Ohana provides needed services -- and a way to rethink our mental fitness.

If you’d told me 20 years ago that in a professional setting I would be asked to close my eyes and do a breathing exercise, I would have laughed. Or maybe I would have just been confused – there’s a pretty good chance I didn’t even know what a breathing exercise was.

By now, I’m accustomed to the notion that focusing on your own breath can strip away distractions and bring you to the present moment. So I was not surprised when Dr. Susan Swick directed me and roughly 150 other people present at the grand opening celebration of Ohana to close our eyes and do a breathing exercise.

For Swick, this is not just showmanship – this is fundamental to creating a path toward solving a crisis of mental illness. And what I find so powerful about her ideas is that they involve participation not just from people experiencing mental illness, but all of us. There is a clinical dimension to supporting mental health, of course, but there is also a social dimension. And Ohana is designed to spur that.

Ohana is Montage’s new campus in Ryan Ranch, the first behavioral health inpatient facility in Monterey County specifically for youth. The grand opening took place on Nov. 29, and after state licenses were secured, it opened to patients on Friday, Dec. 15, with 109 young patients coming on that first day. The 16 residential beds will not open until 2024 – the overwhelming majority of Ohana’s clients are on an outpatient basis. (Expect hiring – of therapists, of nurses – to ramp up as services expand. Swick, the executive director, expects Ohana’s staff size to double to roughly 160 by the end of next year.)

Staff writer Pam Marino has reported on Ohana’s campus design, which incorporates architecture that is meant to promote healing and reduce stigma – it’s a beautiful space that feels anything but institutional. That concept of reducing stigma runs throughout Swick’s ideas about mental health.

First, I should start by striking my own phrase, mental health. Swick prefers the term mental fitness. The implication that we are healthy or ill is a problematic dichotomy – in reality, all of us, young people especially, will go through hard times. The goal is resilience, and developing the tools and skills to help ourselves, or ask others for help, when we need it. “It is not about chasing happiness,” Swick says. “It’s about how to face a challenge and meet it.”

Part of Ohana’s mission is to treat whole families. “It used be, you drop your kid off, they spend an hour in a closed room, then you pick them up and expect a changed child,” Swick says.

In reality, a family is part of any child’s mental fitness. So are our friends and our coworkers, and one time, a stranger in the locker room at the gym who felt compelled to share a story of unbearable loneliness with me – people find listeners when they need them, even in awkward places.

“Kids don’t always know when to ask for support,” Swick says. “We want to help parents know when to worry, and when – and how – to help kids get help.”

The emphasis isn’t on sick or well, but on resilience – the ability to check in with one’s emotional and cognitive state, and to seek the level of intervention needed.

I never learned any of this in school. Swick envisions a sweeping, global change that can start here in Monterey on Ohana’s campus. It’s thrilling to hear her lay out her vision, in which a community – starting with educators, pediatricians, parents – learn the tools required for mental fitness, and it becomes part of how we understand health.

The need cannot be understated. At least 1 in 4 families in the U.S. are impacted by youth mental health challenges – something twice as common as asthma. Swick reports only 1 in 5 ever get to see a mental health professional. Of course, certain conditions require that – I don’t mean to suggest that we can all become armchair therapists. But we can all become part of the fabric of mental fitness, for ourselves and for our communities (or even strangers in the locker room).

This is a crisis of young people especially, with 50 percent of mental illness happening by age 18. But the good news, Swick says, is that mental illness is usually curable, always treatable and can be preventable. And for all of those interventions, it takes a village.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com