hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to mental health matters my name is pat lawrence and we're going to talk today about the life of a beautiful girl  lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter and mental health matters you can't be without it it's the number one ok anyways we're going to talk about you and your life and the very important fact that you have succeeded and you have bipolar  out and it is a severe disease but you succeeded and there are many people out there would bipolar that have succeeded and i want to go into your child first and what was it like i my parents are from a generation that mental illness and yeah and my mother had my sister who soldier who was a perfect child i stood me in life to get to and then she had me which i wasn't supposed puberty by i was very the rage choice there also so my mother had a very difficult time and didn't know i sought help but could didn't get any help and she didn't know but she made things much much worse because she was so very very negative towards and how was your experience in school that's great you know and really it's really wonderful so it was a good start but she passed away the following year and i had a difficult teacher but people in the years of mania outside the house and depression inside the house really yeah and what was the mania like my father was cause to me financially bailing meow i'm you saw i never did drugs or anything because he had two close friends and mel school high school that kept me in the little box in terms of that's it for you and i never drank a lot for the same reason all but risky behaviors you know walking on a wall or the charles falling into the crowd things like that will you i know you're not your mom didn't understand you know and she didn't like my grandmother and i was exactly like my grandma so that didn't help either but you weren't treated badly  are how she treated by sister the way my sister was when my seventeen months apart so it was my mother crying us up getting us ready and then i just looked like a foster child baby everybody knew but it was a time when people didn't speak about it or or do anything about it or at home actually i'm going to seeing mom call after i will hear that apologized to me recently for not getting me out of the situation and i father did the best he could but he was so kept like that he would not step in very often well i don't want to say control but to just have my mother back off but he was there for me and he knew and he would have closed door really wonderful conversations with me over the years well that was nice so he did the best he could write yeah so you had at least one parent that was there to this day he had to stroke two years ago still to then my mother kind of neglected him so last june i moved back and then we got him back to occupational therapy physical therapy he's now getting botox for the arm that never came back and he's getting botox f same i created the same support system that i had had in elementary school so you had some good friend yes they're friends to this day twenty years that's wonderful  handful well that's all right very very caring people even if you only have one or two you know it's ok as long as they support you and as long as they if you decide you want to go up and do something that they don't think she should do they'll tell you there's one specific friend that for all these years checks with me once a week excellent excellent that's nice and i bet you talk for a long time we do sons  but that my i had a really vivid dream about her and go coming at me and i sat up straight and screamed from my father and he came in an calmed me down and then my mother called the school the next day and took care of that and then there was another incident it's funny it goes right till this day of a girl is mother because i have the boyfriend that she was and to this day she's never had a day and her mother came out on the street and came at me but my best friend took care that so that was another incident and there were two girls that got into witchcraft and stole clothes and stuff and tried to do in same ok so when were you clinically diagnosed with bipolar up until age thirty thirty ok but did you have all the symptom before then but yes it got me through i worked full time in a day care and went to school full time and worked on the weekends so the mania got me through my undergraduate because my father lost his business  had to pay for it myself and then all my first job out of college at the time there were no teaching jobs so i took a job as a computer applications trainer and the mania helped me there i actually made it to i was the training manager for forty trainers i had profit sharing and everything and i was only twenty seven at that point it took me a long time finish school  but the same thing happened there that my mother did to me and that i experienced at school and i had been working eighty hours a week and that's when i had a breakdown and my father had to come i was under one hundred pounds and carried me out of my apartment and took me to an emergency room near his house and just begged to the doctors to help me so was that doctor in at mclean hospital so it was a psychiatric nurse at the hospital that got me set up with him at that point they didn't but when i was hospital he took responsibility for me  know because a lot of people with was hollow so nations especially with schizophrenia you know they hear the voices of the voices saying negative things about them and you don't have any of that now what was the and then you hit the plateau with the depression and i can't blame that one of some to say yeah yeah yeah and is the depression as bad as the suicidal ok so the depression get suicidal and that's very serious and that's like the very end of depression you get to the point where you just think that tomorrow is going to be the same as today and nothing is going to change and i don't like to live in this life and i want to get out of it  and i did did somebody help you were there yes a very close friend of my that's why to the station calls once a week we made a pact excellent but the minute i started making plans that i recall or immediately and she hung in there because it was quite often in the beginning in the beginning it was ok now it's only when i'm involved with my mother problems and then when you're depressed you don't deal with anything and the financial problems get worse and worse and worse ok so the next day isn't going to be better ok all right so the next  doesn't get better and how do you get around that i mean the depression stuff at some point does it only stop if you have the support of other people i have i had for the first twenty years it's the same psychiatry and therapist and oh we work through those twenty years because no one knew until it was too late that i also was in premature menopause so that's why we were not able to get consistent medication therapy ok once i finally had the right kind of behavioral therapy psychiatr to he he's much older and that's to the point or he calls me his star patient and he actually checks in on me those who really yes and then you know and then you know the behavioral therapy you write out a plan for what you're going to do ok and the only time i ended up in the hospital was because of a medication that actually did the reverse instead of position so that was another at the bottom crawl back up and then nine eleven and no that was nine eleven is when they let me go and i went back to school for my masters and substitute and went on as s t i and i couldn't make it in the classroom because i can't take over stimulation i probably could if i took more medication but then i'd be asleep after you know you would be able to function yeah so i did everything morphed into i started with the first grade and then i did special needs and then i did residential schools and each time excuse me i couldn't last i just couldn't last i'd have another breakdown so i that's when my team determined that i need to do something that partially at home and that's how i got into great yeah that's how i got into ok they are one of the first ones in the seventy's to help children with children and young adults with problems so let's talk about you this is my business your business i really want to talk about i mean you you are you are wonderful you have a business and you working through your disorder but you still have this wonderful business yes because i'm so passionate and yes   understood my disorder and was rigorous with my training and then i took on my first client and did fantastic when i was living yes from age two all the way up to in their twenty's usually twenty two but sometimes i would help people because i had been through it myself after that age  into the mental health from the source and security and transitional systems and section eight and all that and i still help people with that all right so you started with mental health or special needs needs special needs my master's degrees and special needs education and when you say special needs is the mentally retarded it's anything ok it's now when i moved down to the cape there it i am it's lost so it's very small right now we're i'm i'm starting over so i have a dvocates throughout the state each has three to four clients at the time at the moment and i have two clients at the moment and i'm sort of taking a step back and rebuilding the business part of it so that we can be solid moving forward you have any any other help there he would do it all by yes yes i have three close friends with bipolar with bipolar just order that i just happened to me as life went on and maizie how many people there are in this world with mental illness yes and it's amazing the stigma that goes along with it yes and i've been trying now for twenty five years you know i wrote the mental health parity building give the insurance and i put twenty six billboards across massachusetts that mental illness is a physical illness so that society would see that and i train eighty five hundred police officers these people that are mentally ill that have put in prison because it's like the last place that they have to go and they have all these problems of can help parents get the right education for themselves i help the teachers and everyone involved in the education world of the child so that they won't enter what's called the pipeline to  prison where they were not given the right act accommodations and they were not given the right their fees so they gave up on them selves and that's how they started down that road he had chapter t to to pass on july first which is very helpful because now you won't have so many suspensions and expulsions without access to the curriculum if done right can really actually left ok so if you have anything you really want to say to all those people out there that have special needs kids so they themselves have a special needs what do you want to say i want to say that  i am just beginning to widen my world by that i'm on linked in facebook and everything else so please find me please ask questions  having a mental illness and i hope you'll turn it to an end again in a couple weeks and we'll talk about something else thank you