CINCINNATI (WXIX) – A Tri-State track star is now running her own service to help people improve mental health.
Dr. Shantel Thomas is a Princeton High School graduate and earned a full ride to the University of Toledo, where she remains in the Hall of Fame for her track record.
During her college career, she won the NCAA Woman of the Year for Ohio.
After graduation, Thomas decided to hang up her track cleats to pursue her other love of helping others become their best selves through mental health services.
“I’m a professional clinical counselor,” explained Thomas. “I do all kinds of speaking engagements as well as the crisis interventions.”
Thomas currently owns A Sound Mind Counseling Services, with two private practice centers in West Chester and Hartwell.
She says in years past, they averaged about five to six calls a week. Now, they are managing 20 to 30 calls for help.
“It used to be that you can get in within a day, and now there’s a waiting list because so many people have become aware,” said Thomas. “There’s no longer this huge stigma attached to mental health services.”
Thomas says growing up, she dealt with several issues and trauma that she didn’t know how to handle at times.
“I was an angry kid,” Thomas admitted. “I was fighting all the time through junior high and high school. I was the girl who was in ISS, getting suspended. I was being bullied, but then sometimes I was the bully. And so that became my story.”
She changed that story after discovering a talent and love for running.
“We used to have the field day outside, and they had all the boys and girls run in these 100 meters, and so I beat all the girls,” Thomas said. “I beat them by so much I could turn around and watch them come across, and so they were like let’s let her run with the boys. When I ran with the boys, I beat them, too. It just so happens I lived in Indianapolis. Wilma Rudolph was there. She drove me home, knocked on the door, and told my mother, ‘Your daughter has a gift. We’d like for her to join our organization,’ and they trained me in track.”
Training with the Olympian helped her excel in running beyond her imagination, breaking records with her schools, becoming an ambassador, and running for Nike, where she competed in races in Great Britain and Japan.
After not qualifying for the Olympics, that’s when she decided to run a new path, focusing on school and another talent she discovered while running track.
“In high school, they called me the ‘Chronicle,’ as in the newspaper, because people would tell me things and I wouldn’t tell, and so they said, ‘You can keep a secret,’ and they were like, ‘Oh, here comes the ‘Chronicle,’” Thomas said. “Which at the time, I thought this is a bad thing, I don’t want to be known as a newspaper that holds everything. My track coach at the time, who was the psychology teacher, said, ‘You can get paid for that. You can get paid to keep secrets,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, really?”
That set her on the course to become a counselor, earning her a scholarship for her undergraduate and master’s degrees.
While she’s seen and accomplished so much in life already, she says her proudest moments are the breakthroughs that she sees within her clients.
“I love it when I see my clients healing,” Thomas explained. “I really love to see people getting better. When I see them out in the community and they say, ‘Dr. Thomas, we’re still married and we’ve been on the verge of divorce, but we’ve made it work. We applied the steps and it’s working.’ The thank you’s. I can see it in their faces and their smiles and the joy that comes from it for them is also joy for me.”
Thomas is also the founder of the Center for Healing the Hurt, a nonprofit that provides free trauma-based therapy center for kids and teens in Cincinnati.
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