Saline County is looking for ways to help its residents with mental health and has found something as simple as sending a random text message every day to be a tool in that effort.
The county announced this week that it will partner with Cope Notes, an organization that uses technology to provide daily mental health support with a text message, to provide county residents with subscriptions to the service.
Survivor of suicide and abuse, Johnny Crowder, founder and CEO of Cope Notes, is open about his mental health struggles.
After undergoing treatment for her mental health beginning in high school, she began taking psychology classes and learning about how the brain works.
“I was like, ‘wait a second, are you telling me you can change your brain?'” Crowder said.
Just like doing positive things for your heart or other muscles, doing positive things for your brain can help your thoughts.
“I ended up going to psychology school at (the University of Central Florida) and really got a little obsessed with the idea that you can train your brain to think in new patterns,” Crowder said.
He said it was such an interesting thing to him that he couldn’t understand why other people didn’t talk about it.
Around that time, Crowder also began working in peer support and public advocacy, understanding how reaching out to others dealing with some of the same struggles can help.
Looking at both neuroscience and peer support, Crowder thought there had to be a way to use them in combination as a way to help people.
How does a text message help with mental health?
A TED Talk with Crowder explains the science in more detail about how something as simple as a text message can change your brain, but he also has a simpler way of explaining it.
“Basically, your brain doesn’t really care if a thought is positive or negative, healthy or unhealthy,” he said. “It is an organ; It’s just being objective. The only thing that matters to him is conserving calories.”
He said the thoughts that require the least amount of effort to think are those that are familiar, with the brain taking the path of least resistance to conserve those calories.
Crowder said there’s a concept called automatic negative thinking, which is where the negative things a person perceives about themselves are not something a person has to process to think about.
“Everybody has them, whether you’re living with a diagnosis or not,” he said. “It is estimated that about 80% of our daily thoughts are negative in nature, they are critical (of ourselves).”
What Cope Notes does is help interrupt the constant cycle of these negative thoughts.
“When they’re not interrupted, (negative thoughts) become easier to think about,” Crowder said.
The process of Cope Notes, he said, is to send small, easy-to-read messages to people as interruptions.
“They’re written by peers and contain positive psychology content, journaling prompts, exercises, or (other things) that we send out … to interrupt negative thought patterns with a catalyst for positive thinking,” he said.
Over time, this trains the brain to “challenge” negative thought patterns according to Crowder.
“All we’re doing is teaching the brain that negativity is not the new normal,” he said. “The new normal is resilience and coping skills.”
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Cope Notes one tool among many for mental health
Crowder acknowledges that Cope Notes is not the only thing that can be used to help people’s mental health.
“I’m a big fan of getting legitimate treatment or seeking professional help,” he said. “I wasn’t for long though. I wasn’t ready for that.”
Factors like finances, time, and even trust issues with established treatment systems made Crowder’s journey toward those kinds of tools last longer. Cope Notes is also not designed to replace these tools.
“I imagine Cope Notes as the first or next best thing,” he said. “Maybe you’re not ready for (treatment like therapy or medication), but maybe you’re ready for (simple texting).”
His hope is that someone who is a subscriber to Cope Notes might, after a while, realize that they might be ready for something like meeting with a therapist.
In the county’s announcement that the program is available to residents, County Manager Phillip Smith-Hanes echoed the idea that something like Cope Notes is just one of many things people can use to address your mental health.
“We understand that there is no single answer to mental health problems,” Smith-Hanes said. “This is just a tool to help reach the part of our community that prefers to receive their mental health support through a digital, proactive and anonymous platform.”
The program in Saline County is funded through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and was approved by the Saline County Commission last month.
Crowder said he’s glad county and other local governments are using resources like ARPA and funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to start thinking about mental health.
He said he hopes municipalities see the benefit of this now and this will help them realize the need for this type of care for residents.
“I think a few years of (this type of funding) will make municipalities understand that it’s an item in their budget,” Crowder said. “Every year as (they) meet (they) will talk about what can be done for the mental and emotional health of residents.”
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Join Cope Notes with a subscription paid for by the county
The service is now open to Saline County residents, who can visit the CopeNote website and enter the redemption code SALINE for a subscription.
Subscribers will receive one or two text messages a day on a random schedule that include things like psychological facts, exercises, journaling prompts, and other positives.
The FAQ on the Cope Notes website says that every message sent is reviewed, edited and approved by a panel of mental health professionals and no one else will receive the same text as you at that given time.
