little bit better here.’”
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No matter what you may be reaching out for, Perin thinks that every therapeutic program should be able to help people build their emotional intelligence, otherwise they wouldn’t be making progress.
In terms of health being wealth — and of mental health being health — the Youth and Family Services program that Perin launched last month is cost-effective in that it serves to provide free counseling. Better yet, it’s not the only free mental counseling service out there.
“We’re all located at the Outlook Clinic and they have free counseling and case management and med management for adults as well,” Perin said. “We have a guardian advocate program and we have a reflections program, which is peer counseling from people that have lived experience either in recovery or with various mental health issues, so you can get peer counseling through that program, and they have support groups, they have several different support groups now throughout the week. The other big thing is that there’s the Connections department, and Connections is just a huge database of probably over 3,000 mental health providers in Central Florida, so anyone can call Connections and they can be as specific as ‘OK, I live in Lake Mary, I need a trauma-informed male therapist who’s no more than five miles from my house,’ and Connections will be able to give that person names of providers that fit that criteria.”
Hear the full interview in Season 4, Episode 8 of “Black Men Sundays.”
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