The Mental Health Conversation We Can't Afford to Ignore: A Talk with Alison Malmon

We love to call single mothers resilient. They're the ones who somehow show up to work after a night spent pacing the floor with a sick kid. They stretch a paycheck four ways, sit through school meetings alone, comfort a grieving child while grieving something themselves, and just keep going. Somewhere along the way, "resilient" stopped being a compliment and started being an expectation - like they've earned the label, but there's no room left to admit they're struggling.

That's the line I keep bumping into: we've confused resilience with invincibility.

Over the past year, through my work with For Her, By Us, I've sat across from several single mothers. Some were widowed. Some left abusive relationships. Some rebuilt their lives after addiction or time in prison. A few chose motherhood on their own, through IVF. But underneath the different paths, one thing kept showing up: it wasn't the money that wore them down, or even childcare. It was the quiet weight of carrying everything by themselves, with no one to share the struggle.

That's the reason a conversation I had with Alison Malmon has stuck with me.

When Alison talks about mental health, she doesn't start with statistics. She starts with her brother. Brian struggled through college without telling anyone. His friends, family, or the people who would have dropped everything to help – none of them knew. By the time he asked for help, it was too late. He died by suicide during Alison's freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. She was eighteen. He was twenty-two.

Out of that, she asked herself one question: what if reaching out for help felt as ordinary as asking someone for directions?

That question became Active Minds, which Alison has now spent more than two decades building. The organization works with thousands of schools across the country and its mission is simple: normalize how we talk about mental health – it's not an afterthought after something terrible happens, but before.

"Our goal is to create this environment where everybody feels comfortable reaching out for the help that they need," she told me.

I'm heading to college myself in less than a year, so a lot of what Alison said landed close to home. But it also clicked with something I've heard from nearly every mother I've interviewed: how isolating it is to be surrounded by people who love you and still feel completely alone. Friends and family show up with encouragement. Encouragement isn't the same as someone understanding what you're actually carrying. When you're parenting alone, you end up being everyone else's support system - while your own exhaustion and fear get quietly shelved.

After Brian died, Alison found her way into a grief support group. Not because everyone there had lost a sibling to suicide specifically, but because they knew what it was to lose someone and keep walking around afterward. "There's nothing like having somebody who understands," she said.

I hear that same thing, in different flavors, almost every time I talk to a single mother. For some, it's another mom who gets the impossible gist of raising kids alone. For others, it's a neighbor who brings a meal, or a family member who actually calls to check in, or just someone who'll listen without trying to fix it. None of that support rewrites the past. But it can be the difference between facing the future alone and not.

Active Minds also offers training around help-seeking to athletes and teams. This was special for me. I’ve played competitive soccer at the highest level for over fourteen years, and one thing has become obvious over that time: the strongest teams aren't the ones that never struggle. They're the ones where someone notices when a teammate is off. Someone asks the quiet question after practice. Someone stays a few extra minutes to hear you. Someone who encourages you after a bad game.

Families deserve teammates like that too. We tend to treat mental health as its own category, separate from housing, jobs, childcare, money. For a lot of single mothers, it isn't separate at all - it's the overarching issue. Chronic stress works its way into physical health, into relationships, into how clearly a person can make decisions, into whether she has anything left over to give her kids at the end of the day.

Alison pushed back on the idea that mental health is only about illness. Everyone has mental health, she reminded me, the same way everyone has physical health. Some days are fine, some days aren't. Neither one should come with shame attached.

Maybe the better question isn't how we make single mothers more resilient. Maybe it's whether we've built communities capable of actually supporting them.

Near the end of our conversation, Alison said something that reaches well past college campuses: "You are not alone. People really care. They don't always know that you're struggling."

It’s so true.  Maybe the real strength isn't in carrying everything alone. Maybe it's in letting someone else help carry it alongside you.