Video Transcript: Stories

Welcome back to mental health integration. This is part three of the short. I am Brandon again, and this time, we're going to be talking about stories of people with mental health issues, because it helps us understand what's going on in a mental health issue. Now, normally, when we think about a mental health issue, we think of a story, and we think of a picture like this, someone alone, who's sad and it hurts, or someone like this getting comforted, but it still feels like the person comforting them is a million miles away, someone like this, who's sitting in front of a gorgeous space but may not be able to enjoy it even a little bit because their depression or anxiety is so bad. Or a picture like this, someone's suffering inside and it just hurts. They're being tormented. But we don't necessarily think of this. This is my elementary school photo, and I am up in the upper right hand corner. See if I click myself here. Yeah, I'm that one right there with the striped shirt. Looks like a huge nerd, because I absolutely was. Now, what you need to know about this is I had no experience with mental health until I was 13 years old. And when I was 13 years old, my uncle came to live with us. And my uncle had bipolar disorder type one. He came to live with us because he had lost everything in a single day, and after that day, he came to live with us because he literally had nothing. He no longer had a family or a house or a job. He needed everything, and he needed to rebuild it from scratch. My mom took care of him. She got him to a psychiatrist and therapist appointments. She helped him get back on his medications. He got stabilized back out, and in that year, he taught me the fine points of watching football games and bowling, all American pastimes. For the record, I played goalie in soccer, and still prefer that football to American football, but that's okay. After that time, I got an I got a chance to go on a school trip to England, and my parents said that they put their son on a plane, and a monster came back, because during that time, all of the symptoms of bipolar type one rapid cycling showed up with me that used to be the DSM designation before bipolar became more of a spectrum illness. So what did that mean? That meant I spent the next portion of my life trying to figure out what it was to get well, my parents took me to a psychiatrist, and he helped me find meds. By help me find meds, I mean, I saw him every single week, and we went through a myriad of different medications. We started with the things that worked for my uncle, but when I was allergic to them, we started moving through med after med after med. Then we started working through combinations of meds to see if we could find something that would work. During that time, I was trying to go to school and trying to pass classes and failing at passing classes. My sophomore year of high school, which was when most of this was going on, I carried a 1.3 GPA, and that turns out you can't fail Home Ec, but I failed basically everything else. During that time. I had the same day every day, I would wake up in the morning, I would go to school, I would eat my breakfast, I would take my meds, I would try to make it through my classes. I would often have to leave school because my meds would make me vomit during class. So I would run to the bathroom and vomit. I would cry in the stall if it hurt too badly, because I would have these sudden onsets where I couldn't do anything weep, which is horribly, horribly cruel to do to a high school kid who's already incredibly insecure. I would try to make it through the rest of my day. I would make it to lunch and then my afternoon, and oftentimes I would crash again in the afternoon and not be able to make it through the rest of my school day. I would call my mom, and she owned a bookstore, and sometimes she would call in and call in that I was sick and I needed to go home. I didn't have a car, so I would walk home, and it was a couple miles, I would walk and I would go home. I played drums at night. That's how I got rid of the pain. So I would just beat on my drums until I broke a stick, because at least then it didn't hurt. I would go back up to my room. I would often sob into my own mattress cover, and then I would go down for dinner. I would try to do homework, but I often just couldn't. And then I would rinse and repeat that day, every day. Once a week, I saw my psychiatrist. Once every other week, I saw a therapist. They tried to help as much as they could, but we didn't know if I was going to make it. My psychiatrist pulled my parents aside, after this had gone on for just a little bit, and said, people like Brandon don't last very long. I just want you to get ready, because if he commits suicide, you need to know that it might come. So he got my parents ready, but then I never did. After a few years, we found meds that worked well enough that I could function a little bit. I went from being an honor roll student, to flunking school, to being a C student and having to go to Sylvan Learning Center to learn how to study again. And then, during the course of my next year or so, we found meds that worked, and it was like the sky opened, the sun came down, shone and there was hope and there was life again. So what is the value of this line? Is there any benefit to it? That was how I personally saw myself, and what was going on in that space is that there was nothing good, there was only brokenness and something that would contaminate the world around it. Stepping forward, we knew we could get through it, but we didn't know how that was going to happen or what was going to come out of it. Now, my story ended well, and I look forward to sharing more about that in this section ahead.