What I said at the Henry

I gave a presentation in the Henry’s lobby in March on anxiety and depression. It ran about thirty minutes. I had built a body-map handout to go with it, the kind of one-page sheet that names sensations rather than diagnoses, with a small stack of phone numbers along the bottom edge.

I opened with a question. “Has anyone here ever felt their heart pounding really hard, not because you’d been running, just out of nowhere? Maybe lying in bed at night?” People nodded. I went through the body region by region. Chest. Stomach. Shoulders. Hands. Legs. The framing was not the medical names. The framing was the sensations.

What I learned that morning, about clinical work as much as about the room, is that the words a patient does not have for what is happening to them is often where the gap lives. People who would push back if I said the word “depression” were comfortable saying their chest felt tight. The handout was a translation device. Numbers for the SF Behavioral Health Access Line. Numbers for 988. A suggestion that asking for help is the harder thing, not the easier one. A reminder that the body has been working overtime and that is not a flaw.

The handout listed the SF Behavioral Health Access Line, 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and Crisis Text Line (text HOME to 741741).