In high-trauma Milwaukee, Journey House sees mental health therapy as missing link
John Schmid
In a city that barely copes with an epidemic of psychological trauma, Journey House on Milwaukee’s near south side figured out years ago that conventional job training programs miss the point.
The nonprofit community center — aware that trauma drives a downward spiral of mental illness, depression, sleep disorders, unemployment, addiction and aggression — features basic psychology and brain science in its standard workforce readiness program.
It’s called “Mental Toughness Boot Camp” and runs for 14 weeks, even though the first few weeks have almost nothing to do with trade skills. Trainees silently learn breathing exercises, which become part of a daily discipline. Then come lessons on stress-inducing hormones like cortisol that can fuel anxiety and undermine immune systems. Trainees also learn to regulate cortisol levels along with anger, anxiety and impulsivity.
There’s a full week of discussions on the difference between social chaos and social cohesion. Instructors explain Stanford University research about the "fixed mindset" (I can't, I won't) versus the "growth mindset" (I can, I will).
“Athletes pay millions for mental coaching,” said Michele Bria, chief executive at Journey House. Her curriculum is free.
But even professional-level mental resilience training isn't enough, not in cities like Milwaukee, where children in some districts routinely are exposed to neglect, abuse, violence, firearms, incarceration, drugs and police sirens. The trauma epidemic brings with it a full-blown mental health epidemic — and Journey House wants nothing short of its own full-time mental health division.
“I would like a team of therapists, if I could,” Bria said. The idea of trauma-responsive clinicians might be radical by the standards of conventional economic development. Their work is time intensive. They heal scars that are otherwise invisible, one individual at a time.
Even so, Bria adds: “This is the missing component.”
The ambitions at Journey House reflect a growing recognition within America’s most troubled cities and even its struggling rural regions about the root causes of chronic poverty and other social dysfunctions.
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And as the nation slowly develops trauma-focused economic and social strategies, meant to turn around dysfunctional populations, Milwaukee wants to be in the forefront.
On Wednesday, Journey House hosts the latest strategy meeting for a collaborative new effort to address Milwaukee's rampant and destructive trauma. Convening in the Journey House gymnasium will be clinics, nonprofits, foundations, university researchers and criminal justice officials. Like many of Milwaukee's social agencies, they work in their own silos without a cohesive strategy. Nor have they managed in their isolation to arrest the city's 50-year downward dynamic.
Given the sheer enormity of neurological trauma in Milwaukee, the scope and scale of the problems already overwhelm the existing efforts.
They call their initiative SWIM — Scaling Wellness in Milwaukee. SWIM is led by Marquette University President Mike Lovell and his wife, Amy, a mental health activist. Their mission statement envisions “a connected trauma-responsive community where all can thrive.”
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“We need all the help we can get," Bria said. “If we don’t address trauma, we are going to lose a whole generation of people."
Marquette is coaxing Journey House in one other way.
At the same time that he and his wife were launching SWIM, Lovell announced a President's Grand Challenge, also meant to reinvigorate the university's engagement within one of the nation's most impoverished cities.
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The President's Challenge, also aimed at problems within “some of Milwaukee’s most challenging neighborhoods," parallels SWIM but technically is a separate initiative. It's meant to collect ideas from the school’s faculty as well as nonprofits and social agencies. The idea is for the university to create collaborations with community groups, which can compete for funding for test projects.
Journey House submitted its idea to add mental health workers as a proposal to the President's Challenge. “Our community doesn’t have the resources to pay for it," Bria said.
Low income, high immigration
Journey House, which turns 50 next year, operates a wide range of services apart from job training, everything from adult ed to athletics. Thousands come through its doors every year. Journey House is located in the Clarke Square neighborhood, which has low levels of income and high rates of immigration. Like many of Milwaukee's neighborhoods, Clarke Square once had a legion of last-century manufacturers who have closed or moved.
The envisioned mental health clinicians at Journey House would avail themselves to anyone, not just job trainees. That's why Journey House needs a full team of therapists, Bria said. For the purpose of its Marquette proposal, however, Bria will settle for one therapist as a beginning.
The Lovells' initiatives are in the early stages. Both were launched earlier this year. And in the case of Journey House, both work in concert. The impetus to add a therapist came to Bria at a SWIM meeting in January, when she sat next to a neuroscientist and it dawned on her: "You are the missing component," she thought to herself.
The notion that neuroscience is central to the nation's economic and social debate is new, driven by data collected in the last 10 years. "A Time to Heal," a series of articles last year by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, documented how widespread trauma worsens the ongoing social crisis in a city that for decades has defined the national extremes of poverty, unemployment, incarceration, infant mortality and broken homes.
Too often, trauma in parents repeats itself as children grow up with traumatic experiences, creating a generational cycle.
With or without a Marquette grant, Bria said she wants to find a way to add therapists. And when she does, they will be bilingual.
Classic settlement house
Clarke Square has been a port of entry for successive new waves of immigrants. The early European settlers — with disparate languages, cultures and ethnicities — had children and grandchildren who evolved into the suburban middle class. These days, two thirds of Clarke Square is Hispanic and the rest are African-American or newcomers from Asia, Somalia or Ghana. It's not uncommon to hear Hmong and Burmese.
Studies concur that Hispanics are just as prone to post-traumatic stress disorders as any other ethnicity; what's more, immigrants and refugees are high risk for PTSD. Some who sign up for Journey House job training are homeless.
The nonprofit Journey House, a classic settlement house, operates in a tradition that dates to 1889 when Jane Addams opened Hull House, meant to assimilate Chicago’s recently arrived European immigrants. Journey House provides services meant to break social isolation: education, athletics, free Thanksgiving dinner. It offers English language classes and helps navigate and pay for citizenship applications.
"We're a melting pot at Journey House," Bria said.
Bria's work is being watched around the city. With Journey House as its main partner, the Zilber Family Foundation chose Clarke Square 10 years ago as one of the first neighborhoods to switch to a "collective impact" model to stabilize hard-hit communities.
Rather than use programs that are isolated, Journey House coordinates multiple services in the hope of reaching a critical mass, turning enough individual lives around that ultimately a whole neighborhood stabilizes, and hopefully rebounds. That makes Journey House the 180-degree opposite of a single-service agency run by bureaucrats downtown.
Without therapists for now, Journey House programs still are meant to be therapeutic. On three occasions, the Journey House job training attracted people with such extreme psychological trauma that they couldn't speak — they had the physical capacity but their anxiety disorders kept them mute.
They stuck with the self-help empowerment programs. “They started talking and we’ve been able to place them in employment," Bria said.
If everyone resolved their unhealed trauma, with calm breath and calm mind, Bria said, “then the neighborhood would be on steroids.”