Members of the task force include prominent entities of the city such as the fire and police department. Ivi McDaniel and the Pell City Fire Department celebrate the beginning of the mental health task force. Photo provided by Ivi McDaniel

Pell City Council Member Ivi McDaniel has been on the forefront of creating Pell City’s mental health task force. She decided to create this task force as a network of people to bring awareness and solutions to the city in regards to mental health.

“If one person can’t bring the solution, maybe several people together can bring a solution,” said McDaniel.

She said so far, the program has been well-received and many people have come to her asking how they can get involved. She is hoping this will lead to trained professionals eventually being attracted to the program and willing to volunteer some of their time.

“When I ran for city council, it was in my mind that it was one of the things I wanted to do, I wanted to bring some type of focus on mental health in our city to to and try to try and improve it to make it better,” said McDaniel.

The project was spurred by the creation of Sem;colon, which is another mental health awareness campaign program designed for local teens.

Awareness, resources and training are the three things she’s most interested in, as solving and developing as the task force leaves its infancy. The long-term goal is to put a crisis center in Pell City so that people will have somewhere to go to for help.

The first goal of the task force is to bring awareness and reduce stigma about the conversation of mental health. She wants people to understand that dealing with mental health issues, especially following COVID, is something that is more common than not.

The second goal is to develop resources, which involves working with community clinic and the hospital to find their resources and create new ones. She said the mental health system is broken and it’s hard for people to locate help, especially with so few resources.

While she and others work to figure out solutions to lack of mental health support in Pell City, she asks what can be done in the meantime to boost people’s morale. She said she has many ideas that will eventually require help from people

The third goal is training, which includes the mental health first aid training, which would be getting the average person aware and able to look for the signs of someone struggling with mental health issues.

“If a person is in a crisis, what can we do and how can we help them,” said McDaniel.

Another facet of the program she intends to develop with creating signage to put into the city that will offer resources for someone who might be struggling.

“The whole mental health task force is to bring awareness and we need to remove the stigma through conversation by saying this is what mental health is. It doesn’t mean you’re crazy or weird,” said McDaniel.

McDaniel said her personal passion for the project is making sure people of the community come together to create solutions that will outlast her position on city council: “My hope is that our city will get this right, so that other communities will look and say ‘OK, how did you do it?’”