Meet Jason Rabotnick | Everything MH Founder (Partnered with Slow-Motion Magic)

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jason Rabotnick and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jason, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
Being completely honest, I created Everything MH because I wish there was a site like this when I was younger. I’ve persevered through enough battles with my own mental health to know that we aren’t always believed and supported. Undoubtedly, when I was younger (child through young adult), I could have avoided so many hardships if I had more information, access to care, and validation.

It’s been well-established that the sooner help is provided, the more likely it is to be effective. Simply put, I need people to know that there is help available to them; no matter the circumstance or the weight of it all, and no matter how isolated someone may feel, they are not the first to go through this. I believe that we are fortunate to live in a world where people choose to learn from their battles with mental health, and the field of medicine, behavioral health, and psychology have developed. I haven’t contributed new information to those fields yet, but I sincerely hope I have helped to provide a space for people to receive the understanding, awareness, and help they intrinsically deserve.

I created Everything MH as a hub for resources relating to mental health. It’s purpose is to appeal to and support both analytical and emotionally-driven ways of thinking in order to make everyone feel safe, seen, validated, and informed. It helps the community by doing just that: we provide cited statistics in order to show just how common it is to experience emotional and mental struggle (and inversely, how uncommon it is to go through life without one of the many struggles people may face), and it shares personal stories from people who have experiences these diagnoses, habits, and/or and ways of thinking so that the difficulty and complexity of the issues we face are better understood and related to.
Once everyone has the basic information (what it is, how the stigma is inherently driven by misinformation and fear, and how to approach the topic or person), then they can also use one of the many free resources we list so that they can receive the help they need (and frankly, they deserve).

(I want to make it very clear that I do not provide services directly. My aim is to help others discover the resources available to them, wherever they may be, with ease.)

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I started working in healthcare when I was 16 years-old. It was a Summer job at a skilled nursing facility, providing one-on-one care to a geriatric patient with cataracts, dementia, and a language barrier. I watched as people talked about him as though he were aggressive. As if it weren’t entirely valid for a man, with no awareness of where he is or who is near him, to push them, and express fear and anger. After high school, I earned my EMT-B license and got hired in a senior living facility. Within six months, I was placed in the memory care department. Again, witnessing people being dismissed simply because they were not cognitively present. Next, I worked as an EMT for an interfacility transport (ambulance) company. After approximately another year of seeing the same type of treatment (or lack-thereof), I worked for a 9-1-1 agency. I responded to overdoses, car crashes, assaults, and a variety of mental health issues. The patient that stood out the most, who I’ll never forget, was a twelve year-old girl who attempted to overdose because the bullying at her school was so consistent and invasive that she believed the demeaning comments she heard. Through my own experiences, and constant exposure to others’ experiences, it became clear that people need more help. To be clear, I don’t only mean medical intervention. People need more help feeling heard and finding support.
It absolutely wasn’t easy to learn and advocate as much as I have. Providing proper bedside treatment in the world of medicine made me feel alone in the field. But, if anything, that feeling served as an ongoing reminder that what I was working toward had to be a priority.
All I’ve ever wanted was for people to know that they matter, and their complaints and fears are real. I may have only seen these people when I helped them shower or eat, and I may have only been in the ambulance with them for fifteen minutes at a time, but there was a palpable shift when we discussed their feelings, thoughts, and symptoms. “Being there for a friend” is a concept that we learn as young as kindergarten-age, but actually giving someone the time to talk, and being bold enough to go off the typical social script, is too rare of an experience.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I live near Los Angeles (CA). If I had a week with a friend, it would probably involve one of our beaches during the day and a dive bar at night. That would give us plenty of time to talk and enjoy each other’s company without interruption or distraction. The next day, I would take them to get lunch at a small, less popular shop in the city, and end the day showing them LA’s nightlife (the Hollywood strip and West Hollywood). The next day would involve going out to breakfast, and grocery shopping before a few-day camping trip. I’d really work toward showing them the city highlights and the getaways when the rush-hour and daily pace starts to build.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I would be honored to give a shout-out in this series to Slow-Motion Magic. It was created by my father, David Rabotnick, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) in 2013. He was a nursing student as the time and, instead of accepting the diagnosis at face value and quitting, he doubled down on being a person of comfort, empathy, and advocacy. Magic became his unique form of physical therapy, and his non-profit uses that to spread awareness and information of PD, raise funds for advancing PD-related research, and he just published his book: Conjuring for a Cure: A Story of Parkinson’s, Magic, and Deep Brain Stimulation. Truly, I could not have accomplished (and continue to accomplish) my achievements without his inspiration-through-action.

Website: https://www.everythingmh.org/