Pyx Health: Helping Individuals of All Ages Overcome Loneliness

This week's educational episode discussion features Pyx Health, a company on a mission to aid individuals battling loneliness, which can trigger various behavioral and physical health challenges. Pyx Health employs a blend of technology and human services to deliver around-the-clock care and support for those in need. Pyx Health strives to assist these young caregivers by offering social skills training, peer mentoring, and activities to help them achieve balance and nurture a stronger sense of self. 

Today’s episode spotlights the significant efforts Pyx Health is making to aid young caregivers, a demographic often overlooked. Terry and Kathleen share compelling stories illustrating how the Pyx's interventions have empowered young caregivers to find equilibrium, enhance their social skills, and engage with their peers and community. At Pyx Health, staff understand the need for additional resources and are ready to offer critical support to these hidden helpers.  

Transcript

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Hey folks, it's your favorite sisters here with the Confessions of a reluctant caregiver podcast, this episode is part of our special series caregiving youth hidden in plain sight. We're partnering with my care friends to feature organizations who offer services and support to millions of our youngest caregivers worldwide. Now let's listen in as we learn more about these amazing organizations. Hi everybody. Welcome to Confessions of a reluctant caregiver and our educational series caregiving youth hidden in plain sight. We are doing this fantastic series with my care friends. Todd. Keith, Todd, are you out there? I'm here. Oh, you know what, Todd, we don't have Natalie today. She let me host. If she finds out I'm here, it could be trouble. She could Yeah, you should have favorite sister after yours. I should she always does that on her screen. She gets, like, a special title. So I don't know, I'm gonna make sure my phone is off, because I feel like, if she finds out I'm on this recording, she's gonna start calling. So, guys, today, we have a great educational episode, and our guest organization is pics health, and they are an amazing organization. What we're going to do is we actually have two guests with us today, and we're going to introduce them to you to get started. Great well, thanks for that great intro. JT, what can I say? Yeah, we're thrilled to be here. My Care friends, you know, the online community for caregivers and patient advocates, and caregiving youth is near and dear to us as it is to you and Natalie. So you know, let's just jump in, and I'm going to start by doing an intro of Terry. Terry is the chief program officer at pics health. She has 30 years of behavioral health experience providing therapeutic interventions to all age groups in a wide variety of settings, as well as 18 years of experience working at the executive level management within the Arizona Health System. Her passion is serving the youth population, and has dedicated much of her career developing programs and interventions aimed at improving the mental health and well being of youth. Tru utilizes this experience to create a culture of continuous quality improvement at pics health, and she does that through cross system collaborations and implementation of evidence based practices and innovative solutions for treatment issues. She aims to build an exceptional experience for those individuals who seek services. And she is a graduate of the University of Arizona with a Master's in Counseling, and has a strong desire to work with underserved populations to ensure they receive quality care and services. We also have Kathleen Laura with us today, and she is a pics, health, compassionate Support Center specialist. That's a great title, Kathleen, I gotta tell you, ever since Kathleen was young, she says she has had a passion for helping others. Taking care of her family showed her that she has a natural talent for making people feel heard and seen. Now, Kathleen graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in psychology, and since then, her journey has taken her in many directions, which I found out she lived in a very small town close to where I was raised. So I'm so excited each of those destinations has added to her experience and her love for mental health. She works remotely for pics health, providing wellness and emotional support as a mentor to people across the United States, and she finds it incredibly rewarding to hear their stories of growth during her support calls, guys, we are so excited to have you here and so grateful to learn more about pix, health. Well, Todd, you want to jump in? Let our our big question, sure. Sure, before we jump in, we always have to acknowledge the, you know, the canines that walk through a room. It's fine. We love to to to notice that there are pets in the in the recording with us. So we saw a big tail going back and forth. So I had to kick my dog and cat out. So it happens, you know, Natalie has had her dog behind us last week when we were recording. It was great. You just play off of it exactly. The dog may have bumped Terry off. So we'll hold on just a second we did when we were talking, we were learning a little bit about Kathleen and Kathleen, so I will say that you're young. I mean, you are young, and you have been all over the place. You were informative. Yeah, you got your education there. So you talk about your your mental health. Already you're in Oregon now, which is absolutely fantastic. Yeah, cool, yeah. I love being out here. And again, I like learning about all the different areas and places that I can go and help you. They you know, which will dive into that. But it's been great out here as well. It's helped me expand knowledge. Oh, and completely like disconnected after all that. My gosh. All right, so now that we have all the intros and and dogs mishaps out of the way, we can, we can move forward. Let's see what's next. So I'm just going to start. I guess I'll start with a question for Terry. So Terry, can you provide just a quick overview of the pics Health Program? Yeah, I absolutely can. At pics health. Really our mission. We started off. We start off. We still are. We're a loneliness company, and our mission is really to help people suffering from loneliness, because we know it's the root cause of myriad of behavioral health and physical health problems. And so we use, we're a technology supported human service company. And so we use a combination of our app, our technology, and our human services workers such as Kathleen herself, our mentors, to provide some scalable kind of 24/7 care and interventions for people who are lonely. We have lots of contracts with a lot of health plans who provide us with individuals, and we call them and we provide services. They can use our app. We do screenings for loneliness, depression, anxiety, as well as any resource needs. So we do some social determinant of health screenings as well, so that we can connect them with those services. So through our technology, again, it's 24/7 we have a chat that they can use. Our chat bot, Pixar, who they can converse with, who will give them suggestions. We have a lot of resources in the app. We have interventions such as gratefulness journals or stress reducing exercises that they can use in the app as well as educational materials and then resources, real connections to their health plan resources as well as community resources and find help so that they can get connected to all those services that they need. It's wonderful. And then after they take these screenings, if they score high, if we find out that they are lonely or depressed or have these needs, our mentors call out to them telephonically, and we connect with them and have phone calls where we talk to them, we provide companionship. We really talk them through a lot of interventions that I know Kathleen is going to talk about later on. And we we combine, we talk, we schedule regular times when we can talk and converse with them. We also will three way call and live connect them to to health plan resources, community resources, and then we schedule ongoing support so that we can call on Medicaid, and that makes sense for them once a week, once a month, when we can make sure that the resources they got worked. We like to schedule. We like to create goals for them again. If they have a physical, physical health goal, we make sure we help them schedule a doctor's appointment. If they want to go for a walk, we kind of schedule goals. All right, go for go for a walk once, once this week, and we'll touch base with you next week and see how those goals are going. And then we also provide some support with their professional services. So if they're seeing a counselor therapist, we can be supportive in between those visits. And then we can also help them communicate, sometimes, with their counselors, with their doctors. What should you tell your doctor? What should you tell your counselor? What's what's really important, and how you connect with them? And so we really offer kind of the scalable, well rounded support for people, yeah, so with this being our caregiving youth series, Terry, I understand that you all have a youth caregiver type programs, or those are functions that you offer. Can you guys tell me a little bit more about that and what those services look absolutely so we just this year, we've really been putting a lot of effort. We noticed out there that there's this real need for support and services for for caregivers, and then for the youth and the caregiver in combination. And so we definitely provide all those same services for the youth and the caregiver. We support them. I definitely for the youth Well, for the caregivers in particular, a lot of the things we notice around why they're lonely is just it's reduced social engagement and feelings of isolation they become disconnected from, even sometimes, their families, they're spending a lot of time caregiving, not as connected with their spouse and their families and their friends, which is, which is kind of and then increase that stress and anxiety of trying to do all the things, which is even more complicated for youth, right? Because they're in that developmental stage where they're trying to, you know, you. Connect with peers, differentiate from their families and and the and a lot of social pressures. And so it really even complicates it for the youth caregivers, where they feel even more isolated, and we're noticing really a direct connection between like, those feelings of loneliness and depression and some anxiety. And so we are providing those services like we talked about, directly to the youth and to the caregivers. And I know Kathleen has some good she's had some really good interactions, so I'd love for her to tell you kind of what, what her interactions are like. That's like, a perfect segue to the next question. My gosh, and we didn't, let's bounce over to Kathleen. So Kathleen, in your experience, how does loneliness impact caregivers? Yeah, so I I've noticed a pattern, I think, and this is coming from my own personal experience, from my being a caregiver for a family member, as well as just seeing that same pattern repeated in people that I speak to through pics and like Terry touched on, it's more so I've noticed a pattern of isolation. First off, in caregivers, they seem to become consumed with the caregiving role as a whole, and it's hard for them to balance life outside of that, and it's just a unique experience to be in a caregiving role. And I think because of that, it's hard for them to find someone to relate to those stressors. So you know that, again, contributes to the feelings of loneliness for them. So it's, it's a it's kind of a pattern that I'm trying to help them with balancing life and things and just coming from a place of understanding that and understanding how difficult it can be to be in a caregiving role, to be consumed by it. But yeah, it's definitely the isolation aspect of it that I've noticed a lot and and the loneliness that can impact them. Well, Terry, I'm going to stick with Kathleen for just a second. So what I'm gonna stick with her. So tell me about an experience, you know, tell me about one of those calls. If I were the caregiving youth and you were working with me, how many calls are there like? What is my conversation? What is it like if I'm someone that's getting assistance from piXL, absolutely do. Kathleen, because you are you are our mentor. You are, right? Yeah. So we always start off. It kind of goes in series with pics, but we start off when I get to them as a mentor, I call them, I do a welcome call. And I think the most important aspect that we try to do is to help them feel seen and heard, and just that, I'm a human to human contact, right? So I tell them a little bit about myself. We do the intro. I let them know how the mentoring program works, which, you know, we can set up. Like Terry said, either weekly, biweekly or monthly companion calls is what we like to call them, and it's pretty much just a safe space for them to talk about any life changes going on, stressors going on. I like to touch on, you know, wellness goals that they may have. So we can set those up. If it's like, you know, well, once or twice a week I'd like to get out and go to the grocery store, which can be really challenging for some people. And you know, that's something that I can help them out with, and check in on them, see how they're doing. There's also, like, third party things I can call help them with appointments. But primarily, I've noticed that a lot of people just enjoy the fact that they know that I will consistently call them for as long as that they need me. Yeah, that's it's such a powerful thing that you you all do, having been a youth caregiver and knowing that at the age of nine, you know, I never called myself that at nine, but knowing all of the challenges that go along both that and then in my adult role as caregiver for both of my parents, I can look back and reflect. So it's amazing what you are doing to support youth caregivers. So I'm gonna popcorn it back over to Terry. Terry can it's a two part question. Can you share? Number one, what support and strategies do you offer? And then the second part is, are you just chatting, or is there a specific script or intention? So we do offer there. It's not it can be chatting, but it's but the intention on the phone calls is not just to chat. We do employ a variety of some evidence based techniques we use based in some positive psychology. So what we know for sure is these positive psychology interventions or exercises, which are just simple, simple sort of things, gratitude letters, I mean things everybody's heard about gratitude letters, stress reduction, even things like habit trackers, some techniques about how to how to create small talk with somebody, how to make connections, how to ask for support, identifying one. Of the exercises I like is there's a an exercise about identifying the supports that you have around you that maybe you haven't really identified. I think sometimes when people get lonely, they just withdraw and withdraw and withdraw. And we try and help them identify some things that may be around to them, or some community something. So those are really very helpful. I think that we always try and set a goal for them again, even if it's just to do this gratitude letter once a day, or this stress reduction exercise or write down or go to the grocery store like Kathleen talked. I mean, we've had people, we've really worked to them to just go to the grocery store and actually go in and then really try and help them make connections. I think our ultimate goal is to help them make community connections. And I have just so many stories of people that they started and they told us they didn't have anybody right in our screenings, they say we have nobody to talk to. We work with them for eight to 12 weeks, and they have joined a church group, or they've started going to support meetings, or they've, you know, connected with family members that they hadn't connected with before, and that's ongoing, and we kind of read, we rescreen them, and their answers are, yes, I do have somebody to talk to. Yes, I do feel I get out more often. I mean, I just have multiple stories with that so, and I think it feels like chatting to them, but there's really some intention driven behind that. We also know that physical exercise helps with depression, anxiety, loneliness, and so like Kathleen said, if they have those wellness goals, we want to kind of get them out of the house, or even just taking a walk or going down the stairs. We've worked with people doing things like that. You know, the other things we try and do is get them to their health care professionals. We do work with a lot of people, and I think the youth population, even as well, where they have kind of these comorbid conditions and haven't been to the doctor, can't get to the doctor or or need some follow ups. And so I've noticed a lot with our youth. Also, we've helped them connect with services and supports that they didn't even know, because sometimes as a teenager, you even know what's available to you. And so I want to make sure that we get them connected with all the professional services and support groups that are available to them as well. That's awesome, my gosh. So Kathleen, age for age range that you help? Are you helping the full bracket of age ranges? Or what's your focus? I recently just took on a couple of different programs for youth, so I've been working more with youth, but our age range is I've worked from someone all the way up until I think I have one gentleman who is about 89 years old, and I call him on a week to week basis, and then I have a 14 year old that I also call so and you know, the way that I navigate those calls can be very different, depending on their needs and things, but it's a wide variety of different things that's good that you've stepped that in. Well, that was my that I didn't mean to refuse. So that's my question. They are perfect examples. So you've got this 89 year old and you've got your 14 year old, so how are those different? Like, how are you treating those differently? Because I know you got to change up. You got to be cool with this 14 year old and you're 89 year old. Maybe not so cool. But what are your different What's your What are your different methods? What do you see differently with those two? Kathleen, yeah, that's a great question. So when I support loneliness and youth, obviously it's going to be a little bit different than supporting adults, and I think it's just primarily due to the differences. And I talked to Terry a little bit about this, and there are developmental stages, obviously, and you know, social environments, and you know, the support strategies that I use for youth are primarily trying to teach them skills through like activities, social skills trainings and our peer mentoring calls help them with like their skills towards expressing their feelings. We also have a Thrive program, which I can tell you a little bit about that too. It's, it's pretty much an eight week program, and it's once a week calls from us, one of the mentors, where we've worked through the activities in the app together. So within those activities, like Terry touched on, there's, you know, small talk to connect, which is helping them get out of the house to make small talk with someone, which can be challenging for someone who is isolated, but, you know, depending on the age bracket that I'm working with, we kind of pick and choose the activities that I think will help them grow, right? So with youth, again, I focus more on activities for their social skills and development. Developing those social skills as I guess, with adults, it's more so they're experiencing loneliness, maybe due to life transitions, right? That youth wouldn't necessarily go through yet, divorce, retirement, you know, a variety of different things. So I support them a little bit differently. I look for local like community programs that they can be involved in, or just allow a safe space for them to talk about those life changes. Yeah, but I think the connecting factor between youth and adults is just positive, affirming words and validation in their feelings. That's something that no matter what age group you're in, you need that. Wow, yeah, exactly it's right. So unless I have it wrong. JJ, we have one question left. I mean, it's hard to believe I have loads of questions, but keep you hit that one Todd, one formal question. Formal question. So So Terry, is there any advice to adults who may be concerned that that a youth in their life is lonely, or how might they recognize that that youth is lonely, I think it's, it's very important to continue to connect with your youth. I think that there, there are some pretty telltale signs. Even with youth that are lonely, they do tend to withdraw. They tend to isolate. You won't see them very much. They're not connecting with their friends. They may be, you know, in their room, I think stating that they don't have friends, I think it's very important to to keep checking in with them. I think what I also find with youth, and I think what works with us really well also, is we ask them, right? So we're talking to them. We ask them. We're engaging them. I think it's very important to destigmatize. One of the things that I know comes up with youth is as they're trying to differentiate from their families, they're not feeling quite connected with their peers, and anything that makes them feel different or afraid they're really not going to be able to vocalize. So I think it's very important to talk with them about the normalcy of feeling lonely, of feeling anxious, of how everybody experiences it in their lives, and really help them to normalize that, and then really help them to identify, I think it's very important to get connected to professional services as well. I wouldn't shy away from from that either, and how they can get connected to support groups and professionals in the in the communities, but really just just allowing them that space to talk about their feelings the destigmatization, and then that they're not alone, that there are people that that feel the same way, and that you can kind of help it through it. I also want to make sure that as teens, we're really helping them develop a strong sense of self, and so you're really talking to them. One of the exercises I like is like, what helping them identify. What do you like in a friend? What would you want in a friend? What do you like about yourself? You know, these kind of affirmations talk to me about the things that you know you feel, that you do like about yourself, or that are important and helping them because they're in that developmental stage as well as kind of defining themselves and helping them do that in a healthy way. So I'll jump ahead with unscripted questions. How's that, Todd? I'm pulling one out of my hat here. So I think for us, and I know this is Todd's mission as well, and I believe it's the same with pics. Change is what we're all looking for, positive change to help people's lives. And I know you guys probably have loads of stories about a client, someone that you made a positive change and like something that you felt amazing about. Can you tell me just something that comes to mind where you made a change, and this is something that picks health. Could do if someone out there is lonely, a caregiver, a caregiving youth that needs help. And I'll let Kathleen answer that one, yeah, I can jump in. Okay, yeah. So like you said, I have so many stories, but the one that comes to mind is there was a youth in a caregiving role, and I related a lot to this youth, because there I recognized their need for support was different from regular youth population, right there. You know, in that caregiving role, they're taking on a lot of adult responsibilities, and they felt the need to kind of grow up quickly and put hobbies and interests aside, right? So I, I help support this youth just by being a simple reminder of not having to grow up too quickly, and kind of work on their feelings of guilt, of wanting to take some time to be with friends, you know, away from her grandmother. And so we developed over the course of a few weeks, we were helping her with her social skills so she didn't know how to develop social skills and recognize who was there for her as support in her friend group. So we would work on, you know, open ended questions she would ask me, and then I would kind of throw them back at her. We would make conversation in that way to help her social skills. And we would practice together over a few weeks. And what I loved about that is that she was able to find balance. I remember one conversation specifically. She really wanted to play a video game, but she's like, Oh, but I have to go, you know, run some errands for my grandma, and I don't know if I'll have time, so I helped her make a little schedule for her day. And I said, Why don't you do this at 1pm and you can still play your game. You are. Still a teenager, I want you to remember that, and she appreciated that so much, and it was just so rewarding to hear her social skills grow over just eight weeks. And I She kind of came out of her shell, and at the end of our companion calls, we did the eight week Drive Program, she had made two new friends at school, and she was able to find time to be with them on Sundays, and they were going out to do a couple of activities together, and, you know, she thanked me just for helping her with her social skills. And I think it's just really important to identify the needs of each specific youth, right? They're all going to be different, but that story was really rewarding, and we spaced out our calls. Now we're on once a month, so I'm like, Well, I'm glad you're doing good, but I miss talking to you weekly. But that's what we want, right? We don't we don't want to keep them on it. We want them to grow. So yeah, that was just one of the many stories it was amazing. Yeah, you know, I know that there is that that loneliness is pervasive, and that is with adults and caregiving youth, you know. And I'm one of them. I know Kathleen, you said you've got a story. Everyone does have a story about that, that experience. So if I'm a caregiving youth, and I'm listening to this, and I'm thinking, how can pics Help me? Help me? Because you guys have a great little guy that is your, you know, that is your little mascot, and it's, you know, okay, I see that. How can he help me? Tell me how someone I know that you do the intakes, the questionnaires, but how can they learn more and and become part of pics? How can they get help? Our website is available. There's a lot of information on the website. It'll it'll give you links to resources and to how you can get involved and become part of pics. It's got the phone numbers, and so you can definitely go to our website and and take a look at that. And it's available both on the computer and on the on the phone as well. Well, Todd, do you have any questions, or have I covered everything? I think we got it all. I'm sure we'll get off the call. Wish we asked. We're always happy if you have anything that, if there's, is there anything else that either of you would like to add that we missed? I don't think, I don't think you've missed anything. I just want to express my gratitude for allowing us to come on here and talk about again, this, this population, the youth, is really important and dear to my heart, and so I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. Well, thank you. Well, we want you all to know that all of the information for pics health is going to be on our website. You'll find it on confessions, everelected caregiver.com on the caregiving youth page. You'll find it on my care friends, you know you can even, you know, I don't know, you can book Todd personally, they're going to hit you up on Facebook Todd, but you can find lots of information about pics health on our pages for this fantastic series, caregiving youth, hidden in plain sight until we confess again. As sister Natalie says, we hope you are well and we'll see you again soon. Bye, bye. Well, friends, that's a wrap for today's educational episode. Thank you for listening to our special series, caregiving youth hidden in plain sight, and don't forget to visit our website to sign up for our monthly newsletter. Sign up for the free sisterhood advantage discount club, and of course, connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Twitter and Pinterest. You'll also find the video recording of all our episodes on the confessions website and our YouTube Channel. We'll see you next time when we confess again. You