and what i try very hard to do is to get rid of the stigma that surrounds mental illness to get rid of the fear of a very terrified and vulnerable population and with me today i'm very nightmares you do have nightmares you know it's it's nightmares it's excitability you know hyper vigilance which we talked about yeah you know the flashbacks being overwhelmed by certain smells certain sounds fifteen and without getting into the nitty gritty details let's just say it was not a happy time and you know very shortly afterwards i just i would wake up every night you know from just horrible horrible nightmares you know i could never sleep i was anxious in class you know my throat would close up i couldn't breathe or be like sweating profusely all the time and then you know i would catch the smell of something and i knew you know i was it smoke and it wasn't or it was something that smelled like smoke and i knew you know i'll pay whatever but at the same time my body reacted in such a way that i panicked and you can't just shut that off because your body just keeps keeps going so how long have you had this that i'm seventeen years i'm thirty two now it's thirty two now thirty three next next week i  effectively the idea behind them is that when you were feeling anxious you would take a pill and this pill would quite literally make you feel better by making you feel kind of high and this didn't work i mean in principle this sounds awful and most doctors don't like prescribing these medications that he more but this is really their first line of defense against p t s d because the treatment isn't exactly up to par yet addictive by it makes your body physically incapable of panicking least that's i'm not a doctor but that's how it's been explained to me and that really seems like how it works and that drug changed my life man yeah just completely changed my life i or i just wouldn't be able to function if not for that medication keeping in mind when we're not reporting any medications we are saying that some of them do help but some of them are so dangerous that if they help it's great but this side effects come in some can kill you well this statistic is it is it thirty years or twenty five twenty five it's twenty five you ok so the minute you start taking psych meds your life expectancy drops twenty five years so the life expectancy of a person with a mental illness is twenty five years less than quote unquote chronically normal right which is something that's very serious and something that they should be working on and so that's what we're doing here today would try to get rid of stigma fear etc of the mentally ill so that the research will become stronger so they'll be more cures so they'll be even better treatment so they'll be less ridicule less fear because we do have to admit that person with a mental illness people often perceive the psychotic as scary or dangerous and ok fair enough but then we have to ask why are they in treatment absolutely and one of the things that comes up like over and over and over again from people i've talked to and things you know i've heard is that no one wants the label no one wants the stigma that it would be it's perceived that it's better for them to live with these sort of horrible symptoms than it is to enter the system be labeled a mental patient and just be treated as this sort of pariah by society that's just awful it's awful that someone in that position would have to make a decision like that made i mean people with cancer people who are on no terminal list of cancer and that perceived as to be you know anything why people with a mental illness why can't they have medications that can calm them down and and bring act slightly different in a public setting that would draw attention but no one hates people with tourette's no one is really scared of the mental you know who display you know certain little social tics or whatnot or vilified and you know there's this huge disconnect there because they're you know they're both diseases they're both treated with medication but one over here you know is socially acceptable and autistic children you know it it's we have to help them it's inbred innes everyone is really starting to love alzheimer's patients you know there is more funding there's more  people on television and you know holding up their hands please give to alzheimer's which is actually a mental problem for why not schizophrenia why not bipolar because of stigma  when people hear when people hear about autism they think about rain man which was you know and uplifting family family friendly film right you know when people and i think of the little children yeah maybe the little children and it's it's a pleasant image whereas when people hear psychotic they think of hannibal lector or the joker and these are grossly inaccurate portrayals that are quite frankly inappropriate for television or film i mean fifty years ago african americans were portrayed as just you know horrible people and if we go back and we look at these like old shows these old cartoons and we see how these individuals are betrayed it's just like it's shockingly gross  that that could happen and yet society was tolerant of it and so nowadays we see in the popular media over and over and over again the mental mentally ill being for traders you know villains are monsters and this everyone just ok with it and it's just like people you know twenty thirty years from now people are going to look back on this like what on earth were they doing and i know that it's obscene heard it will change don't will it will not absolutely will and we're not going anywhere to it's starting to change a little bit now it is a little bit yet still heck of a lot better than it was ten years of that i mean even babies even children when they watch television when they watch a la saying oh this princess is crazy you know so this these are the children get it right from right age three and up and down and it keeps on going and that is really a shame do you think that's that's vindictive do you think the people that are behind this media i think they're just trying to just sell their show their ignorance they don't care and they're not hateful they're ignorant because i think that's an important distinction to make yes because i don't i don't hate the media i just think they're not very good at fair portrayal of people like us and if you take a person quote unquote again we get chronically normal who murders somebody and then we have a person who has a mental illness that murders somebody don't you think that the media just picks it up and because they're mentally ill it gets so much worse oh absolutely i think it's one of the most i'm except of all thing is that i mean just recently there was there was a story about some  arson logit arson at some church up on the north shore this is just in the past week in the first thing i i read it came out all of the suspect we think is mentally ill and sick how is that newsworthy how is that even appropriate to put into print i mean wh why would you say that that has no bearing whatsoever on this case i mean a mentally ill person is as responsible for their actions as anyone else may so why it why put it why introduce it into the conversation except to use it as a talking point toward stigma now you mentioned before then that you know that coming back from afghanistan and iraq are two hundred thirty four thousand men there some people or when soldiers started coming home from vietnam and it was just an explosion of homelessness and mental illness because society wasn't ready they had no idea what to do with this many individuals suffering from p t s d and other disabilities and we are not in other words we're not thinking that p t s d is something it is a separate thing from mental illness it's not looked on the same way i think all trauma related diagnoses are sort of they're in a separate room from the rest of many mental illnesses are just simply because they arise from different situations by i mean i it's still mental illness and it's still you know treatable under the same sort of family providers but yeah it's sort of it's not exactly  so all these guys that are coming back there are a lot of nonprofits out there that that hopefully will help and the v much by their own american citizens because they were i know a gentleman who said that when he got off the boat people would spit on him because it was a war they didn't want well this is a war that we sent these boys and girls into and we are responsible for them because they're coming back this way and it's kind of our fault they're coming back this way  yeah and i'd i don't know i have some friends in the military and i don't exactly know how much information is provided to them going overseas or pope p t s d statistics i mean kind of interested in sort of figuring out how that process works but you know it's just it must be completely shocking to them to go overseas you know full of zeal and hope i'm going to defend the country i'm going to defend liberty you know people view them as heroes and then they come home and if they come home sick then they're not they're not really people anymore at least according to society and i just it's such a such a betrayal of their trust that we really have to we can't let it happen again we can't let it happen again and hopefully we won't i know there are so many people that are ara are working on it but you know are there enough you talking to me before  a committee that you're on and that you lean into the room and i really want that over the air you're right that's that's a fun one so i receive services through a and you don't look mentally ill and that just made me so sad because it meant this person this you know this person with mental illness working in a nonprofit agency to empower inform her still had this sort of self stigmatizing image in her head of what someone with mental illness looks like and that someone with mental illness can't you know can't be well groomed to their clothes aren't clean the things like that and i think if the idea is that prevalent that even people in the system receiving services on their path to recovery aren't aware you know that independent entity because clubhouses they have a very specific sort of charter in the work order day in this this is set up differently this is more of a social component do any of those people look mentally ill i don't know what mental illness looks like and that's really good i think it's such a loaded question thing yeah well i know what the media says mental illness looks like right but i don't you know you know the mad scientist  evil cloud that's going to you know steal your children away you know like the mad arsonist these kinds of things this is fiction absolutely i mean if you want to see someone meant we'll look at me you know this is what mental illness looks like when we talk about the people who are mentally ill we talk about the people who are out on the street we talk about the people who have the budget has been cut where they have nowhere to go the shelters have no room for them you know when people are out on the street people are cold and all these people are shunned by society so they don't really have any options they go into emergency rooms and put on a to be the veterans that are going to be out there on the streets and the exact same thing is going to happen to them that they're going to their families won't be able to take them back they will be so angry at cetera et cetera everything that goes defend our country or or afghanistan or iran or it's not fair that they should come back and be stigmatized and thrown out on the street and not get a job and not get a home and have their family show on them because they may feel a little bit angry or a lot angry and the families can't handle it with it it has a lot to do with the families too i think the family component is really tough because you can't make families accepting you can't really force education on but it has to be sort of it has to be they have to care they have to want you know their seanad their daughter to be taken care of to have a life and some people are just so off put by the label of mental illness or misunderstanding of the symptoms that you know their family unit cannot accommodate that and they don't do the research they don't talk to the doctors they don't find out that you know there is treatment there is help this is not the end of your life but it's not enough families that really accept you know the label in this family you do you know i was before the show i say you know pictures with your daughter you're very very supportive of her my my mother whom i love very much is not very supportive of me you know  it well i have my own you know support network i have my friends you know i have various other whatnot but the family component isn't there for me and i fear from so many people at that program i because families if that person continues to get the love and support from their family if they need to take medication and the family is all in agreement that maybe this is going to help them maybe they'll think about a little more and maybe they'll take it and things might change i know my daughter has been on medication for eighteen years and it's like she is my same sweet daughter that i had before the illness came and  so i do believe in medication a lot of people don't i think medication as a whole needs a lot more research i believe in medication but i think better medication better medication yes simply because you know the side effects as they stand now are unacceptable i mean absolutely to have twenty five years shaved off your life  god when i heard what tardive dyskinesia was i thought it was like a star trek villain because i'm like what is this that's a made up word that's not that doesn't really happen and happen and it happens so much and it feels like it should be criminal or something to have dyskinesia stats on your time and it's like a worm like feeling under your tongue and then it goes to different muscle groups of your body and then you said to shape and that's from medication it is and it is is preventable if they take them off the medication immediately but if they continue on with the medication it's there fell a i mean it's nerve damage it's moved them i mean that that's unacceptable medication cannot cause nerve damage that's the into if it's of medication right so obvious so more research absolutely must be done and these medications if you absolutely have to be on them ok bye just be aware of the side effects i think informed consent laws have come a long way and i think you know psychiatrists have really worked with their compliance on this issue but i also know a lot of individuals and myself included i was put on medication without without the information without knowing what that you didn't gain a hundred pounds i did actually did i lost eighty pounds a few years ago oh so i mean yeah i've got pictures and then i look horrible i look horrible hundred you  nation yeah that's part of that but i mean i just i didn't want to be that person anymore and you know i got off of those medications and i got you know i strange over all of my tutors in my entire medication i'm doing much better now but the point was that you know for fifteen years i was allowed to just languish in this sort of you know muck and mire of mental illness with really no progress and no hope  i really suppress your family to do something i wish they had i don't want to beat up on my family they have their own stuff they had to deal with and i can you know i've made peace with that by i think at the same time personality disorder that reaches out to borderline personality disorder patients and their families because that is one heck of a disease and they say it's a female disease but i say ali males are in the prisons you know because the anger just reaches this it gets never stops it keeps on well and so borderline is another mental illness quote unquote that should have more research should i have absolutely should have some sort of medication that could come these people down i think any sort of diagnosis that's tied to one of the other gender is suspect of being you know  need of more research because that's i mean this is the twenty first century it's kind of silly to apply a mental disorder to women without really saying well men don't get this straight and it's like we're all human race can you explain why you know it only women know of course not there's no justification for it so it feels sort of sort of unfinished as a diagnosis to me i think i think women probably reach out  and be sensitive to behavior that exhibited by mental illness absolutely one minute that what you have to say about stephen i think is awful it's changing but it's going to require all of to people who are out on the streets in the shelters kitchens to help out and do anything they can and i'll see you in a couple of weeks and we'll do this all over again and hopefully i will be able to bring