Thursday, December 02, 2021
When You Need to Take Time Off for Your Mental Health
Dance Magazine: In the dance world, most companies and training programs have resources to support injured dancers. However, the same standards are not always in place for dancers who need time off for mental health reasons. "It's hard enough to take time away for a physical injury," says former Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre dancer Casey Pentrack. In 2016, although she had been poised for a long, promising career, she quit dancing due to challenges with depression and an eating disorder. "For something that's so unseen as a mental injury," she says, "it can be difficult to convince yourself or communicate to others that time off might be necessary."
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9 comments:
I think we should all try to value our mental health, as stigmatized as that is. It's so wild to me that people still think that it's not important to take care of your head space or emotions!!! In 2021!!! For technicians and practitioners, I feel like we all have some sense of duty to put other things ahead of our well being, like productions or work, and it's simply just not worth it if you're not okay. But it's just the way we were taught from like, the generation before us who think we're all just lazy and can't do anything because we'll get "triggered" or laugh at us when we need a mental health day. I hope one day we can all put ourselves first and maintain a healthy relationship with our brain. We just have to be a little nicer to ourselves everyday and understand everyone is taking it one day at a time too.
I definitely think that mental health should always be prioritized. It always seems that mental health kinda takes the back burner especially when you are in theatre. I see it even at our school, where students sacrifice their mental health in order to do well in their classes. I think that mental health should be more prioritized in the school of Drama to keep healthy and happy students and students that want to stay in school. I think that articles like these are important because it shed light on on important issues that are often overlooked. Further, theatre has more or less stayed the same throughout the years, and I have to wonder if the model most theatremakers are sticking with still works for the modern world? If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that the world can change so drastically and people will still find a way to move forward. I think that it is time for theatre to move forward as well. Though it is difficult, I believe that we should also come back as a different theatre, rather than what was before.
It's sad that I'm so impressed that some arts organizations are offering paid time off for mental health. As stated, mental health is just as important as physical. One thing that shifted my understanding of this was when someone in high school told me, "if your ankle was hurting a lot, and you were walking on it every day, wouldn't you go to the doctor to see if it's alright? Maybe get an x-ray in case it's fractured? Why not do the same with a mental health issue?" It changed my perspective on the notion of if you don't address something right away, the problem could grow into something much worse. We have to take care of ourselves when we need the care, not when we enter into crisis mode. Burnout is real, and we don't want people to lose the joy in their passion because of a lack of rest.
It’s really important that we take time off for our mental health when things are going on so that we don’t let problems pile up and get worse. Especially here in creative environments that constantly demand a lot of our emotional and physical labor to complete. I’ve definitely had my fair share of instances of issues resurfacing from stress. I can’t speak for other departments, but at least for mine it feels like there is often a lot of pressure to put aside personal things in order to get the work done. Or that when issues arise from other departments, it winds up falling back on us to catch the production back up. It’s definitely gotten better this year than it has been in the past, but I still wish we valued our own stability more than the school plays. Maybe sometime in the future more theatres and entertainment spaces can value the people as much as the product.
I think pretty much everyone who has needed to take a break for mental health reasons knows that the hardest part can be asking for said break. I know on several occasions I've powered through several things I shouldn't have and had mental health consequences purely because I was afraid of letting people down or having to push work onto them. It's unfortunate, because in several instances I'm sure I would have been fine to ask and get that time, but plenty of other instances I'm certain there's no way a production or a project would've gotten by well enough without me.
I know too that in the life of a creative, where being creative is part of their job, having to do it all the time can be draining. Breaks are necessary to avoid burnout, but they're just so difficult to come by, and often times they don't come soon enough.
Mental health, I think is a very hot topic at CMU. It’s different to read it from a dancing perspective in this article but I feel that the principles are still the same. It can be hard to ask for a break and it can be even harder to know when the right time to ask for a break is. Sometimes when we need the break it’s the most inconvenient within a work schedule and that is hard to manage. You can’t choose when you need a break, but you must find the proper (or at least compromise) time to take time away from working (or get away from whatever is causing distress). We are human and I think at times (at least in personal experience) we forget that sometimes. We push our bodies and minds to the limits but end up doing more harm than good when we finally hit a wall. I’m not a dancer but something I really enjoyed seeing in this article is the mention of staying physically active during a break. I know that when I don’t have time to focus on staying active or miss out on time to move my body my mental health deteriorates. I know that for myself I need at least 1-2 hours a day where I can focus on getting my heart rate up, stretch, or take a moment to understand how I am feeling in my body. When production schedules get intense, I seem to forget that or find it hard to take that time for myself. Sometimes I feel guilty when giving myself that time (even though I don’t feel guilty giving up 4 hours of my time when I am called every weekday during production time?? What is up with that)
The thing that really bothers me about this article is how it’s putting the shouldering of taking a mental health break on the dancer and not the organization. Dancers often suffer from eating disorders and mental health issues, yet it’s up to them to take a break, not the organization looking into its staff, practices, and policies to protect it’s dancers. A line that stood out to me was "it can be difficult to convince yourself or communicate to others that time off might be necessary”, especially the part about talking to others. There are so many people who think that mental health breaks aren’t important or that people are just making it up, and that feeds into the “just push through it” mentality that is so damaging. Just a single day off isn’t enough to recover from something, especially not mental health. It takes time to breathe and heal, and sadly, you might also have to worry about your job not being there when you return.
Taking care of your mental health is important but it is skill that usually requires unlearning a lot of experiences and lessons that have been taught already. Honestly, it probably gets harder the older you already are to start unlearning the things that we have been learning for our entire lives. Even if this is espoused, it needs to be practiced and checked as part of the daily processes and also considered in the light of larger institutional practices in a way that I struggle to see at the school with harsh violations, at least in description, for missing things such as a crew call. That does come from being an institution that has a high reputation and then feels pressure to uphold that and validated by those outside opinions while there are some consequences to the way that systems runs, emphasized by the article as the mental health of the students.
I have a friend that both suffers from chronic back pain as well as depression. Because depression isn’t seen as an illness the same way the back pain is, if she’s not able to participate in something because of her depression, she blames it on her physical pain. Physical pain is something we can all relate to but depression and other types of mental health related issues are not always so easy to understand if you haven’t experienced them yourself. It’s good news that the contract allows for sick time that can be used for mental health and it's also good that the HR and artistic departments are genuinely understanding which certainly can’t be said about all creative enterprises. The other thing that I’m glad about is that in the case of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, the performers are unionized. Hopefully other performance organizations like the PBT handle this issue so well.
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