The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Shredding the Stigma about mental health: a local snowboarder’s awareness project
[ By Victoria R. Jarosh ]
If you didn’t know, a crescent peaked giant lounges beside our tiny town. She offers a sense of place to locals here. Wherever you pause for a moment, she catches your eye commandeering your attention for however long you allow it; the snow clinging to her slopes and a chorus of mountains sprawling from her. At this moment, you might ask yourself, how can I stand to feel sad in such a beautiful place? News flash: paradise is a permeable concept in the real world.
The “Neverland effect” in towns like Crested Butte has been around since the 1950s, as coal mining or other extractive economies were replaced by a tourist one. This fantasized atmosphere offered a sense of western freedom and adventure. Slowly the hooligans trickled in; the population in 1987 was around 500 people, planning wild events like chainless bike races down mountain passes, pagan fall festivals, dog poop collecting competitions, etc. It definitely gets weird in Crested Butte. Today, the population is more than triple that number, and the party culture prevails on and off the mountain.
Work hard play hard—a live by it and die by it motto that reverbs throughout the community. For many, this fast-paced lifestyle can make paradise feel more like a solitary wilderness.
The Project
Suicide and lack of mental health awareness and resources are affecting the community of Crested Butte. That’s why local snowboarder Maddie McCarthy started her project, MENTAL Madness. The brand name is a homage to ski slang, said when someone drops a cliff, or does a backflip or some other sick stuff that I would never attempt—mental.
For eight years, Maddie had consciously dealt with her mental health—mood swings and sadness for seemingly no reason. She turned to the web, searched for others who shared her experiences, and eventually realized she has bi-polar disorder. Since accepting that she is living with a mental illness, she has found balance through camaraderie, professional help and the right medication.
MENTAL Madness is Maddie’s “baby of a project” that launched on Halloween. Maddie is building a social media presence, using her website as a platform for herself and others to share stories about their mental health journeys. She wants her platform to be a source of information for friends to help friends—like how to respond to a friend showing signs of addiction or expressing suicidal thoughts.
“To reach one person makes it worth it,” says Eggs, a local restaurant manager. Eggs has had more friends and acquaintances take their own lives in this small mountain town than back home in Detroit.
Crested Butte has 273 days of sunshine a year and some of the best recreation in the U.S. There is a lot of pressure to soak up every second of it, and some guilt when you want to stow away inside. With no breaks from work or play, paradise presents habitual patterns. Which usually means having a beer after work, or going on a bike ride and having a beer, or icing your torn ACL and having a beer, “which is not conducive to health,” says Eggs. Legend has it, around here you either tear your ACL or get a DUI—to achieve both is not mythical.
Another long-time resident described an image of ski bums and lawyers alike filling every bar down Elk Avenue before noon. People enable each other here, “you feel like you have to keep up.” One waitress reminisces how every night a server’s first hundred bucks in tips went straight to cocaine. For some people this lifestyle is manageable, but for others, the pressure is overwhelming, driving some people to recluse into their mental illness.
Of course “willy-nilly drug use” is going to drive some people into toxic cycles, says Maddie. She explains other contributions to mental stress such as the expensive lifestyle of ski-towns, expensive housing, the competitiveness of ski-culture. Even the regularity of concussions plays a role because it can cause difficulty in reasoning and processing emotion.
The Crested Butte dream comes with dark corners, but as Eggs says, “out here, there are more good days than bad days.” Some people are good at hiding their personal challenges behind the good times, but it’s time for mental health to become an open and supportive conversation in Crested Butte.
Looking Forward
From Maddie’s developing site: “[MENTAL’s] mission is to INSPIRE snowboarders, skateboarders, skiers, surfers & all other walks of life to seek professional mental health HELP, learn how to SUPPORT your loved ones through dark times, SHARE stories to create SOLIDARITY, ACCEPT that it’s okay to take medication, FIGHT to make mental health care more accessible & affordable, gain skills to build HEALTHIER mind & hold events to SPREAD AWARENESS & SHRED THE STIGMA.”
Mental health is for everyone. Stay tuned for website updates from Maddie and MENTAL Madness: https://www.mental-madness.com
Zoom-based free suicide prevention training December 17.
Thursday, December 17, 5 to 6:15 p.m. RSVP to preventsuicide@gunnisoncountry.org
Other local peer resources
Gunnison Valley Health (GVH) partners with The Center for Mental Health (CMH) has gathered certified peer support specialists that have overcome a mental health condition and mentor individuals who struggle with mental health, psychological trauma or substance abuse.
To schedule an appointment with a Peer Support Specialist:
GVH Peer Specialist—Gunnison: (970) 642-4762
CMH Peer Specialist—Gunnison/Crested Butte: (970) 252-3200
