and i learned a lot but i learned more because i had actually few people in my immediate family with mental illness and to live amongst people with a mental illness you get to know quite a bit about it especially if they go into the hospital and you are up there every day and you're you're taking care of them but you're also watching these teenagers and because that's one of the strikes and really between sixteen and twenty five so i got to be called mom many times and i didn't care at all i loved it and if any teenager want to set on my lap because their mother didn't come because they were traumatized i was fine they could sit on my lap i don't care and i learned so much about psychosis and i learned so much about these kids and from then on and that was like when we were years ago from then on i have done my very best to try to get rid of the stigma of mental illness so the people will start recognizing that it's physical illness it's part of the body so today i mean i've had depression and i've had schizophrenia bad i've had five it's to educate society into what it's all about for you people know about what it's about for cancer people and diabetic people and things like that but mental illness is kind of men on the bottom of the shelf and if they can a lawyer paying for benefits for the mentally ill they'll do it and so i'm here to just ask them just open up your ears and listen and so let's get to you and let's get to when you were first diagnosed and that was that was twenty two years ago march was twenty three and the fact was that i was going to law school and it was not a friendly law school was a commuter school i was in the middle of manhattan and i didn't it was hard to make friends  that and that was a stressor my roommate that was a stressor and my father was sick my grandmother was sick she was we thought she was dying of cancer she lived a few more years  i had a very bad therapist who without helping at all my mom in fact i think she was more part of part of the problem and she with a solution my mom came from new york to see me and she wanted to take me home i think but they wouldn't release me to my brother with a medical school he was a graduate of medical school he came up from san antonio texas where we lived my parents lived at the time and he took him back to texas little he's really going to ask you so this must have been something that you know he really came to the yeah he wanted to help yeah all that that's really good for you and so that was when you were twenty three rate i found actually kind of the cost of the recently of a friend of mine that was in the program recently you can believe how much it had johns as i was i tried to get my daughter in it once and it was just too expensive at that point met with that was about twenty years ago restaurant so they grow their own food and kill their own meat and they kill their own meat and so everything is like one big community and you live their houses there for the staff members of the volunteers who come from different programs and you also have therapy there so the that you help me really don't have therapy you have a contact person you meet with once one once a week about an hour and i understand you know we just make thoughts and we think they're real but in a way you are not you know i used to have a friend who had schizophrenia that carry his little dog with him and he said if the dog barked the the government of massachusetts of any state it seems that the government takes their most vulnerable and puts them down the bottom of the list and that's not the way to run a country you always treat your most and its name was spirit and spirit just loved everybody and everybody loves being you know it was just something that they could take a hold of and love and pat and the and spirit would give back the love so it was good that they use the animals as far as therapy exactly that yeah so anyways you're not twenty three anymore but you know at twenty three and you're forty but you can go to other groups that i have great with that makes it or i used to be president of the friendship club in limit which is a clubhouse and what they had was transitional employment in other words the staff would take on the job and if you would job at mcdonald's they'd learn how to cook french fries or hamburgers and then the mentally ill person would pick it right up and if something happened that the mentally ill person had to be hospitalized the staff would take it over and were always good and when in line yeah so the staff would to take it over and then when the mentally ill person got out of the hospital and more and more people should to do that more and more people should hire the mentally ill because they're so good and you're so good you know no one would would you know know that you have a problem or you you've got your loving boyfriend and yeah angela loving can and you've got waverly place and you've got almost people that are supporting you yeah and that helps a lot so the this second that you start to feel bad or back to where you might think that you should be hospitalized i mean everybody's there to support you and get you out of there earlier and one of the things that they did the hospital was  yeah so what do you think about stigma well what do you want to talk about say what i want to talk about thank the little children from the very beginning when they see the looney tune and it's like kids brought up from the very beginning to look upon mental illness as something inferior and but that has never affected you never i think it's a shame that kids are being taught that mental illness is crazy but it's also a cute i love that ok we got a different slant on all of the  way it's the people around them as they were older yeah yeah and which is not a good thing and eventually see it's the stigma that prevents the bringing in the wow and the car was plan a lot and health care management and the college is based on writing i mean you could do this i think about i want to master absolutely it's based on writing and you have different courses and instead of taking tests they say ok write a five page paper on post traumatic stress disorder and you could do that i would love to if you're giving me ideas absolutely they say write a write a two page paper on terrorism and you could do that right but the thing at the very end is write a fifty page paper on anything you want something that you could almost use like a thesis  that you could publish as a book and what i did as i i wrote about the mentally ill in the prisons all because one third of the prisons have mentally ill people in them wow and a lot of them can't handle the controls when they commit suicide so my thesis was you know is that there is a suicide the fault of the state or the fault of the prisons and that really i came up with it's fault at the state because the mentally ill should not be in prisons so to give you ideas of what you can do especially if you have mass health and  can get into schools very easily to get a master's degree and whatever you want psychology that's my razor and was my major and i would ask yeah so if every author is unknown on this but i thought it was good enough but i really want to read it and the name of it is listen and when i ask you to listen to me and you sagging we advice you have not done what i asked when i ask you to listen to me and you begin to doubt me why i shouldn't feel that way you are trampling on my feelings when i ask you to listen to me and you feel you have to do something to solve my problem you have failed me listen all that i ask is that you listen not talk or do just hear me when you do something for me that i that i can and need to do for myself you could tribute to my fear in inadequacy but when you accept as a simple fact that i do feel what i feel no matter how irrational then i can quit trying to convince you and get about this business of understanding what's behind those feeling listen to people you hear what they feel and as i said even though it might be irrational you still hear what they feel and mental ill of her the law to do with emotions and feelings and and are you people out there that don't know very much about men the mentally ill it's a physical own as a biological based brain disorder the  chemicals are kind of out of whack and things should shouldn't change and what would you like to say i just want to remember that the brain is a part of the body it's not disconnected from the and we've heard wonderful things from her and and please think please think about it and and please do something about it help them and that's all i have to say for this week but i'll be back and i'll do more stigma busting and thank you very much for listening and thank you melissa you're welcome