It really is an honor to be on this stage and to share my story with
everyone else who shared theirs. It's a powerful day and I'm just so
lucky to be here. My talk is a Flawless talk. I'm a board member of the Flawless
Foundation. And the mission of Flawless is to see the perfection in everyone. The
mission of Flawless for me is about self forgiveness, it's about self compassion,
and it's about getting that internal voice to match up with those external
voices, that are being much nicer when you're in your darkest moments. I have a
really interesting beginning to my personal story. I grew up in Pennsylvania.
That is not interesting. What is interesting is that I was actually born
in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. I have to use the map
because, when I didn't use a map, people would get really angry and they'd be
like, "That's not a funny joke, man. You're not mental health Jesus." And I was like,
"Right, I never said that."These places exist. Nazareth doesn't have a hospital.
If you're pregnant in the hospitals in Bethlehem, you have to have your child
and then go back to Nazareth. The funniest part of this story is I'm about
to tell you, about a guy who was born in Bethlehem raised in Nazareth and went on
to speak to millions of people with a message. Every mental health story begins
with a family. This is mine. I am the little guy in yellow I have two older
brothers, Vance and Thad. This is a perfect 1980 photo- my dad's in a track jumpsuit,
my mom has just let out her disco perm, and we are moving forward in life. But
every story starts with a family because what this picture could never tell you
is that on both sides of my family we have massive amounts of depression,
anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, and addiction. This was not a question of if
I was going to have a mental health disorder. It was which one was it going
to be and when was it going to come out. And so I want to fast forward to age 11.
This is me rocking a Jordan t-shirt. I'm dropping off my oldest brother at the
University of Pennsylvania in his sophomore year of college. My middle
brother is on the right side, the other guy. We dropped my brother off at the
University of Pennsylvania that August. In October, my father received a phone
call that said, "Your son was determined to be a threat to himself and others
and was placed in a psychiatric ward. We hope you can come visit him." But this was
just the start of a massive amount of change for me that I would experience
over the next two years. I visited my brother in that psychiatric ward in
October of that year. In January of the next year, my grandmother died. A year
later, my grandfather died and six months after that my best friend was killed in
a car accident. From age 11 to 13, I started going through this major amount
of loss and change and I didn't know what to do. I grew up in a family where
emotions were never discussed or talked about, and so I hid it. I found it was
much better to put a happy face on and make people laugh than to talk about it
and I found that drinking was a quicker way to could cope with my pain than
anything else. So by the time I got to be 16, a lot of things changed. It's okay to
laugh at this picture. Who thought this guy would have trouble adjusting in high
school, right? So a lot of things changed but obviously what I was going through
wasn't funny. At 16, I started experiencing clear symptoms of bipolar
disorder. I had massive amounts of mania where I wouldn't sleep for five days in
a row and felt invincible. Then I'd go into this deep depression, where I couldn't
get out of bed and I couldn't do anything. But because I'd started
drinking at 13, I started binge drinking at 16 and what I found was that binge
drinking was a much quicker way to stop the thoughts, to slow them down, to pass
out, and to sleep. When you drink as your coping mechanism, your symptoms don't get
better. At 17, my diagnosis changed to bipolar disorder with anger control
problems and psychotic features. I had massive outburst of anger and severe
hallucinations. When I went into my senior year of high school, I went into a
horrible state of depression. It started off with loneliness. I didn't say
anything. I thought the loneliness would go away. It led to thoughts of death and
suicide, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for two months, but I didn't say a word. I
thought that one day, I'd wake up and I'd want to live again. I thought that one
day, I'd wake up and everything would magically get better. But that day didn't
come and on January 5th of my senior year, I was hospitalized for attempting
to take my own life. When I got into that hospital a couple
days later and finally figured out what had happened,
I realized that I had this massive external life that everybody saw and an
internal life that no one knew about. Because I wasn't on anyone's radar. I was
present in my class and a varsity basketball player and involved in every
student activity possible. Eventually, I got out of that hospital I went back to
high school and I just wanted everything to be normal again. So when I graduated, I
chose to go to American University in Washington, D.C. I thought my past would
leave me, that I could start over and move on. Two months into my freshman year,
I had a massive relapse with bipolar disorder and I had to go home and I was
hospitalized again. And then I was in and out of hospitals and colleges for the
next four years. And then I had this genius idea that if I just went back to
American, everything would get better. When I returned to American University,
four years after I started at age 22, not only were things not going to get better
but my coping mechanisms had gotten much worse. In November, that's first semester
back, one night I pre-gamed. I had about 13 shots of vodka in an hour and then I
went out. More shots. More beer. I passed out that night around 2:00 in the
morning. When I woke up the next day, my clock said 12:00 but when I looked
outside, it was dark. It wasn't noon of that day. It was midnight of the next day.
I'd been passed out for 22 hours and this was not uncommon for me. This had
become the norm. So I woke up that night I looked in the mirror and I started
crying and I said to myself, "Alright, you're either gonna continue this and you're
gonna die or you're gonna have to change." That was the first night that I actually
accepted having bipolar disorder. From 13 to 22, I went through loss and hospitals
and all kinds of things and it wasn't until that moment that I accepted it.
Acceptance is a big part of this, but I hated myself and I hated myself more
than I think anyone in this room could possibly imagine. And when you hate
yourself, it doesn't matter what your diagnosis or treatment are. I didn't care
enough about myself to even want to try and work on anything. There are few
things more dangerous than a person who hates themselves.
I had no consequences. So I went into therapy, I went into treatment and I was
honest for the first time. And I had to learn to like myself and once I learned
to like myself I could deal with everything else. To do that I put myself
in a system where I got sleep and I started working through therapy and
finding a treatment that works best for me. But the most important lesson I
learned in my recovery was that I never chose to have bipolar disorder but I
could choose to change the way I coped with it.
I could start being honest. I could stop hiding. I could stop drinking. I could
start talking and exercising and writing and building relationships that mattered.
Eventually, I found a way to manage my bipolar disorder. I went on to graduate
from American University. I went into a fancy life of mental health advocacy but
I still work on this every day. Every day I have to build my mental health and
check in with myself and make sure I'm okay and then I can manage these
situations. So that's my story with bipolar disorder. Now you're thinking,
"Wait, that's like six minutes. That's only halfway." Having bipolar disorder doesn't
make me unique or different. A lot of people have it. What made my story
different is what happened to me when I was in high school, when I got out of the
hospital after attempting to take my own life. I grew up in a really small town.
The reaction was not kind. I lost friends. In school I was called, 'the crazy kid', 'the
psycho'. I had rumors about me all through that
town and two months after I got out of the hospital, a psychologist came into one of
my classrooms to talk about the patients he was treating. As he talked
about the patients he was treating, every single student in that classroom started
laughing, but I wasn't laughing. Because at that point, I had been laughed at too
much. And so I grabbed my teacher and I took him into the hallway and I said,
"This isn't funny to me." And he looked down at me in the most rural
Pennsylvania way and he said, "What are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna
do about it?" And I had no idea that the answer I was
gonna give was gonna change my life forever, but I looked back up at him and
I said, "Let me speak. Let me tell people what it's like to go through this." I
stood up in that classroom two weeks later and I spoke for the very first
time. And when I finished no one laughed. And I learned at a young age that if you
share your story it opens people to sharing
theirs. So from age 17 to age 22, I spoke to high school classrooms in my darkest
years about what it was like to have bipolar disorder. When I turned 23, and
was doing better in treatment, I had this idea- Why wasn't this a full school
assembly? Why didn't I hear about this in high school? So I created the Youth
Mental Health Awareness Movement. It was a nonprofit organization to start full
school assemblies about mental health. I ran it for a year. At age 24, in 2002,
these guys approached me. Hey it's those guys. This is a picture of the Clintons and
the Gores at the first-ever White House Conference on Mental Health in 1999. They
started the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign at this conference. It
was the first large-scale stigma reduction campaign in the country. In
2002, they came to me and said, "What's missing?" and I said, "We don't have
large-scale assemblies about mental health." So I signed on as the Director of
Outreach and from 2002 to 2006, I spoke to over half a million young people in
large-scale presentations. The goal was not to promote me. It was to figure out a
system to train others so that we could have more diverse voices and get more
people involved. In 2006, we created the first Youth Mental Health Speakers
Bureau in the country. In 2007, I wrote a book called, "Behind Happy Faces". By 2010,
I had trained over 50 speakers and created this new movement of Youth
Mental Health Speakers speaking a large audiences and I burned out. And I did
what anyone does when they burn out- I joined the Peace Corps. It's like I'm so
tired. I'm gonna go live in this hut. I lived in Botswana and I worked at the
largest Center for people with disabilities in the country. My main job
there was to do awareness for HIV and AIDS. I had done
eight years of awareness for mental health, I was doing two years of
awareness for HIV and AIDS, and the whole time that I was washing my clothes by
hand and stepping away from leopards, I was thinking to myself, "What's next?" I
came home in 2013 and this one statement stuck out to me. Nelson Mandela said,
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." So
I asked myself again, "What's missing?" And what was
was a mental health curriculum. We're not teaching people about mental health. So
in 2013 I created the Behind Happy Faces Mental Health Curriculum and it's now
being used by over 70,000 middle school, high school, and college students. Thank
you very much. It's being used in very unorthodox ways. It's being used in
Greek life and freshman orientations. I have a partnership with the NCAA. It's
being used by student athletes. But it's just the start. It's four lessons to
teach you a definition, a vocabulary, how to cope, and how to help a friend. We need
to go further than that. We will always need awareness but we need to do more. We
need to teach mental health the same way we teach physical health, from
kindergarten through the rest of your life.
Mental health is not something you do when something's wrong. It's not
something you do when you have a problem. Mental health is something you build and
you foster and you grow much like your physical health. That's the future I see.
That's the future we need. That's the future I am working tirelessly
to. Mental health needs to be taught. If we're going to see the perfection in
people, they need to know their options. They need to know how to work on them. I
didn't have the tools to do this when I was a teenager because no one talked
about it. We need curriculum to give people those tools. And so I have one
more story I'm going to share with you. When I turned 21, my parents took me out
for my birthday dinner. It was a standard birthday dinner. We sit
down at a steak house, we order appetizers, waiter walks away, and then my
parents started crying. And I didn't see my dad cry a lot in my life and so I
looked at them and I was like, "Why are you guys crying?" And my dad looked at me,
through those choking balled-up tears, and he said, "We didn't think you would
live to be 21." I gave my parents a lot of reasons to not think I would live to be
21. But I did. Unfortunately I've met a lot of families
who don't. If you have experienced loss with every
cell in your body, then of experienced love with every cell in your body. And
you know that after a while you can find some lightness through that dark. Today
you heard a lot of stories, including mine. This issue doesn't change unless
you tell yours. This issue doesn't change unless we teach people about mental
health in new ways and that is art and that is music and history and
neuroscience and everything coming together to make a difference. There is a
massive amount of power in all of your stories. You won't know where it leads
until you tell it. Thank you very much.