How to Seek and Offer Help: A Guide to Mental Health Advocacy

Without question, the last couple of years have underscored the necessity of knowing how to ask for help, accept help and offer help. And yet, “help fluency” remains elusive for far too many people. In Go To Help, mother-daughter power duo, Deborah Grayson Riegel and Sophie Riegel, blend their backgrounds in coaching and mental health advocacy to help readers recapture their empathy. Penned and launched during the pandemic, their message has resonated with teens and experienced professionals alike. In our productivity-obsessed culture, we all need help from time to time. But how do we learn to identify that need and find the strength to actually ask for it?

Amy Cohen Epstein: I am so excited this afternoon to be joined by a mother-daughter duo, to really get into mental health and talk about how to ask for help, how to raise your hand and say, "Somebody needs to help me." And I thus would love to touch on the mental, physical health combination, and how we think about it. A lot of people think about their physical health and they're adamant about it, but then let their mental health slide. But first, I'm just going to let you two introduce yourself because it's fun to have a duo on here.

Sophie Riegel: I am Sophie Riegel. I'm a junior at Duke University and the co-author of our new book, Go to Help. I'm a professional speaker, an author. And I go all over the country to talk about why mental health is so important. How do we have these conversations so that they're more comfortable, and now how to ask for help, how to offer help, and how to accept help.

Deborah Riegel: And I'm Deborah Riegel Riegel, Sophie's mom. I'm in my a billionth year of college. And I am an executive coach and a leadership consultant. I also teach at Columbia Business School, I've taught at Wharton, and I'm starting to do a little work for Duke's Business School as well, which is very convenient. And most of my professional career has been in helping leaders communicate more effectively, including presentation skills, difficult conversations, and feedback. I'm a co-author with Sophie of Go to Help: 31 Strategies to Offer, Ask For and Accept Help.

Amy Cohen Epstein: How did you separately or together start down this road?

Deborah Riegel: So it takes us back to pre-pandemic. Right before the pandemic, so in October 2019, Sophie and I wrote our first book together called, Overcoming Overthinking. Sophie and I both have several anxiety disorders between the two of us. And we decided to write a book together on the strategies that we've used separately and collectively to manage our own anxiety. Little did we know when this book came out that talking about anxiety, talking about mental health and well-being would become the most important topic in the world just a few months later.

And so we spent a lot of 2020 talking to everything from colleges to corporations, to camps about wellbeing, mental health, and mental illness. And there was one chapter from the book Overcoming Overthinking that really resonated with people which became a book. Sophie, I'll let you take it from there.

Sophie Riegel: Basically, people were like, "Okay, we really want to know more about this." And overachievers that we are, we decided instead of writing an article, we would just go ahead and write another book, which took up the entire summer. Before that I had, in January of 2019, published my first book, Don't Tell Me to Relax, which is all about my experience with anxiety and mental illness. So that's how I got into the topic of mental health, and with my mom's expertise in coaching and her professional audience, we figured that both of us would be able to relate. So my mom is really good at relating to professionals and parents, and I have a relationship with the teens and also the parents and just the younger people in general. So together we're able to reach a really wide audience.

Amy Cohen Epstein: And what prompted you to be so open about your own experience? Lots of people go through anxiety or different mental illnesses and or health issues. But they are less inclined to share it with the world, and write a book about it in their teens. So that's beyond impressive, but what made you want to be so open?

“I wanted to be the person that I wish I had had for myself. I wish like when was being diagnosed with OCD and panic disorder that I had someone to look up”

Sophie Riegel: I think I wanted to be the person that I wish I had had for myself. I wish like when was being diagnosed with OCD and panic disorder that I had someone to look up to and say, "This person got through this, this person is okay." I think I just really wanted to show people that despite, and because of having these anxiety disorders, I'm a successful human being in both relationships and school and things like that. So I just wanted people to see that just because you have a mental illness doesn't mean you can't do exactly what you want to do.

Deborah Riegel: That's right. So when Sophie was in middle school, she started displaying some of the behaviors that were associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and they weren't private behaviors. They were pretty public behaviors. And middle school kids are going to call you out if you're doing anything other than the norm. And it was really a form of bullying. And Sophie realized that if what she was experiencing was bullying, but people didn't know they were bullying her because they didn't know it was an illness, it's a mental illness that Sophie actually felt obligated to educate.

So Sophie, who is a wonderful public speaker now, but not in middle school, worked with her psychologist to put together a presentation, to teach her classmates, what OCD is and what it's like to live with it.

Sophie Riegel: And then after the presentation, everyone came up to me and apologized, and I realized, like I had only spoken for a few minutes, but I realized if I could put this information out into the world, how many people could we really be changing?

Amy Cohen Epstein: So what has been the moment where you've looked and seen someone connect with you and maybe had a conversation with them, or an email with them, where you felt those butterflies in your stomach about the life-changing work your book is doing?

Sophie Riegel: I think just last week we were at a restaurant doing a speaking engagement, and there were only a few people there, but the one person that we really connected with, I honestly believe that we changed his life.

Deborah Riegel: I think we were there because he was there. We just didn't know it at the time.

Sophie Riegel: You want to explain what happened?

Deborah Riegel: Yeah. So this was somebody who had come to a business lunch with a group of people at a restaurant and all men, and one by one, all of the men left as we were talking about asking for help and offering help. And this gentleman stayed. And he shared with us that he was in a marriage where he believed that his wife probably needed some help and wasn't getting it. And it was really hurting the relationship. It was really hurting him. It was hurting their daughter. And he started by saying, "What do you do when somebody who needs help, won't get help."

We have an entire chapter in our book about that. And so we shared some of our insights, but more importantly, we asked him the question that we recommend everyone asks, which is what kind of help do you need right now? And he really just wanted to be acknowledged. He didn't want somebody to say like, "Well, look on the bright side" Or "This too shall pass." None of that stuff. He wanted people to acknowledge his pain and to recognize that he was doing what he could for himself and his daughter because his wife is an adult. If she chooses not to get help, that's up to her. And so I think he just really appreciated that. We heard him empathize and acknowledged the difficult spot he was in.

Sophie Riegel: He was really emotional.

Deborah Riegel: Yeah, he was. So I think that's one example. And I'll just share two other things. Another one, Sophie was, when you were speaking at a conference a couple of years ago, and about the topic of anxiety, and one of the survivors of the Parkland School shooting came up to you.

Sophie Riegel: She was in the audience. It was actually my first speaking engagement ever in February of 2019. And she came up to me after and she said, "I wish that people had spoken to me after this happened, the way you just spoke to me." Like this would've changed lives if we could hear this if all the other teens who were there could hear this. And that was my first speaking engagement. And I just realized, wow, what am I in for? This is going to be quite a ride.

And I'm still in contact with her. I sent her books to give to her friends who are at the school. You never know who's in your audience. You have absolutely no idea. So you A, have to be careful with what you say. And B, you just have to realize, even if some people aren't paying attention, there's someone there who needs to hear what you're saying. And that's all that matters.

Deborah Riegel: And I would say the third thing that really resonated for both of us was we got a call about six weeks ago asking us to be the speakers for mental health awareness month for US Homeland Security First Responders. So these are the people who help everybody first. And we are there to help them understand why they should be asking for help for themselves. And when we heard that, we were like, "Oh my goodness, what an honor it will be to do this."

Amy Cohen Epstein: Wow. That's pretty amazing. That's pretty amazing. And how do you juggle it all? How do you stop and sometimes say, "Okay, I have class or I have work, I'm teaching at multiple business schools." Like, how do you juggle it? Each of you individually or together?

Sophie Riegel: I was just thinking about this the other day.

Deborah Riegel: You go first. I want to learn what you do and I'll just say same, same.

Sophie Riegel: Yeah. I was just thinking about this the other day because I'm in school full-time and I'm doing this: speaking and coaching and whatever. And I also have another business. I'm a part-time reseller. So I go to vintage stores and resell things online. And that's my favorite thing to do. And I'm just like a human being who needs to do other things. So, I'm juggling a lot of things, but A, I try to nap every day, and B, I just try to prioritize and make time for the things that are important.

Deborah Riegel: It is tough. And I would say for me, a couple of things: number one is I choose not to do anything that I'm not great at. And most things I'm not great at. And I say that truly, there is a small pile of things, coaching, speaking, training, facilitating, writing that I'm really, really good at, and I'm going to do those things and anything that doesn't fall into one of those buckets, I'm going to delegate out. I'm going to hire somebody to do it. I'm going to say no.

And the other thing is maybe a little counterintuitive, which is, I would say 80% of the time I don't work Fridays. And I know it seems like, well, shouldn't you have more work time to juggle it all? But honestly, if I don't have time for me to rest, engage in my very short list of hobbies-

Sophie Riegel: Which hobbies?

Deborah Riegel: They're indoor hobbies. I know many people think a hobby has to be outdoors. My hobbies are indoors…. So actually taking that time off and usually having three-day weekends allows me that time. And I think both of us have gotten really good at saying no to different things.

People asking me to speak at their organization or do different podcasts or whatever it is. And I can't say yes to everything. So I have to decide what's most important, where do I want to put my time and energy? And so that choir saying no, and it's not fun to say no, but if I didn't say no to anything, I would be completely swamped….

Amy Cohen Epstein: Good answers. I like that. And then the other thing I want to talk about or segue into is when you're feeling in a moment where you're overwhelmed or you're giving advice to people who are, I guess, like that gentleman that you spoke to and of sort of too much on their plate or they're suffering from anxiety or a bevy of other things, have you seen or witnessed yourself how that can translate also into your physical health?

The number of people, especially women that we talk to, I've talked to for 20 years in doing this that have said, "I was diagnosed with something and gosh, like for a couple of years.” I was so stressed out, or running in circles and that realization of how that manifests itself into our bodies, breaking down on our immune system and our ability to fight off, all the things our body on a daily basis does, have you had experience with that and how do you deal with it?

Deborah Riegel: Well, yes, we've both definitely had experience with it. And it's interesting when I was growing up, very early on in my life was diagnosed with a neck tick. So I have a repetitive movement in my neck, which is part of an anxiety disorder, but it's so repetitive that I would get a repetitive muscle injury just from having a tick in my neck. And so I grew up knowing about the idea of somaticizing. That when you have a mental health challenge, you are likely to feel it in your body. And so I remember when Sophie was little and she was experiencing physical symptoms. And I said to her, "Sophie, do you know the word?" She was really little, I said, "Do you know the word for when you experience physical symptoms because of something going on emotionally?"

And she said, is the word normal, which I loved. And I was like, well, yes, it is really normal. And then I got to teach her about somaticizing. So it's something Sophie and I have personally dealt with, our mind-body connection is pretty tight. That doesn't mean it's the healthiest, but we both are very well aware of it. I am pretty sure there's something psychological going or wow, I'm aware there's something so psychological going on and it's starting to manifest itself physically. And we certainly see this in the audiences that we talked to in fact, probably the most frequent program that I've led over the last two years is called, talking to your employees about stress at work or about mental health at work. And there was a great article in Harvard Business Review where they talk about a new model for Apgar.

So if you remember when your babies were born, they had an agar test at one minute in five minutes. And that was to see, did they need any intervention? Well, there's a stress Apgar that these two authors and Harvard Business Review wrote about that I use all the time, citing of course my research, and the idea behind it is that you may notice somebody's stressed by looking at their appearance, their performance, their sense of growth or spirituality, their effect, and then their relationships. And so all of that is the connection between what's going on inside and what you might see on the outside….

Amy Cohen Epstein: So if there's one piece of, solid either advice or introspection that you really like to leave or give out there, what is it? And that might be impossible to answer. And you might say here, this is one of many, but especially the difference you're doing, adult coaching and working in a workplace. And then for you Sophie, when you're talking more to your contemporaries?

Sophie Riegel: I would actually say treat your mental health, just like your physical health. I think, for example, if you were to break your leg, you wouldn't be like, "It's okay, everyone's dealing with this." You would immediately go to the doctor, if you need surgery, you get the surgery. But as soon as you're dealing with depression or anxiety, we go into this mindset of, it's not that bad. Other people are dealing with things that are worse, things like that. And so if we start to treat our mental health, like our physical health, we'll actually get the help that we need. And when we have a mindset where we're saying that our physical health, that our mental health are comparable, or they're similar, there's actually a lot less stigma associated with our mental health.

“Mental well-being is for everyone.”

Amy Cohen Epstein: I love that.

Sophie Riegel: It's not stigmatizing to say, "I have a cold." Like, you'll tell anyone that, but as soon as you say like, "I need to go see my therapist." There's kind of a different vibe there.

Deborah Riegel: And I would say for me, the thing that resonates a lot for me and resonates a lot for the audiences we speak to is that you can have mental illness and also great mental wellbeing. And so mental illness and mental well-being are related, but not the same thing. And I think Sophie and I are examples of two people who have been diagnosed with mental illnesses, and more often than not have really good mental well-being. So: having healthy relationships, enjoying what we're doing, connecting to the community, taking care of our physical health as well. And you can have really crappy mental well-being and no mental illness. And so if you think about it in terms of mental wellbeing, that feels a lot less stigmatizing and it's for everyone. Mental well-being is for everyone.