Kristen Harootunian | Source | Speaker at Minding Your Mind

Kristen is a mental health advocate and speaker for Minding Your Mind, a nonprofit that provides mental health education and suicide prevention training in schools, communities, and workplaces around the country. She shares her lived experience to help normalize conversations around mental health and end the stigma and destructive behaviors that can be associated with mental health challenges. Kristen holds a BA in Corporate Communications with a special interest in Public Relations from Penn State University.

As a child, Kristen experienced significant trauma, including her mother attempting and completing suicide.

When she reached her preteen years, Kristen didn’t know how to manage what she was feeling and turned to alcohol, drugs, and self-harm to mask the pain that she so desperately wanted to keep locked away. The alternative was facing the issues related to her childhood trauma and she did not know how to do that. As a result of this she suffered with debilitating depression and anxiety that affected her in her everyday life. She continued these negative coping skills, including negative self-talk, which drove her down to a very dark place. Quickly, she arrived to a bottom she thought she would never leave.

After going to treatment, where she learned how to replace her negative coping skills with positive ones, she worked hard to incorporate those habits into her life. Kristen attended a recovery high school to finish her education and went on to college. She has many therapy experiences that have proven to be wildly successful, and attends support groups regularly to maintain her ongoing sobriety and abstinence from negative coping skills. Kristen, being a young person in recovery, proves it’s never too late or too early to get the help you need. She has spoken on panels and at board meetings to help educate others in an effective manner break the stigma around mental health and substance use disorder.