May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the Community Health Center of Fort Dodge organized the Make It OK Day event to help spread awareness and show support. The event featured a walk around the square, the Feedshack food truck and several mental health resource tables.

“It was a great turn out,” CHC Behavioral Health Director Roxanne Fevold said of the event. “It’s awesome to see the community come together for something so important and starting those conversations, continuing those conversations.”

Regina Suhrbier, outreach coordinator for the CHC, organized the event. Last year was the first event and after its success, Suhrbier wanted to go even bigger and better this year, so she invited other mental health providers and organizations from around the area to participate.

“This group of organizations and providers have been working together for the past few years on different mental health things and we have really created a great synergy together,” she said. “Mental health resources can be hard to find, so our goal is just to be visible, to be easily found and doing things like this together I think is meaningful.”

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Participants in the Make it OK walk pass by a sign reminding them that mental health is just as important as physical health on Thursday.

As participants walked around the square to show support for mental health awareness, they passed signs with various messages like “stop the stigma” and “mental health is just as important as physical health.”

“I think it’s super important to stop the stigma of mental illness and more importantly, people really need to know where they can go to seek help,” said Webster County Supervisor Niki Conrad. “It’s really cool to see so many different organizations here in the square so people can come down and whatever it is that they’re needing help with, there’s an organization that will be able to help them.”

The mental health resources tables represented a wide array of providers and organizations, including Webster County Health Department, Community and Family Resources, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, YWCA of Fort Dodge, Community Health Center of Fort Dodge, UnityPoint Health and more.

“Whether it’s acute response for something that’s happening right at this moment, whether it’s longer term care, whether it’s more niche services that they need, there’s some place for them here,” Conrad said. “It’s really wonderful to see so many people in the community coming to support this.”