‘Head Space’: Mental health should be snackable, too

 Independent columnist Brandon W. Hahn. /Brandon W. Hahn photo

By columnist Brandon W. Hahn

I’ve been writing about mental health for a long time.

Long enough to remember when talking openly about it could make a room suddenly very interested in its shoes.

Thankfully, things have changed. Not completely. But enough.

These days, I find myself in an interesting place professionally. I’m a writer, a mature film-school student, a podcaster, a mental health advocate and once again, a newspaper columnist.

Apparently, I don’t enjoy spare time.

But all of these things have started to connect.

A couple of years ago, I created Snackable Mental Health with a pretty simple idea: Mental health conversations don’t always have to be turkey dinners to be meaningful.

Sometimes we need the clinical conversation. Sometimes we need the serious conversation. And sometimes, we just need two people talking honestly about what it’s like to be human.

That’s really what “Snackable Mental Health” has become.

Through the podcast, I’ve had conversations with advocates, writers, actors, comedians and people with lived experience. We talk about mental health, but we also talk about work, creativity, relationships, recovery, bad days and occasionally ridiculous things.

Because people are more than their diagnosis.

I know that personally.

I’ve lived with serious mental illness for more than 30 years. But I’ve also written books, performed comedy, hosted radio, gone back to school in my 50s, made mistakes, fallen in love, lost people, started over and somehow accumulated an unreasonable number of stories along the way.

Mental illness is part of my story – it isn’t the whole story.

That’s something I want to explore in this column.

I don’t want this space to become 500 words of advice from someone pretending to have everything figured out. I don’t.

What I do have is experience. And curiosity.

I want to talk about mental health the way we actually experience it: At kitchen tables, in classrooms, at work, in relationships and during those strange 3 a.m. negotiations with our own brains.

Some weeks will be serious. Some will be hopeful. Some might even be funny. Probably a lot will be funny.

That’s life.

And yes, if you'd like more of these conversations, you can find Snackable Mental Health on YouTube. Consider that my tiny commercial. We now return to our regularly-scheduled column.

Mostly, though, I’m simply happy to be here.

Community newspapers gave me a place to talk about mental health years ago when these conversations weren’t nearly as common as they are today.

Now I get another 500 words.

Let’s see what we can do with them.

Brandon W. Hahn is a podcaster, screenwriter and mental health advocate. He hosts Snackable Mental Health on YouTube and writes about the strange business of being human.