Video Transcript: What is it like? Part 1

Welcome back to Mental Health Integration. We are now in week three and we  are asking the question, What's it like? Last week we did so much work on  understanding what mental illnesses were and then definitionally understanding  what they are. This week we're asking different questions. 

We're asking what do they feel like, how do they affect people, and what  actually occurs in a mental illness, not in your brain so much as in your life. And  so this is going to be a much more personal week. To start out, when most  people think about mental illness, they think about pictures that look something  like this. 

This is somebody depressed who's sitting on the ground. We used to joke in  mental health groups, a bunch of individuals of us that would get together, that  the joke was that people with depression clearly didn't have chairs because  they were always depicted on the ground, curled up. But that's the idea, it hurts  and there's just nothing going on. 

It feels like being with somebody but feeling alone and being so consumed with  grief, or being in the middle of beauty but not being able to see any of the  beauty because it's just too much, it's too heavy. It feels like mental anguish,  like the world just hurts and you just want to get out of your own skin. That's  normally what we think of when we think of mental illness, it's kind of these  pictures. 

But that's not how all of the pictures of mental illness start. A lot of these  disorders are late onset. They don't start when you're 2 or 3 or 4. The majority  of them start before you're 20. 

And they can start before you' re 14 or before you're 16. But they generally hit a little bit later in life. And before that, generally you have a life that you're already living. 

Generally, when you start your childhood at 5, 6, 7, 8 years old, it looks a little  bit more like this. This, just so you know, is my elementary school class. And I  am the kid in the upper right hand corner in the striped blue shirt. I was always tall. I wasn't that tall. They had me up taller for some reason. But that was me. I was the nerdiest kid you will ever meet in your life. A pretty  happy kid.  

I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I wanted to be MacGyver and create things. I  wanted to build and do and have so much fun. 

I wanted to be fast, and I wasn't very fast. I wanted to play soccer, but I wasn't  very good at soccer. I wanted to build things and be an engineer, and I was a  miserable engineer. 

But I was smart. I had a lot of fun. I wanted to know everything about  constellations and stars. 

So I learned everything that I could. And later in life, when I was 14 years  old, my uncle came to live with us. And he had just had his world fall apart.

My uncle was married. He was living in Texas. And then in the course of a day,  his life changed. 

He was feeling really depressed and down. He had stopped taking his  medications. He got a call in from his boss. 

He went into his boss's office, and his boss said, Hey, you're done. You're  fired. You are not cutting it here at work. 

So he went to call his wife at home, and she said, If you don't have a job, you  don't need to come home. We're done. And in the course of an hour, he lost his  job, his house, and his marriage. 

And so he came to live with us. He was my mom's brother, and he didn't have  another place to go. So after not seeing him for years, he showed up at our  doorstep, and he came to live with us. 

We had an extra bedroom. During that year, he taught me the fine point of how  to watch a football game. How to understand when a linebacker hits  somebody, what that means. 

The fine points of cheering, and how loud you must cheer. How you must  scream at the top of your lungs, because clearly, your TV can hear you. And he  also taught me how to bowl. 

It was an education in everything that I'd missed in life. And by the end of that  time, he spent nine months with us. He had stabilized back out. He was back on his medications. He was doing well. How that happened was  pretty simple and straightforward. 

Ron had bipolar disorder type 1. He had these huge mood swings, but he also  had medications that worked for him. He didn't like the way they felt. He didn't  like how they affected his moods. 

He didn't like how they made him feel kind of numb, but they worked. And all he had to do was start the pills over again, and he started to stabilize. My mom and dad tried to figure out what it was that was going on, because they didn't know  anything about bipolar disorder. 

So they started reading every book they could. They read books about kids, and books about adults, and books about medications. They started going with Ron  to his appointments at therapy, and to support groups. 

They started taking him to psychiatric meetings with a psychiatrist. And before  you know it, he was doing well again. For my parents, it was also a heck of an  education, because they learned so much about bipolar disorder specifically. Fast forward a few months. He was ready to get back out on his own. He had  been living with us for nine months. 

He had stabilized out. He had a job. He was building cabinets. He had found a room with a guy where he could pay, and start his life again. So  he did. He moved out. 

And then three months later, I went on a school trip to Europe. It was this once-

in-a-lifetime thing. My parents had never done anything like that, but they  said, how can you turn down a trip to England? You need to go. So I did, and they put their son on a plane, and a monster came  back. Everything fell apart. I had all of the symptoms manifest of bipolar  disorder type 1. It was awful. 

I started having these incredible moments of depression. So dark, I can barely  explain what they were like. They were crushing. 

I was completely non-functional. I would just curl up into my comforter on my  bed and weep. That's all I could do. 

It just hurt so badly. Not like physical pain, but like a mental anguish that was  completely consuming. And then I would hit highs that almost felt like being an  exposed nerve. 

Everything would get on my nerves. I had a super short fuse for any sort of  thing going wrong. My parents would joke around that I had Superman  syndrome because I would fly around at what seemed like a million miles an  hour thinking that I could solve all the world's problems if the world could just  keep up with how fast I could move and talk and work and be. If the world could just keep up with me, then we could get this thing handled, but it couldn't. So I was frustrated all the time, and thus the exposed  nerve. Because with all of that energy and all of that passion and all of that  aliveness, also came this incredible sensitivity to how much the world was not  like what I wanted it to be. 

I didn't exist in a middle state, either. I existed in one of those two states, in this  incredible high or this incredible low. And I would oscillate between the two and  just bounce back and forth. 

But spend nearly no time in the middle. The transitions would happen so fast. I  remember within just a couple weeks, my parents got me in to see a  psychiatrist. 

Handy that my uncle had found psychiatrists. He sat down, and in my first  meeting with him, he correctly diagnosed me with bipolar disorder. He saw an  entire cycle, high and low, while he was in his office that day, which is not  common, but is me. 

I was diagnosed, and I started meds that very day. We started with what worked for my uncle. I turned out to be allergic to it. 

Then we moved on to another med, and then another, and then another, and  then another. I spent the next about year just bouncing from med to med to  med, hoping that we could find anything that would work well. Finally, at about  the year mark, we found something that kind of sort of worked, and made it so I  could at least function without being a suicide risk. 

When I was first diagnosed, it was one of the worst cases of bipolar  disorder that my psychiatrist had ever seen. People don't oscillate back and 

forth like this, this hard, this fast, in the middle of your teenage years when you  are so susceptible to thinking you're nothing anyway, and live. He told my  parents in that first meeting, he pulled my mom and dad aside, and I got to talk  to his wife for a few minutes. 

I told them, kids like Brandon, they don't last. So he might last three months, he  might last six months. But I really doubt he'll make it to Christmas. My parents had to sit there knowing that the kindest advice that my psychiatrist  was to give them was that I probably wouldn't be around for very long, and if  they could at least expect it, at least they wouldn't be blindsided. My parents,  being who they were, took his advice to heart and politely told him that that was  terrible advice and they were never going to give up on me. So immediately we  started meds, and we tried everything. 

Immediately they hunkered down at home to try and make sure that I was going to be okay. We didn't worry about grades the next year because that wasn't the  function. It was between my freshman and sophomore years of high school  when I was diagnosed, and my sophomore year of high school I managed to  carry a 1.3 GPA. 

It turns out that you can't fail band and that you can't fail a job requirements  course because I failed everything else. I worked as hard as I could and I was  non-functional that year. Absolutely non-functional. 

I would wake up every morning, I would eat my breakfast so that I could take  my pills, I would go to school. I would make it through one or two periods until  the depression or something hurt so bad that I had to go. I would hide in a  bathroom stall between periods and sometimes during periods. I would call home and tell my mom that it had been too much and I needed  these periods excused or this period excused. I would go make it to lunch. I  would see a few of my friends but I started isolating myself from a lot of my  social networks because it hurt too bad. 

Then I would try to make it through the rest of the day. Oftentimes I wouldn't, so  I would walk a few miles home because I just couldn't manage to make it  through another class. When I got home, I would go up to my room. I would hit my knees. I would curl up into the side of my comforter on my  bed and I would sob because it just hurt so bad. We called that crashing. And then I would go downstairs. I was a drummer and there's nothing in the  world that can relieve more stress than hitting things as hard as you can until  you feel better. So I did. 

I would play almost every day until I broke a stick and then I would have to buy  new sticks. A lot of new sticks because I went through a lot of them because it  was the only thing I could do to make the pain go away. That's how I lived every day for the first year, basically. 

I would have psychiatric appointments once a week. We would go see my 

psychiatrist and he would adjust my meds. I was a good client. I always told him what was going on with me. I was always upfront and  honest and my parents always came to my appointments so that they could fill  in the gaps because there were things I didn't remember often about what had  happened in the last two weeks. We worked through medication after  medication like you've heard. 

Finally, when we got to something that kind of sort of worked, I managed to pull  myself up to a C average at school. I managed to start passing things. I  managed to start functioning a little bit. 

I went to a learning center to relearn how to be a student. I had had an  exceptional memory growing up. I had to work hard in order to do school  well and now I had to work really hard to do school well and I didn't have any  study habits. 

So I had to go back to a learning center to learn how to study and learn how to  read well. During that time, I didn't die, obviously. My parents kept a secret to  me that my bipolar was so bad because they thought that I would feel  hopeless if I ever found out. 

So instead, they just let me continue doing life and continue doing the best I  could and I did the best I could and the best I could my sophomore year was  failing at school but succeeding in staying alive. My junior year, about halfway  through my junior year, we had a break with medication. Not that we had  stopped doing it, but we hit a break. 

We found something that worked incredibly well and in that moment, it was like  my life changed. The sky parted, the angels sang, there was hope, there was  life, there was goodness. After living in an episode where there was mania and  depression, cycling back and forth quickly with no middle, for the better part of  two years, I finally existed as a normal person again. 

I could finally think again. I could finally process again. I could finally feel joy  again. 

I wasn't vomiting because of the side effects of my pills every day. I didn't feel  like I couldn't remember anything. Going from remembering anything basically  I'd ever heard to not remembering what I had for lunch an hour before was a big change. 

But now I could remember anything again. Anything except the holes that were  there because of all the medications I'd been on. But, you know, you take some, you win some. 

And then you lose some, too. So, through all that, I learned a lot about  myself because I'd been through two of the most agonizing years of my life and  I had survived. But what I had lost during those years was pretty profound. What's the value of this line? When I was going through my lowest points in  bipolar disorder, my mental picture of myself was as a charcoal line scribbled 

across a concrete wall. That this was something that didn't improve me it  improved things, it marred things. It wasn't good, it just made things ugly. It wasn't happy, it was just bleh. And when people came into contact with it, it  would rub off. Not that they would get bipolar disorder, but it would stain their  life. 

It would break them. It would make them hurt, make them sad. Because this  depression was so consuming that it sucked the joy out of everything around  me. 

That's the reason that I isolated myself and that I stayed where I was. It was  because I didn't want to contaminate the world around me. I didn't want to break the people around me. 

I wanted them to experience life on their own. And I didn't want them to get  marred by my problems. What my parents did, though, was different. Because they modeled something really powerful. All they said was, we'll get  through it. Whatever it is, we'll get through it. 

If this is the worst that it can be, that's fine. We'll get through it. If this isn't the  worst yet, that's fine too. 

We'll get through it. It changed my perspective dramatically because they just  kept going. My family members just kept being there. 

We kept going to psychiatrist's office. We kept going to therapist's office. We  kept working until we got the thing done. 

And the attitude wasn't, you need to do better, you need to do more. The  attitude was, you will do your best and we will get through this together. It was a model of what we can be as human beings. 

And I owe them my life. They know it too because I tell them on a regular  basis that I am so, so grateful for them. And that's my experience with going  through bipolar disorder. 

This incredible high, this incredible low. Two years of struggling to find  balance. And then I find the meds that made it right. 

During my twenties, I had to mourn the fact that I'd lost two years of my high  school years. These years that were supposed to be some of the best of my  life. At least that's the way high school dramas portray them. That I'd missed things like doing cross country or playing in larger bands, doing  anything. That I'd missed two years basically. Because my two years of high  school were just consumed with staying alive. 

In fact, I didn't even get a yearbook those years. I didn't want one because I  didn't want to remember. I didn't want to have to think about it ever again. Now my experience with bipolar disorder and a lot of people's experiences of  other mental illnesses are incredibly familiar. They're incredibly  common. There's elements that are the same. 

The element of being surprised. The element of feeling like there is no 

hope. The element of feeling like you are the only one who experiences this. The element of feeling like you're blindsided and you don't know what comes  next because it hurts so bad. The feeling out of control. The feeling like you  don't know if you can trust your own brain. 

There are so many things that we share with mental illnesses. You don't have to have the worst case of bipolar disorder that your psychiatrist has ever seen for it to be awful. You don't have to have the worst case of depression your  psychiatrist has ever seen for it to just be incapacitating. 

You don't need the worst of anything. In fact, in some cases, like bipolar  disorder, the less severe a case, the more likely you are to commit  suicide because you don't take it as seriously. It's not as much of an immediate  threat so you don't have to take it as seriously. 

Everyone has their own story with mental illness. I am not trying with my own  story to undermine anybody else's and saying, but mine was worse than  yours because your story is your story and it has value. And it absolutely is. Our tolerance of pain is what our tolerance of pain is and that doesn't make it  good, bad, or otherwise. When we go through things this hard, at some point we surpass our tolerance and we just survive. In a lot of ways, we're so far past  what we can handle. 

It doesn't matter how hard it is what you go through if it was past what you could handle. It just is. It's just consuming and you just try to keep going through. I would urge you after hearing this that if you have a mental illness take the time to write your own story. Take your time to think about it. Take some time to  reflect on it. 

Take some time to understand it and understand what it cost you and if you  need to, see a therapist to work through that. I had to. It was too big and too  daunting. 

I needed to see a therapist in order to work through all of that. If you don't know  anyone with a mental health issue like we said earlier in this course, it's  incredibly common so please find someone, share stories, hear stories learn,  grow, develop. When you see mental illness as a face when it looks like a  person that you know and care for instead of as an abstract theological  concept or an abstract societal construct it'll serve you incredibly well because  you can put a face to it and know what it looks like and feels like. Our stories are what make this thing possible which is why we're going to  continue looking at what things feel like in the next section. Thank you.