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Situated in a quiet corner of Greenville — home to a couple pets, horses that bring Charlie to Darke County Fair each year and a miniature donkey acting as a bodyguard against coyotes for those horses — the Pope family opened up their home to the Dayton Daily News. Charlie and her mom, Tiffany, shared what it was like dealing with concerning changes in Charlie’s mental health, along with the stigma that comes with those challenges.
For Tiffany, that time in their family’s life about two years ago meant having to watch Charlie lose the spark in her eye and her joy.
The spark in Charlie is that something that has since returned, evident as she opened up about struggles that are difficult for adults twice her age to articulate.
Mental health disorders can affect people of all ages, Dayton Children’s says, including children and teens. While it’s normal for children and adolescents to feel sad or down from time to time, it can be more than the average experience of sadness if it persists for weeks or longer, impacting children’s day-to-day lives.
“One way of looking at it is if it’s really changing the way that you’re able to function,” said Dr. Kelly Blankenship, the division chief of psychiatry at Dayton Children’s.
Depression is a mood disorder, which can manifest as a sad or irritable mood that lasts for weeks or longer and affects a child’s daily life, according to Dayton Children’s.
‘A very dark time’
For Charlie, she started experiencing pessimism about almost everything, she said.
“It was a very dark time,” Charlie said.
In trying to cope with her feelings alone, Charlie sank further into the symptoms of depression, not wanting to leave her room or her bed, feeling like nothing mattered anymore.
She stopped showing interest in the things that normally brought her joy, she said.
“Everything got very muted,” Charlie said. “I was spending a lot of time in my bed instead of actually hanging out with my friends and doing the activities that I wanted to do.”
Charlie stopped doing certain sports and other activities. Tiffany first thought maybe Charlie was changing interests.
“We found that we were quitting things and then not replacing them,” Tiffany said. “And that’s when all of a sudden I’m like, we’re not doing anything that we like anymore.”
“It was just hard to get her to participate in life, and we just saw a spiral happening,” Tiffany said.
Looking for solutions
Tiffany and Charlie have always been close, so they began talking about what Tiffany was seeing happen with Charlie.
“It got to where we knew that it wasn’t her and it wasn’t just a teenage thing, which I think is really hard for parents to distinguish because teenagers do go through so many different things and they do have times when they’re down,” Tiffany said. It became clear Charlie was struggling with a serious problem.
“Once we identified that it was a serious problem, we immediately started looking for solutions and help,” Tiffany said.
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It also became difficult for her to confront her depression because she didn’t feel like she had a reason to be depressed.
“She thought she could self-manage it, and she thought she was okay,” Tiffany said.
While the buildup of her depression may have been gradual, once it hit its peak, her family and she knew they needed help immediately.
“When it spiraled, it, spiraled quick,” Tiffany said.
Charlie ended up getting hospitalized, but it was also what she needed to realize she needed help.
“I feel like the part of it that helped me the most was the wake up call of like, this is serious, something has to change,” Charlie said.
Overcoming stigma
For Charlie, she found that medication was part of the help she needed in order to manage her depression, but to get to the point where she could ask for help, she needed to overcome the stigma around mental health.
“That’s another thing that Mom and I have talked about that is such like another stigma is that it’s a chemical imbalance in your brain. Mental illness should be treated much more similarly to physical illness than it is ― attitude wise, at least like,” Charlie said.
There are some people who are genetically predisposed to struggle at some level with anxiety and depression if they don’t get treatment, Blankenship said. For those on that end of the spectrum, they are likely to experience mental illness even if they don’t have any social stressors impacting them.
“And then there’s opposite,” Blankenship said. “There are people who have genetics that no matter what they encounter in life, it would be very unlikely they have depression or anxiety.”
Most people are going to fall in the middle, she said.
“They’re going to have some even mild genetic predisposition to either depression or anxiety,” Blankenship said. “And so then a social stressor hits, and they start to become sad or start to become anxious.”
Stigma around mental health says they should just be able to get over it, but it would be like someone with asthma refusing to use an inhaler to help them breathe, Charlie said.
“If you have a broken arm, you’re not going to question if like, ‘Oh, Sammy doesn’t have a cast on his perfectly good arm, so I’m terrible for having to have a cast on my arm.’ It’s because you have different needs, and your arm’s broken,” Charlie said.
Charlie credited her mom for helping her come to terms with the fact that there was a problem and that she needed help for her mental health.
“I was lucky that I have a very attentive mom, who loves me very much, and immediately notices when things are off,” Charlie said.
Becoming an advocate
Seeing Charlie enjoy life again and hopeful for the future was all Tiffany could ask for as a parent, Tiffany said.
“That’s all you want,” Tiffany said. “Seeing her develop and become self-sufficient and able to make good decisions for herself made me able to sleep at night.”
Charlie went to Washington, D.C. last year to talk to lawmakers about her mental health journey on behalf of the more than 7,000 children also treated for a behavioral health crisis at Dayton Children’s that year.
The trip not only helped her advocate for the thousands of children and adolescents facing mental health struggles in Ohio, but it helped measure her own growth, showing how she took the dark times she faced and turned that experience into something positive.
“A year ago from that point...I was so down and I thought that nothing was going to change and I have no impact for all these things,” Charlie said. “Then it’s like, now I’m in Washington D.C. and I’m talking to congressmen.”
In just sharing her experiences, it meant Charlie was not being held back by stigma.
“I’m maybe not changing things, but at least I’m trying to,” Charlie said.
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