Meet the new deputy commissioner of mental health

In March of this year, Harmony Ayers-Friedlander started her new role as the deputy commissioner of mental health and the director of community services for the Tompkins County government. Now with several months under her belt, she said the experience so far has been enriching, and she looks forward to her continued role at the county.

Ayers-Friedlander has lived in Tompkins County for 30 years and has worked in the human services field her entire adult life, starting as a summer intern in college providing youth programming for a shelter in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

“I just loved that work,” she said. “I worked with a lot of children who were just growing up in poverty and didn’t have a lot of summer programming available to them. And I just fell in love with it.”

Ayers-Friedlander earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology, but it wasn’t until she started working at the Lansing Residential Center — a medium-secure correctional facility for girls ages 11 to 17 who have been adjudicated by New York state family courts for various criminal offenses — that she really became interested in counseling.

“A lot of the girls there had significant trauma in their lives, and they would say to me, ‘You should just become a therapist. You’re just so good to talk to, and you’ll help us out a lot,’” Ayers-Friedlander said. “I just didn’t think there was anything more interesting you could do than help people heal with your words alone. Your words are your medicine, and sometimes not your words, just your presence and your being there when people are going through hard things, and to have that really create change in people, what better job could you possibly have?”

Ayers-Friedlander earned a master’s degree in counseling from Liberty University in Virginia and became a state-licensed mental health counselor. Upon moving to Ithaca, she opened her own private practice, but that was short-lived. Almost all her work that followed was outside the county, much of it centered around juvenile justice settings and residential programs.

In 2015, Ayers-Friedlander went back to school to earn a master’s degree in public administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, with an advanced certificate of study in health services management.

Her most recent work prior to working for Tompkins County government was as the executive director of Family Service Society, Inc., where she led the agency in providing quality professional counseling and community services for children and families throughout Steuben County and the surrounding area, according to a recent press release from the Tompkins County Health Department.

Ayers-Friedlander said she thoroughly enjoyed her time at the Family Service Society and believes in its mission.

“Over the span of my career, I really felt that … we need more services in our communities so the children don’t have to leave their homes and all their connections in school and all that,” she said. “And the Family Service Society provides a lot of services for families and children that are really good supports that can help build that system, that sort of safety net that families need in their communities when they’re struggling to so that their children can get the services they need immediately.”

Ayers-Friedlander’s interest in the deputy commissioner of mental health position actually began just before starting at the Family Service Society, but it wasn’t until recently that she decided to apply.

“I’ve lived here for 30 years, and even though I worked mostly outside of this community, this is my home,” she said. “And I really wanted to have that opportunity to do something here in my community. And the position had been vacant for a while, and I really felt like this is a way that I could really contribute to my local community.”

Another large factor in her decision was the merger between the county’s Health Department and Mental Health Department. Back in December of 2019, the Tompkins County Legislature authorized the implementation of a plan to merge the two departments, and the process is expected to be completed within the next couple of months (full article at t.ly/eGic).

When Ayers-Friedlander went to Syracuse University, she wrote a paper on innovative solutions in the mental health field and referenced an example out of Baltimore where officials there had done a similar type of merger, so she has high hopes for what benefits the merger will bring to Tompkins County.

“You can create a one-stop shop for people where they can get all of their health care needs met, and we can really tackle the stigma that we still experienced with mental health by combining it with other health care needs,” she said. “And I think, by the integration, we can just do things a lot better. And that was exciting to me to be part of something so innovative like that.”

Ayers-Friedlander has been in her position at the county for about four months, but she said it “seems like a week” because everything’s flown by so fast. She said her colleagues have been very supportive, friendly and patient, which she greatly appreciates.

While she’s faced some challenges relating to pandemic restrictions, the biggest challenge facing Ayers-Friedlander has to do with the pandemic’s impact on the county’s — and the whole country’s — mental health.

“We’ve seen an increase in anxiety and depression, and I was just reading a report on post-traumatic stress disorder in first responders,” she said. “These are things that are an outgrowth of the pandemic, the impacts on children’s socialization and just all of us feeling safe in our worlds. We kind of need predictability, and we haven’t had that in a long time.”

On top of that, the pandemic caused a large economic crisis, which most affected those in already vulnerable populations. Couple that with a year filled with social unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd, and it was a culmination of factors that had a detrimental effect on almost everyone’s mental health.

“I just think we’re collectively different, and we need a lot of healing in a lot of ways,” Ayers-Friedlander said. “And the most vulnerable people in our society — people with serious mental illness, people who are living in poverty, people who have experienced racism and discrimination — have had it the worst.”

To help address this increased need, the Mental Health Department is bringing on more social workers and focusing on increasing the use of methods like group therapies and telehealth. Staff members are also focusing on substance use, which has increased greatly during the pandemic.

As for her goals specifically, Ayers-Friedlander said her first is to listen so she can learn the particular needs of the community and what residents could benefit from the most. After that, she wants to make sure that her team feels supported and that their hard work is recognized.

“We’re all exhausted, and it’s hard to be a therapist when you hear your clients talking about things that you’re worried about yourself in your own life,” she said. “You’re bearing witness to all these things going on in other people’s lives, but with the pandemic, so many of us were experiencing the same kinds of things at the same time that were stressful and difficult.”

In the long term, Ayers-Friedlander said she wants to find ways to better coordinate health services across the county, as she said we have a “rich array of programming and services, but it doesn’t seem like they’re always well connected with each other.”

“You put your head down, and you just do your job, and you forget sometimes to look up and see what your neighbors are doing and how, maybe together, we could do something even better,” she said.

For more information about Tompkins County mental health services, visit www2.tompkinscountyny.gov/mh or call (607) 274-6200.