By STU CLAMPITT
Michelle Shepherd, Jeff Muszar, and their marketing and technology expert, Jeremey Jordan, own Mind Trek. Their goal is to help people of all ages deal with the cumulative effects of stress, overcome trauma, and learn to live healthy lives.
Shepherd has worked at Mt. Vernon Middle School since 2009. She has worked in EMS for 17 years. She is currently a paramedic at the Jackson Township Fire Department. She has a degree in psychology from Ball State University. She went to medic school after college, then to nursing school. She has worked as a nurse and also has a master’s degree in counseling.
According to their website, TheMindTrek.com, “The Mind Trek Program is uniquely crafted by our staff with over 54 years combined public service and counseling expertise. This Social Emotional Learning (SEL) program was created to strengthen the mental health of people of all ages and occupations.”
“Working in the school, I just saw such a need for students and their social and emotional learning,” Shepherd told The Reporter. “The programs out there for middle school were very few and they were extremely costly. I went to our director of curriculum and got the go-ahead to create our own program. It has just grown and grown. There are very few programs for high school, so we built on from the middle school program to a high school program and a special education program for sixth to 12th grades.”
Shepherd said the last year as been especially hard on first responders, which is one reason they have expanded the Mind Trek programs.
“From working in the firehouse and COVID hitting, everyone was just falling apart,” she told The Reporter. “Their stress was through the roof. There was depression. They were getting cranky with each other. So I shifted gears to what I know of public safety and expounded on that to help them deal with their stress and deal with their relationships and get through things.”
According to Shepherd, they have a program for any first responder.
“That program is geared toward stress management, how to get help when you need it,” Shepherd said. “Public Safety workers really struggle with mental health. Forty to 45 percent of people in public safety self-report clinically significant symptoms of mental health disorders, which is a huge increase over the rest of the population, but they have difficulty going to get help. They have a hero complex where they struggle with admitting they have a problem or it’s a bit taboo. While that is improving in public safety, it is not there yet. We give them an opportunity to pre-manage those things before they get out of control.”
Shepherd told The Reporter the first responder program is different than standard mental health programs.
“A lot of mental health is ‘kumbaya, spill your feelings, tell everyone what you’re thinking,’ but fire fighters and police and EMS don’t like doing that,” she said. “To get past that we give them the tools to do it themselves. There is a threshold where you do need to go get help. So we educate them on giving them the tools to manage it on their own as preventative medicine, and we give them the signs and the symptoms for when they cannot do that. We teach them ‘this is where you need to go to talk to somebody else and these are the resources.’”
The Mind Trek school programs are designed for the entire student body with the goal of being able to reach every single student.
“We have all the general education students plus we have the special education students, who often get left out with programs because they are not tailored to their levels,” Shepherd said. “The school program is designed for students to have a weekly lesson in their classrooms where they are learning and doing it together.”
Mind Trek offers education resources for parents, teachers, guidance counselors or administrators for junior high, high school, special education, and homeschooling.
For public safety personnel, resources are available for first responders including law enforcement agencies, fire departments, EMS, 9-1-1 dispatchers, and coroners.
The corporate programs are tailored for human resources, business owners, managers, directors, and corporate leaders.
You can learn more online at TheMindTrek.com, as well as on Facebook and Twitter. You can reach out directly through email at info@themindtrek.com.