Video Transcript: Supporting People with Mental Illness
Welcome back to mental health integration, integration. We made it to week 10. You guys are doing awesome. I am Brandon still, and we are talking today about how to support others. Now, when we started my quiet cave, I thought we were just going to be supporting people with mental health issues, and then this crazy
thing happened, which is that it seems like half or more of the people who started contacting us were not personally afflicted with a mental health issue. They had a son or a daughter or a spouse or a brother or a mom or a dad who had a mental health issue, and they were asking a really simple question, what do I do to support this person? Because I don't know what to do, and they are just, this is killing me inside, and so I want to give you any sort of insights that I have about that until a few stories, walk through a few things and help you start working through how you can support others. So let's jump in. How do you support someone you love? We've got a picture of a table, because in some ways, that's how we think of the people we love. They're at the table with us. They're the people who eat with us. They're the people that we care for. And when they're going through something hard, we want to be able to make something better. We want to be able to change things, and there are a few things that you can do, but I want to start with unraveling some stuff. First, you want them to get better and you want them to get help. What do you do? Now the most frustrating thing as a supporter is oftentimes, you will do your research. You will look into what helps people get better and how to get a hold of those resources. You will find psychiatrists and therapists. You will find out what people need to do to take care of their self care. You will find out all of the things that we've talked about in the previous nine weeks, and then you're stuck with somebody who doesn't want to do those things, or is dragging their feet, or is trying their best, but it's just not very fast, and it can be so frustrating and daunting, frustrating because you're going, I have all the right answers. I want you to get better. You want to get better? We're in this together, teamwork, right? Let's get better. And then they just go, I can't do that. Or you want them to get help. So you find these resources, and you take them to the therapy session and go, This isn't a good fit, like this isn't right. I can't do this. And sometimes people are dragging their feet because they don't want help, and sometimes people are dragging their feet because they're overwhelmed. Sometimes people are doing everything they can, and it just doesn't look like much. But as someone who's a caretaker, or as someone who's trying to support somebody else, you can feel so alone. Is it hard? Yeah, it's so hard. It feels so lonely. Why is it that I can know what to do and I can have all the right answers, but the person who I'm trying to help, they're not actually getting help. I'm not spending time on my life, I'm spending time on their life, and they're not getting better. Is it frustrating? Yeah, it sure can be at points in time where you believe that you are doing everything that you can to help someone else get better, and they're not actually working their program. They're not working their system. It's so
frustrating. Now I feel on both sides of this thing. I have bipolar disorder, I struggle with anxiety, but I've also been a caretaker. This is me and Eugenia in 2008 14 years ago. I want you to sit with that for just a minute. Because this was us having fun. We'd been married for a year or so, and we were just loving that we were finally together. Took us two years to get married. We were stoked to have life together. I was working hard. Eugenia was finishing college and stepping into her career as a teacher. There were no warning lights. I was I was the crazy one. I mean, you've been with me for 10 weeks at this point, you kind of know me at this point, I was doing my best to stay stable and doing my best to take care of myself and all of that stuff. But we had always assumed that I was the one who was a little bit crazy. Eugenia was the one who was just fine. And then things started to turn a little bit sideways. Eugenia started to get discontented with life. Things started to not be exciting. The goodness in life started to fade away. And all of a sudden she started talking about self harm, not that she wanted to hurt herself, but she wanted to get rid of herself, that she wanted to kill herself. Then it came in Sly comments at first, and then those sly comments started to escalate. And then they started to escalate some more. We lived a few blocks from a very major street, and one day, she talked about how it would be so easy to just step in front of a bus, and I didn't know what to do. At this point in time, I was in therapy, working on my own stuff. We've talked about that a little bit, and I was just dumbfounded. My wife seemed to be slipping away. I didn't know if she was going to stay alive. I desperately wanted her to get to therapy, and she had absolutely no interest. Therapy was a place where Brandon could go and get figured out because he was crazy, but she didn't need any of it. So we just kept going one day after another, and it felt like Eugenia was going a million miles away. I started feeling like I was walking on eggshells at home. I was so afraid of setting her off. I was so afraid of doing something wrong that would trigger all of this self loathing on her side. So I had to make sure that everything was done perfectly all the time. I had to make sure the dishes were all put away exactly right, that everything was put away in the kitchen exactly right, that I made sure that everything that she wanted on a regular basis was the way that she wanted it, because if anything was ever off, that could trigger her into this spiral of self loathing, and If she spiraled like that, I didn't know if she would recover. I didn't know if she would make it, because she already wanted to die, and any trigger could actually be the thing that pushed her over the edge and make her do it. I remember being so scared all the time. I remember dropping a dish out of our cupboard, and it shattered on the floor, and I was so scared, because this could be the thing that set her off. It wasn't that I wasn't good enough, it wasn't that I somehow needed to do anything different. It was that she was in such a fragile place that I knew all it would take was a little bit of any sort of breeze and that would push her over. She was working as an elementary school teacher at the time, and that's when I got the phone call that
she was a suicide risk. She talked about how she was processing her depression with her co teacher, and her co teacher told the school psychologist, the school psychologist came and talked to Eugenia, and Eugenia basically spilled the beans on what was going on when I got the phone call, I remember being horrified and relieved at the same time, horrified because it was serious enough that I was getting a call that my wife was suicidal from her school psychologist, relieved because I finally wasn't alone. There was finally some evidence that we needed to get help. I called my counselor because I knew I needed a good counselor. We talked about how there's a lot of unique good counselors, and I asked for the best recommendation I could get. He gave me three. I called all three of them immediately. I wasn't home at the time. I was actually at campus. I was in seminary, in the student center, calling therapists to see who can see my wife within about a half an hour, one of those therapists called me back, Mary Ellen, I set an appointment immediately, for as soon as possible, and then I waited. We shared one car at the time. So I don't remember if I rode my bike home or if Eugenia picked me up, but I remember two days later, we went to her psychologist, or therapist, and she didn't want to go. She had no interest in going. She hated the idea that she was going. In fact, we got in the car, and I said, we're going to go see the therapist now. And she said, No, we're not. I said, Yes, we are. And she threatened to throw herself out of the car, and I locked the doors, and we drove to her therapist's office. We got inside, and we sat in the waiting room together, and then we met her therapist, and after an hour, it became apparent that this was a really good fit. On the way home, I had asked Eugenia to call her friends, and I said, I am going to call them, or you're going to call them, but somebody's going to call them. Eugenia threatened to throw her phone out the window, so I picked up my phone and I dialed one of her friends. I said, Well, I'm going to tell them, and that's it. She said, No, you're not. No one's going to tell my story, but me. So she talked to her friend Katie and her friend Jennifer, told them what was going on, and told them that she was getting help, and they started checking in. The next week, we went back to Mary Ellen's office. I called my counselor, and I had to stop seeing him for a period of time. We didn't have the money to pay for two counselors, and at this time, I needed Eugenia to see hers. So we went to Eugenia's counselor, and I sat in the waiting room, and Eugenia went and saw her counselor by herself, and when she came out, we came at home. The next week, I drove Eugenia to the same counselor, and I waited in the waiting room again. The week after that, I waited in the car. The week after that, I waited in the car, and Eugenia started to make huge breakthroughs in therapy. She started to see the reasons that she had a self image that was so low and so negative of herself was because of how she'd grown up and how she'd learned about her own self and how her she had some childhood trauma that wasn't anybody's fault. It was just the reality of what happened in her life, and because she had stepped into that, she was able to
unravel that situation and begin to see her own value and worth and begin to see who she was as a child of God, and begin to see What was going on with her. And through that process, she started to heal. My job through this situation was really simple. My job was to listen. If I said anything that triggered Eugenia, still she was that was still a really, really bad idea. I didn't need to freak out if something happened, because that was its own trigger. I needed to figure out how I could stay sane and how I could stay myself and how I could support her at that same time. This is just a couple months into this process. We got invited to do a retreat at a marriage retreat at one of our mentors houses, and in that God spoke value over Eugenia, and there was this very profound moment of her just being herself by March and April, it seemed like the worst of it had kind of lifted. It wasn't quite as bad. And so we thought maybe Eugenia could stop seeing Mary Ellen. And then I remember, I was in our kitchen, and I dropped one of our spices. It hit the floor, it exploded, and I freaked out, because this could have been the thing that put Eugenia over the edge, and she was fine. At that point we were turning a corner, there were some of the scariest moments of my life. In that period between December and March, Eugenia never actually tried to do anything to herself physically, but I remember being terrified that she was the entire time. I remember the evening that I went to class and I got a ride home, and Eugenia had the car. And I can't I was dropped off at home. It was late. I had an evening class. It was nine o'clock, and Eugenia's car was not in the driveway, and I remember my heart sinking as I thought, oh God, she did it. She's gone. I remember opening the door and just feeling like there was nothing left of me. And then I remember waiting in the kitchen. I couldn't say or do anything. I was just completely numb and overwhelmed. And then about a half an hour later, the door, the door opened, and Eugenia came in. Hi. I was just so destroyed. I was so happy to see her. And she looked at me and said, What's wrong with you? I had to go through and process. I thought that you just might have died. And basically she said, Well, I'm still here. I remember being terrified all the time, but I also remember how God was with me in those moments, and I remember how I heard my value and my worth as a beloved Son of God. I told her the story already during that time, laying down in bed and Eugenia feeling a million miles away, and hearing Brandon, you are My beloved Son, and just knowing that it was going to be okay somehow, some way, I wasn't ready to be a widower, but somehow it's going to be okay. So what do we do through this process? I learned that always I had to do the next thing. I had to be empathetic, I had to care, I had to take care of myself, and I had to do the next thing and just keep moving. And it was hard, it was brutal, but it was also only six months. Eugenia wasn't brought back as a teacher that year. So she went through another phase that was really hard, but by the beginning of the school year, the next school year, she was doing great. She stepped into a position that she enjoyed. It was fun. I found other positions to fill in the gaps in our finances, and
we made it work. But when you're supporting someone with mental health issues, know that you're not alone. About 20% of the population goes through a mental health issue in a given year, and that means somebody is caring for almost every one of those people. Someone's been where you're at, and we know it. And having been on both sides of this thing, having been the supporter and having been the person with mental illness, I really don't know which one is harder. On the mental health side, it's hard and it's painful, but you just keep moving one step in front of the other, because that's all you can do. You're way outside of your stress tolerance window. You have no idea what you're doing, but you just keep moving. On the side is a supporter you're walking through, and there's so much fear, because you can never do the wrong thing. You feel like you're always walking on eggshells, like you always have to be perfect. And there is there is no margin for error in anything, and in that you just kind of, you're so aware and you're so afraid of making anything wrong happen. There's this different kind of hard. But I don't, I don't know which one's harder. And I've been through both they are just so challenging, both of them. So if you are a caregiver, I just want to say my hat's off to you. I know how hard it is, and thank you for doing the hard work. And if you have a mental health issue, just thank those people you might know later what they're going through, but just thank them. It's a really big deal. And when you're going through these things, remember do the good thing. Just do the good thing one at a time, when I got the news from the Eugenia psychologist, I did not have to do everything in the world. I had to make a few phone calls. So I did. When I picked her up, I had to get her to call her friends, so I did. I had to make sure I did my best at home. So I did. Just do your best. That's all you can do. But if you do that a lot of the time. It can make a huge difference. I know it did for us. Eugenia is still here. That was 14 years ago. We're still doing great. Thank you so much. We're going to talk more about what you can do to support a loved one in the next section.