Christine Davis says she’s always been good at taking things apart and putting them back together again.
“Like VCRs and radios and stuff like that,” she says. “I can take it apart and fix it. Put it back together.”
Davis sees the health of a human being the same way. It’s the kind of approach she had to take when it came to overcoming the mental health challenges she and her children are facing.
“We were in a domestic violence situation,” she says. “The kids had experienced quite a bit through that experience, and their dad was a very angry person, no filter kind of situation, that doesn't have a whole lot of empathy for other people.”
When Davis was finally able to remove her kids from an environment of abuse, and into a shelter for some time, she says she knew they had to find a local resource to help them recover. That’s when she turned to the
St. Clair County Community Mental Health Wrap Around program and began working with Children’s Clinician Marissa Parkins.
“What's awesome about Christine is she really did utilize, all of our programs, and she utilized them to the fullest capacity that she was able to,” Parkins says.
The Wrap Around program allows a person to build a support system of all the specialists they might need to tackle their mental health struggles, whether that includes a team of multiple therapists, a child’s school, or representatives from the court system, if the court is involved.
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Christine Davis with Marissa Parkins.
Parkins says Davis was committed to the program from the start, a quality she doesn’t always find in the parents of children who come to Community Mental Health for services.
Witnessing Davis’s drive to ensure her children have the coping skills they need to heal motivated Parkins to nominate the Port Huron mom for a Parent Hero award, a new addition to the annual St. Clair County Community Mental Health Celebration of Recovery.
“The Celebration of Recovery honors the commitment and hard work of individuals served through St. Clair County CMH, who made remarkable advances in their recovery journey,” says Child and Family Services Director Heidi Fogarty.
Celebration of Recovery was started in 2007 as a way for St. Clair County Community Mental Health to bring together the people it serves, their family members, CMH staff, and community stakeholders to celebrate the accomplishment of recovery.
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Heidi Fogarty, Child and Family Services Director at SCCCMH.
When Davis found out she’d been named this year’s Parent Hero, she was surprised but touched to see the hard work she’d put into getting her family on the right track be recognized.
“I looked at her, and I was like, really, oh my gosh, really. Me? You picked me? That is so sweet,” Davis says, describing the moment Parkins told her she’d receive the award. “You know, I'm a hard-working mom. I work four out of five days of the work week. Wednesdays are my day off. I have to have a day off because my youngest daughter has special needs, and I have to be able to take her to speech therapy at least once a week.”
For Davis, being named a Parent Hero is about more than just accolades, it’s proof of the success her kids found during their time spent under the care of Community Mental Health staff. She believes CMH was not only able to give the kids the skills they need to grow into good, productive members of society, but also give her the right tools to put what they learned into practice at home.
“It's important that they're able to function, and that's a big deal to me,” Davis says. “With these guys here at CMH, they helped shed a new light, a new perspective on things for me as an adult.”
Relying on community services hasn’t always been easy for Davis. She says she’s been failed by the system before when she was fighting back against a situation of abuse from her past, alongside her siblings and mother.
“There were four of us girls,” she says. “CPS would get called out, and we would tell these CPS workers, these horrible things that happened to us, or that were happening to us, and they never did anything about it.”
When people enter the CMH system as a family, Parkins says she often finds that parents need just as much support as their children, usually because they weren’t able to access mental health services, for one reason or another.
“A lot of times it's hard for parents to recognize that they've had a lot of their own trauma,” she says. “They never really process and help themselves, and now they're trying to help their kids, and that is a struggle because they don't see how that piece affects their parenting.”
Still, she says Davis overcame it, put her kids first, and took on the title of Parent Hero with pride.
It’s only one facet of the Celebration of Recovery that Fogarty says sends the message that recovery is possible, but hard, and worthy of a celebration when it's achieved.
“We have a very large service array at Community Mental Health, both children and adults,” she says. “And I think it's awesome when we have families or individuals that take advantage of our services because we have seen some really positive changes with a lot of individuals as a result of the services that they receive.”