The Wellness Studio, off Highland Road in Baton Rouge, was founded by Dr. Mary Kathryn Gastinel and Dr. Katie Fetzer, both licensed mental health professionals with 31 years of combined clinical experience.
Fetzer spent the first part of her career working in hospital settings, gaining clinical experience and knowledge in the areas of psycho-oncology and grief. Fetzer saw firsthand the role that medicinal and sterile environments play in a client’s overall comfort level and treatment experience.
With a call to do more, creating a private practice setting was a natural next step. The Wellness Studio was established in 2012, with its first location serving the Baton Rouge community. In 2014, the Covington office was opened, with a pilot New Orleans location to soon follow and serve a larger population in Southeast Louisiana.
In her approach to her work, she tries to break through the stigmas that still exist around mental health.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you define mental health? What does the Wellness Studio do?
Mental health is the thing that everyone’s realizing connects to everything. It’s an underlying issue under all things. It’s our brains. We’re all collectively together, realizing mental health is so important but also hard to talk about.
The Wellness Studio is a mental health counseling practice. All of our staff here, all of our clinicians are having either masters or doctorate level degrees in mental health counseling. Our bread and butter is psychotherapy — we’re in it for the long journey with people who are suffering and really getting to the root of what’s going on with them.
We don’t want the quick Band-Aid. We want to help people get to the root of an issue and heal and truly transform. We really want to help people change for the better, but we also take a holistic and preventive view of wellness.
When we’re talking about mental health, we have to zoom out and look at the whole picture, look at all the factors and areas of people’s life. We use something called the “wellness wheel” which has spirituality at the center, but also their social life, their home life, their relationships, their school experiences, career.
Another piece of our process is trying to diagnose and treat mental health conditions. We don’t use diagnosis as a one-thing label. It’s less about labeling and more about understanding why people experience their symptoms.
Now that mental health has become more widely accepted, how has that changed or altered the way you practice?
From our vantage point, when generalizations are made, it’s really hard to watch. We know it’s wrong.
Most people that are in positions of being on public platforms don’t realize how heavy or how weighty their words are when they speak. They have the potential to prevent someone from getting care.
Tell me about those pivotal generational differences?
As a whole, when we’re talking about generational mental health, it’s important that we approach it curiously, not critically.
The generational stereotypes that have occurred about mental health have contributed to a divide, as opposed to a connection. The truth is that we’ve learned a ton over time, but we need to unlearn a lot, too.
The pendulum has kind of swung from it’s no longer taboo to talk about your feelings, which is great, to now people are defining themselves by their feelings and letting their feelings drive everything we do. That’s not healthy.
Think about the different stressors each generation went through, Great Depression, two world wars. When we look at the younger generations, they had a pandemic, the digital age, social media. Both generations have a lot of challenges that they’ve faced in mental health.
People are more open to therapy, now. That’s a really wonderful thing. But the stereotypes that exist are still fighting that.
A very common generational mental health stereotype is, “Well, young people are not resilient enough, and they just need to toughen up.”
Then the younger generation will make the stereotype about the older (generation) and say: “They are too closed off and they’re not open enough.”
We hear this as professionals and we hear it in families all the time. Instead of just believing these stereotypes and letting your perceptions be shaped insidiously by rumors or stereotypes or experiences, we want truth.
Maybe there is something to the fact that younger people need to learn to not let their feelings consume them, but maybe older generations need to be a little more open. At the end of the day, when you bridge the two, they’re both right.
But, it’s the stereotypes and the assumptions that get in the way, and that’s really what we want to help people in therapy do — learn and unlearn.
What is one piece of advice you would give younger generations to help them feel less anxious?
I would definitely say to embrace digital self-care. Everybody knows that term by now, but digital self-care includes unplugging and touching grass.
How have you connected more with older generations as mental health becomes more mainstream?
One thing that has been very helpful with the older generations is that we get a lot of referrals from their doctors in primary care. Primary care is a very big entry point to mental health. Older generations tend to trust their jobs, their friends and their doctors.