Welcome To The Mental Health Entrepreneur with Rachel Harrison

Welcome to the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. We are here to inspire creative ideas and connections for entrepreneurs and advocates working to address our mental health crisis. As you listen, I hope you will experience new ideas and motivation to innovate in your business, your community, and in your life. Welcome to the very first episode of the Mental Health Entrepreneur Podcast. I am your host, Rachel Harrison. I am really excited to be here. This podcast has been years and years in the making and it comes from so many parts of my experience. But most recently, the event that bubbled this up was an event in my community. We have what's called SheWeek and it's sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. And it's basically a situation where a group of female entrepreneurs have a Shark Tank kind of event. And it's months in the making and there's lots of coaching for these businesses and essentially these businesses present at an event. The event has a conference and it also has an award ceremony. So there are all kind of things tied in. And at this event, I was sitting there this past year and I loved the energy and I loved the new ideas. And I started thinking to myself, I think this is what we need in the mental health world. We need new, fresh ideas. I had also been having a lot of conversations in my community with different community leaders, just about the mental health needs, government leaders, as well as nonprofit leaders, as well as business leaders, hospital leaders. And at this event, I happened to run into someone from the hospital and we were just talking about some of the limitations and the need in our community. And afterwards it just kind of sparked this thinking in me. And I said, I want to do a similar thing for mental health. I want to think about mental health entrepreneurs. And I really believe this. We have a crisis, a mental health crisis in our country. I can tell you. I own six group practices in three different states. I can tell you that we never have enough therapists. We have highly trained therapists who specialize in EMDR and evidence based treatments. They're highly effective. But no matter how much we grow or how many people I hire, I can't meet the need. And that is because mental health needs have skyrocketed. So since COVID and I think also with heightened awareness, and I don't think this is going away anytime soon. And I look at that and I say, okay, if our hospitals can't meet the need, our nonprofits can't meet the need, our entrepreneurs that run group practices or private practice owners can't meet the need, what then? And in my mind, I think this podcast and My hope for this is we need creative conversations. We need to look at mental health differently, mental wellness. We need to consider other options for how we are going to address the needs in our communities. And I think entrepreneurs are an untapped resource to do that. Entrepreneurs have a lot of great ideas, they have a lot of great inspiration, they have a lot of great creativity. All of those things, I think, make entrepreneurs the right people to have these conversations with. So as I started thinking about this podcast, I started interviewing and researching all different people who are doing these things. And I am looking for people that are not doing traditional mental health care. I am interviewing people who are doing something different, something creative. They may be a therapist, they may not be a therapist. I am looking for people who are focusing on mental wellness for their communities in creative ways. And my hope is that by having these conversations with these people, that there will be an opportunity for inspiration, there will be an opportunity for collaboration and all kinds of connections to potentially be made. I have already seen with some of my interviews the opportunity to make connections between different entrepreneurs, and that has been so exciting for me. My entrepreneurial journey has been an interesting development. I didn't start here. I started as a mental health professional coming out of grad school 25 years ago and working in all kinds of settings, residential treatment settings, home based settings, outpatient settings, and eventually starting my own individual practice that I had for a long time, and then developing a group practice and growing that. And from that work, I started realizing that I needed to run my business. And so I started doing more of that, less of therapy, more of running my business. And then I really identified with the entrepreneurial spirit as I joined different groups, as I looked at leadership training, as I did business training, I realized I really have this entrepreneurial spirit. And so I kind of say my second career is an entrepreneur. And since then I have multiple different businesses that I run. And I have found this new excitement, this new career as an entrepreneur. But my love is, of course, mental health, and I have that training and background and all of that. And I continue to still train other therapists in how to do EMDR therapy. So that is all wrapped up as a passion for me. But my new job is being an entrepreneur. And what better thing to do than talk to other entrepreneurs? I think that's how we can fuel ourselves and keep up the sometimes difficult work and think of creative ideas. And so it wraps that piece in for me of my entrepreneurial journey. And I also looked at a lot of different podcasts, specifically in mental health and entrepreneurship, and I found that there was nothing quite like this. A lot of the mental health podcasts focus on solopreneurs or group practices and kind of all the nuts and bolts of how to make all of that work, which is awesome. And there's so much out there for that and I love that. But I am really coming from that place of more thinking about what's new, how do we have community leadership and collaboration in the mental health arena? Doesn't have to be a therapist and who's doing what and how can we really bring that up and showcase that and get other people to be inspired? I am hoping that people will listen to this and they will begin to think about things differently. I'm hoping that people will listen to this and want to collaborate with somebody that they hear about. I'm hoping that people will listen to this and get inspired about what's needed in their community and thinking about ways that they can help. Because after years of talking about these issues with other mental health professionals, government agencies, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, I have come to one conclusion and that is that none of us can solve this alone. We all need to be able to collaborate and I'm hoping that this can be an avenue for us to do that. So thank you for being interested in entrepreneurship and mental health and I am so excited for you to hear from the entrepreneurs that I've already interviewed, as well as the ones yet to come. If you have any feedback, if you want to reach out to me, I would love to hear from you. You can look up my information in the show notes for how to get in touch with me or how to join our Facebook group. I hope you will join me for an entrepreneurial journey, for a passion for community, leadership and collaboration and a passion for mental health. Be inspired, get connected and promote these entrepreneurs who you're going to hear from. I'll be here every Thursday talking to someone new and I can't wait for you to hear from them.