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Bastrop bakery serves sweet treats during May to support mental health

Austin American-Statesman - 5/20/2021

Jennifer Johnson considers herself an upbeat person.

It helps generate the positive attitude she takes into each day as her small business makes strides toward returning to pre-coronavirus sales levels.

Johnson is the owner and baker at Johnson’s Bakery, at 715 Old Austin Highway in Bastrop. The bakery has been a destination for residents to pick up sweet treats since it opened in November 2014.

But for the first time, some of the baked confections she's offering are meant to promote positive mental health and shed light on the matter. Mental health is especially important to Johnson, who said she can intimately relate to people who struggle with emotional and behavioral adjustment.

For Johnson, mental health is personal. She learned about the death by suicide of a second cousin through Facebook.

“I don’t think he told anyone that he was sad. I think that’s the case in a lot of people that deal with depression,” Johnson said. “They kind of bottle it up and it’s not something that they think they can talk about.”

Johnson's Bakery is one of nine bakeries in Central Texas acting as Depressed Cake Shops, an effort to raise awareness about mental health that began in England in 2013.

Since its debut nearly a decade ago, Depressed Cake Shops have become a fixture in the United States, with pop-up bakeries spending a day selling sugary treats while helping inform people about the importance of mental health.

Locally, the Depressed Cake Shop campaign is run through the National Alliance on Mental Illness Central Texas, which has put its own spin on the concept.

Instead of just a one-day event featuring pop-up bakeries, Depressed Cake Shops in Central Texas exist for the whole month of May, which is recognized as Mental Health Awareness Month.

NAMI Central Texas partners with local bakeries during May to offer items like cookies and cupcakes that highlight the initiative. The featured baked goods often come with gray frosting on the outside, with colorful sprinkles that pour out from the inside when people bite or break apart the treats.

Karen Ranus, who has served as the executive director of NAMI Central Texas since 2014, said she enjoys the concept and message behind the Depressed Cake Shop initiative because her daughter lives with anxiety and chronic depression.

“Part of the reason I do the work that I do is I almost lost my own daughter to suicide about 10 years ago,” Ranus said. “People love to eat and I think one of the things that we do when we eat is we talk and we tell stories, and so I love this idea of taking a baked good and having some element of gray on the outside, but then being able to open it up and then there’s some color to it because it was so emblematic of exactly what we hope to impart upon people.”

Johnson’s Bakery is the first bakery in Bastrop to be a Depressed Cake Shop through NAMI Central Texas.

As part of the initiative, Johnson’s Bakery is offering customers different types of decorated cookies that feature a gray frosting exterior and sprinkles inside, or with inspirational messages written in the outer frosting.

“I’m hoping they get the gray, cloudy cookie and break it and sprinkles fall out and they’re like ‘Oh my gosh, this is so cute,’” Johnson said of anticipated customer reaction. “I hope that they buy them and share them and that helps spread the word.”

Discussing mental health

The Depressed Cake Shop initiative goes beyond just providing a sweet treat to customers.

As part of the initiative, NAMI Central Texas created conversation cards about mental health that are placed in the bakeries.

Listed on the cards are facts about mental health, common warning signs of mental health issues, tips for having a mental health conversation and information about available resources.

Ranus said the cards were created after people frequently asked NAMI Central Texas about how to best engage in positive mental health dialogue.

“I was struck by how often people needed that coaching. They knew they needed to talk about it, but they felt awkward talking about it,” Ranus said. “To me, it’s like everything you need to have a really positive mental health conversation, all in one place.”

Another key part of NAMI Central Texas’ efforts to encourage positive mental health discourse is through the work of volunteers, like Terry Stringer.

Stringer helped start a NAMI chapter in Bastrop after he arrived in the city in 2015.

Stringer said his connection to NAMI Central Texas began when one of his sons started showing symptoms of mental illness.

“Over a long period of time we were able to find that therapy and the medications seemed to work the best for him,” Stringer said. “Of course along the way we discovered that we needed to work on not just helping him, but begin to investigate ways that we could do a good job of taking care of ourselves, rubbing shoulders with other people who had family members struggling with some form of mental illness.”

After learning about NAMI, Stringer said he participated in a 12-week course called Family to Family Education that fundamentally changed the way he viewed mental illness and his son.

“I thought I knew something about mental illness, but I learned that I didn’t know anything at all,” Stringer said. “It was a life changer for me. I became a more loving, compassionate father, I believe, as a result of that course. It helped me see my son in a new way.”

Stringer said one of the most important things he does as a NAMI Central Texas volunteer is helping connect people with a NAMI group and the materials they need to get on a path toward recovery, help and education.

Stringer said progress has been slow for the NAMI chapter in Bastrop, and it wasn’t uncommon for the meetings, held at a local church, to have just four people attend, including Stringer and his wife.

Those meetings have been paused since the coronavirus pandemic began last year, but Stringer said he’s able to keep tabs on the mental health situation in Bastrop County with the help of his daughter, who works as a mental health professional in Bastrop.

“We have done our best to become walking, talking posters for the (NAMI) program. It is always word of mouth, that’s what I find about this,” Stringer said. “We have many, many, many people here in the county, as we do everywhere, who struggle with some form of mental illness. It’s high time that in the culture as a whole that we accept what’s going on in mental health in our communities."

‘We often connect memories to food’

Ranus said the value of the Depressed Cake Shops comes in providing a positive connection for people and mental health.

“By the nature of us being human beings, we often connect memories to food,” Ranus said. “So, I want to connect something joyful and sweet and wonderful to this concept that sometimes feels shameful or embarrassing, so there’s this new connection that we make there.”

Ranus said she’s seen people with mental health challenges, like her daughter, continue to live fulfilling and joyful lives.

This belief is at the heart of events hosted by NAMI Central Texas, such as a Mental Health Month keynote webinar being held May 26 that will feature Iranian-American author Melody Moezzi, but it's also at the core of the organization’s connection to Depressed Cake Shop.

Ranus said one Central Texas bakery that has participated as a Depressed Cake Shop in the past chose to do so after its original owner died by suicide.

“It’s just a great opportunity for them (the bakeries) to highlight an issue that’s important to them as well. Sometimes it’s for very personal reasons,” Ranus said. “I think we live in a culture in which we don’t talk positively and proactively and openly about mental health, so the Depressed Cake Shops and the wonderful baked goods that they make create this wonderful way to do that.”

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Bastrop bakery serves sweet treats during May to support mental health

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