Destiny pointed Schmitz to career in mental health

By Robert Williams

Editor

Becky “Anderson” Schmitz, a 2003 Frazee-Vergas graduate and former Miss Frazee, left school with no plan, but a chance meeting in a post-secondary classroom with a former teacher put her on the path to a successful career working in mental health.

Schmitz is currently the Executive Director of Vikingland Community Support Program, a non-profit in Alexandria that provides adult rehabilitative mental health services in Douglas, Pope and Stevens counties. 

Her road to working in mental health was preceded by a look into a cosmetology degree, but that lasted only a few hours.

“Originally, I went to one day of cosmetology school in Wadena and realized I had no desire to do any of that,” Schmitz laughed.

The former Miss Frazee ended up at Alexandria Technical College’s Human Services program, but after her one day in Wadena she enrolled at Northwest Technical College in Detroit Lakes, now M-State. That’s where fate appeared.

“I went there with no clue what I wanted to do, but I had to take some elective classes,” she said. “One of the classes was with Mr. Hodek, who used to be at the high school, and he taught developmental psychology and that was my first experience in learning about mental health and I just couldn’t get enough of it.”

From there, Schmitz transferred to Alexandria and has been working in mental health for the past 17 years.

“I wanted something that was always changing and never the same,” she said. “I will assure you it’s always changing and it’s never the same. I enjoy people’s stories and I guess as I’ve gone through my own trials and tribulations in life it’s allowed me to have more empathy and understanding what they’re experiencing too.”

Schmitz is very willing to share her own difficult experiences.

“I went through a pretty rough marriage,” she said. “That’s an open piece of my life. I like to speak openly about healthy relationships and domestic violence and I’ve also lost a child. My oldest was stillborn at 39 weeks so I’ve been through a lot of situations that, as they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I’ve learned from those and I’ve learned who I am. Honestly, COVID taught me a lot about myself too. I learned that I’m a lot stronger than I think I am and it was a challenge to continue to keep the doors open here, manage 150 consumers’ lives, make sure my kids made it through school and kept myself sane.”

Going through those ordeals helped Schmitz reach a new plateau in life.

“It all gets strung together and then when you finally become that person, like that whole person in life, it all just makes sense,” she said. “I think I’m finally at that place in my life and I can look back and put it all together.”

She uses that personal growth to help her clients.

“I’ve always believed no matter what situation we’re put into in life it allows us to have some knowledge to give back to other people,” she said. “Now I have more things that I can share with clients that walk through the door.”

Schmitz heads Vikingland’s staff of 10 practitioners in the Alexandria office.

“We are extremely busy all of the time,” said Schmitz. “We are put in people’s lives to provide them with the tools they need to manage their day in the least-restrictive environment. We want them home and doing well and out in the community and living independently—truly living the best life that they can.”

She began her career in mental health working at group homes, but wanted to do more.

“I was more interested in the mental health side of things than the developmental side and obviously, there is a huge need for that, but I liked the mental health piece,” she said.

Her next move was to Milestone Mental Health Service, a halfway house.

“I knew that I kind of wanted to do more than that and oddly enough, the former director here called me one day and asked for my resume. Within three hours, I was a mental health practitioner here,” she said.

A few years later, she became the executive director, a position she’s held for the past seven years. That promotion was part of the plan.

“I always said in my staff reviews, ‘I want to run the place someday.’” 

In doing so, Schmitz joins her employees as a continuing practitioner.

“I have as big of a caseload as everybody else here,” she said. “I think it’s important for me to pull my own weight, aside from everything else I have to do. On average, most of the workers here see anywhere from 17-20 individuals per week, which is actually a lot, because we will see some individuals up to five hours per week so that really adds up.”

Looking back at being the kid in Mr. Hodek’s class, getting her first taste of a future in mental health, and coming full circle to the present of succeeding in the field is a testament to destiny.

“It’s funny how your path all comes together,” she said. “It all just kind of came into place and here I am. I love it and I love everything about the challenge of it and what I get to do on a daily basis.”

There were other high school mentors that brought out aspects of Schmitz’s character that she found crucial to her development.

“One of the people that I know was a part of helping me bring out my personality in my high school years was Ta Fett and I was part of the Frazee Fly Girls,” said Schmitz. “She was one of the first people that was able to embrace this spunky side of who I was. As a wrestling cheerleader and Mr. Nagel and as Miss Frazee you learn different ways to present yourself and that mindset.”

Working in the mental health field for nearly two decades has taught Schmitz how to manage other aspects of self while negotiating the difficulty of helping others with their problems and not making them her own.

“You do have to learn a piece of detaching yourself,” she said. “It can truly consume you bringing everybody’s problems home. I’m an emotional disaster most of the time. I pick up on other people’s emotions and I feel so bad and my heart is consumed by their stories. It takes a lot of practice to learn to shut that off. At the same time, I’ve met so many incredible people. I’ve learned so much about myself and what I want to learn from them to implement into my life—their struggles and what they’ve done to get to the other side of things too. As much as it’s a stressor I’ve learned a lot from people too, because people have incredible stories that have led them to this place in life. I get to have that and I appreciate that.”

The mental health field presents slippery slopes when investing in very personal care for people who are sometimes learning to actually care about themselves.

“For the most part, it’s an honor to work with these individuals,” she said. “I just like to see the final product of a person coming in the door and working through the program and discharging and living their life, having a job and being back on track. It’s extremely rewarding. There are some that we discharge and never see again. There are some that end services and come back maybe once a year. It depends on life situations. Mental health can be so sneaky too. So many individuals can be doing well and something triggered in their brain that kind of sets them back and they do come back into our lives to understand what went wrong and what needs to change. There are more successes than not, but again, the whole COVID situation has changed mental health. I knew there was going to be a fallout but now we’re seeing the wave kind of hit. We have to brace for the storm of everybody reaching out for services and do the best that we can.”

The pandemic created initial panic and excess stress, but it also provided new opportunities. Plus, Schmitz is the kind of person who would prefer to have more work than not enough. 

“I function better when I’m on fire,” she said. “A normal day of chaos actually feels more comfortable than a day of, oh, now what do I have to do?”

She tackled the COVID issues head on and found new outlets for her work.

“We got word on a Wednesday that we had to close down on Friday and this was a whole new territory,” said Schmitz. “I didn’t even know how to process this. I was in panic mode. How are we going to continue to help people? We work in the community with them all day long. You couldn’t go to the hospitals because they were full of sick people. What are we going to do about mental health? I’m not going to lie. I had a meltdown. I just said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do at this point.’”

A co-worker suggested doing videos on social media as a place to start.

“It was going to be a way for people to feel normal,” said Schmitz. “They can check in and see your face. It was our way of keeping them, look at me, we got this, we’re going to get through this together. Thankfully, we were only closed for two weeks and we got to go back out. We had to keep working. We have to keep people well.”

The videos began from her home. She was telling jokes, trying to stay light and funny, sometimes with her kids. 

“I just wanted people to smile and see something normal and oddly enough people enjoyed them and I just kept doing them and it’s been almost three years,” Schmitz said. “For a long time, we didn’t have groups, we didn’t do a whole lot, so this was a way you can keep yourself in check, learn your coping skills, give yourself some things to think about. I enjoy doing them and it’s been incredible to learn how many other people watch them and I hope people enjoy them and I have no problem on a video to tell you when I’m having a bad day when things aren’t going well. I might be bubbly most of the time but there are days when I just don’t care either. It’s good to have that normal piece of things.”

A suggestion to transfer her Facebook videos to LinkedIn led to another outlet. Schmitz was contacted to start writing for a health blog. Leery at first, writing helped Schmitz create her mental health toolbox, a treatment utility she created where she matches a tool with a coping skill that she uses in her practice.

“It’s funny. Again, it all came together to this world I would have never guessed but I think it’s absolutely fantastic,” she said.

Becky has also transitioned into public speaking at local hospitals and school classrooms. That is a part of her career she is looking to expand.

“I want to be a public speaker,” she said. “I love everything about talking. I’ve been on stage and in pageants. I would love to do more. I would really love to travel and speak publicly; that’s what I aspire to do someday. It’s been fun to go out and talk about it.”

Away from work, Schmitz concentrates all of her time on motherhood. Many aspects of her daughter’s lives are reminiscent of her own upbringing in Frazee.

“I’m a single mom so I spend my time with them,” she said. “My oldest is in high school now. She was part of the dance team, which brings me back because I love everything about dance and I have such great memories with that. My youngest is a gymnast so that has been fun. We like to travel and thrift shop. We’re all over the place and always on the go. Honestly, I don’t know where the days and the time go. I just hold on and by the time we get to Friday, I’m not sure how exactly we got here but we made it through.”