Maggie Bertram Struggles

Increasing one’s health has become a common goal over the last few years. However, many times mental health is left out of the focus and even stigmatized. Maggie Bertram’s personal account of her struggle with mental illness in college is salient to Social Work on multiple levels. Her testament to the importance of recognizing mental health problems and treating them is applicable to a Social Worker empowering their client as well as empowering themselves. When faced with new experiences, such as enrolling in college, many people try to control the unknown by setting clear plans. Maggie Bertram began her college career in that exact mindset. Her future plans involved getting perfect grades, graduating top of her class and marrying some lucky guy in a beautiful stone church picked out by her mother. Growing up in a small town where everyone knew everything pushed her to prized academia above anything else. However, what she did not consider was that she was genetically predisposed to anxiety and depression. When she started to have to deal with a harder school workload in college that anxiety grew. Then, with the realization that she was a lesbian, her anxiety spiked exponentially along with her depression. She still pushed herself to achieve high grades and punished herself for being a lesbian through
As Social Workers we must keep this in mind as some clients may not want to self-advocate. In order to empower them we must not only provide counseling resources as it is a basic universal need, but advocate against the stigma of mental illness (Dubois & Miley, 2014). As David Soyer discussed in his article Reverie on working with the aged, the groups of people Social Workers aid can drastically affect Social Workers personally and professionally (1969). Many Social Workers can struggle from “burn out”. In order to work and be healthy we must remember to care for our mental health as