Coming-of-age is terrifying and speaking as someone who turned 40 several months ago, so much of my life has not gone the way I imagined it would when I was younger. When I was a child, an hour felt like days but now that I’m reaching middle-age I feel as though a week passes as quickly as a day.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where my life has gone and how quickly time has passed. I’ve been reflecting on the advice that older people gave me when I was younger, about how I needed to go to new places and do new things, and that somehow my life would slow down through the experiencing process. Unfortunately, I have not found that to be true. Instead, I have found that the only thing that is true is that change is the only constant, that impermanence is the only absolute.
I have begun to think that I need to focus more on what I’ve gained from experiences and less on trying to have more and more of them in a futile attempt to slow down time. For example, courage and authenticity are things I’ve really taken to heart over the years. Life is an adventure and like any adventure things don’t always go to plan. What’s important is to not get caught up in the mistakes and choose instead to simply acknowledge them as the learning experiences they are and move on the wiser.
When I was 16, I was too afraid of the social pressures of conformity and the risk of receiving judgement to feel like I could live authentically. Years of my life were spent in pain pretending to be someone I wasn’t just to feel like I could fit in and be accepted. But the person the people around me accepted was not me, only a shadow of who I really was, a mask I put on to feel normal and safe.
When I was 22 and had just been discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps I realized that I would rather live an authentic life not knowing what was to come than to die having lived a life not my own. It was in that experience that I learned courage was self-acceptance and authenticity.
Life is about letting go of the desire to control everything, that was a lesson I had to learn too. Not all of my goals would be accomplished, not all of my dreams would come true. I had to stop seeing myself as a failure and start seeing myself as a person.
The hardest thing we will ever do is be ourselves in a world that constantly tells us that we are never enough, to let go of other people’s expectations for who we are and how we choose to live our lives. This is particularly true in our teens and early adult years, what is frequently referred to these days as the “emerging adult” phase of life.
It is a time in our lives when we are becoming our own person with our own identity outside of our old life, old friendships, away from our parents and family, and perhaps most importantly separating ourselves from our old actions, beliefs, and choices. We are becoming someone new, someone changed by time, experience, and consequence, and that transformation is often fraught with confusion, questioning, pain and an unbecoming of the old self to make room for a more authentic self.
This unbecoming can feel scary because it means letting go. We humans love to hold on, hold on to the past, to familiar ideals, old narratives, old stories, to our old selves because old feels comfortable, but growth does not come from what is comfortable or easy, it comes from the unknown, from adversity.
Everything in life is like leaves falling from a tree, we can’t force them all to land where we want, only some. I have learned that we need to just admire them as they fall into their own self-directed place and appreciate the beauty that chaos and impermanence brings.
While I think the advice that those older people told me when I was young about how I needed to travel was good advice to access opportunities for experience, I don’t think it was helpful in discovering more about who I am as a person. Far too often, we travelย abroadย or go out into the wildernessย in the hopes ofย findingย ourselves only to discoverย that what we’re really doing isย attempting to escape ourselvesย in a new location.ย Only to learn that we are everywhere we go. The best we can hope for is to come back from those voyages, understanding that the only path we ever needed to traverse was inward to begin the hard work of personal development.ย To “come home” as they say, to know ourselves perhaps for the first time in our lives.
Life is strange, I admit we often do need to be removed from our normal circumstances, either in the sense of ordinary physical location or in mental routine, multiple times before we finally see that the common denominator in what troubles us is actually us and the massively unanswered question of who we are. It is a lesson in self-actualization, self-acceptance, and more often than not self-forgiveness.
The most difficult challenge any of us will ever face in life is to master ourselves. Doing this is both a quiet and a lonely path, one without audience or fanfare, a long and arduous path of painful truths that reveal secrets and trauma deeply held, and the letting go of the falsehoods we conceal ourselves behind in fear of disappointment and judgement. It is a transformation into authenticity, delivered in solitude, and we are both the giver and the gift.
One of the biggest hurdles I needed to face between the ages of 14 and 22 was my mental health, something that no older person ever gave me advice about until it was already too late and I was in the deepest, darkest places mentally. My story is not uncommon, for most people that timespan between 10 and 24 years of age is saturated with mental health hardship and the vast majority of us are woefully unprepared to endure it because such topics were not part of standard school curriculum nor common conversations within our households growing up.
At any given moment, 31 million Americans are struggling with a mental health condition, 19 million are struggling with a substance use disorder, and 11 million are contemplating suicide.
Mental health issues are widespread and very common as 1 in 5 Americans are currently living with a mental health condition or substance use disorder, 1 in 2 will struggle with either or both at some point in their lifetime and 50% of them will experience the onset of symptoms by age 14. The majority of which will not actively seek treatment due to a variety of reasons, including stigma, cost, and physical access to services.
Statistically, someone experiencing a mental health crisis is more likely to be a victim of a crime than the perpetrator of it, yet we often see in film and television that people experiencing a mental health crisis are dangerous or scary. The statistics range depending on what organization we collect the data from, but reports suggest that anywhere from 10 – 30% of Americans with mental illness will have an encounter with law enforcement at some point, but the majority of these encounters include petty infractions like jaywalking and disorderly conduct, as well as substance use. Violent crimes are in the minority of encounters.
As someone who has lived with a serious mental health condition for more than twenty-five years I know all too well the consequences of untreated mental illness, as well as the lack of education about mental health and the relevant signs and symptoms of mental illness. Mental health conditions are still shunned today, but they are far better understood than they were 50, 40, or even 30 years ago.
Someone once asked me to describe what it’s like having a serious mental illness and so I described it as the following…
Having a mental illness is like walking along a rocky seaside shore enjoying the warm sun, the sounds of the waves lapping against the shore, the seafaring birds calling from above you in the sky, and the sounds of children laughing, people wave at you and ask you to join them and have a wonderful time.
Then suddenly you slip on a wet rock and hurdle down into the sea below, so quickly your brain couldn’t even register what was happening, let alone allow you the chance to call out for help.
You plunge into the water down below in a dizzying flurry, you can’t tell which direction is up and you can’t see a damn thing.
When you finally get your bearings, you swim up and break the surface only to realize the waves have carried you far from the shore.
Making your way back you quickly become fatigued.ย As you try to climb back up the wet rocks, their slipperiness makes it so difficult and behind you the waves keep crashing, slamming you into them.ย The waves keep coming, wave after wave after wave.
Exhausted and feeling helpless you convince yourself there is no hope, you’ll never crawl up the rocks, especially not while the waves keep crashing against you.
It’s taking everything you have just to tread water and keep your head above the surface.ย The longer you fight the more disoriented you become, no longer does the sun, the birds, or the laughter pass through your thoughts.
All you know is the pain from the battering waves, the agony of the taunting rocks, and just how immensely tired you are.
You look up and see people walking along the shore, you motion to them hoping they will notice you.ย They stop and shout down to you, “Hey, why areyoudown there, it’s not safe you should climb back up,” and then continue on their way.
Others pass by and shout, “Just climb up the rocks, it’s easy to do.”ย Others, completely oblivious that you are struggling, shout, “Isn’t it a wonderful day for a swim?”
When you manage to call out for help, some answer back, “I’m sorry, I’m really busy right now.”ย Others reply, “This is scary and it looks really tough, I can’t deal with this today.”ย Still others shout, “Looks like you’re in a bad place right now, let me know if you ever wanna talk,” as they walk away.
Something that I have been noticing more and more frequently in recent years is psychosis in teens and young adults. If you attend a mental health conference (as I do) it’s a topic that is getting a lot of attention, much of it related to substance use triggering the onset of psychosis in teens and young adults. As someone who had experience with short-term psychosis in my early twenties, I know it’s a topic that makes people uncomfortable and fearful. If we are living in a world where more teens and young adults will be experiencing psychosis as part of their coming-of-age story then I think it’s a topic that deserves a little more attention when we talk about the challenges of this phase of our lives.
I experienced auditory and visual hallucinations in my early twenties where the things I saw and heard were, in many ways, very real to me and indiscernible from any other person who could be in the room speaking with me. I could see them and hear them like any other living thing, I could have conversations with them. However, the beings that talked to me were floating disembodied heads. Their voices were loud and angry, telling me horrible things about myself and other people, telling me to do horrible things to myself and other people.
Today, I am a certified peer specialist in the mental health industry and I know a whole hell of a lot more about mental health conditions and substance use challenges than I did back then. But still, even at that young age, I knew the things I was seeing and hearing were not actually real, no matter how real they appeared or sounded, I knew that they couldn’t possibly be real because they defied everything I knew to be possible. Floating disembodied heads that talk are not real, voices telling me to kill myself didn’t make logical sense, no amount of reasoning could justify their existence or the truthfulness of what they were telling me.
Perhaps if these things had happened to me when I was even younger it’s possible I could have believed they were real, but at the time I experienced them I had already determined that I didn’t believe in ghosts, demons, spirits, or any supernatural stuff and I’ve always been a very skeptical person. The floating heads screaming at me may as well have looked like the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, and I would not have thought them any more absurd.
This of course was just my experience, not everyone has the same experience, and I do believe that some people are more impressionable than others, particularly due to age, skill in mindfulness, level of skepticism, cultural and religious background, and personal life experience.
When I was younger I had a friend who lived with schizophrenia, and early in his diagnosis he didn’t always take his medication routinely. One time when we were hanging out he forgot his meds and skipped a dose or two. That night he began seeing what he described as demons dancing around the room playing musical instruments, he said I was a demon too. He got up and went outside after feeling overwhelmed by everything he was seeing and hearing. He knew these things couldn’t be real and yet they seemed to be really happening and he became afraid.
In both of our experiences we were always in control of our actions, we could still think for ourselves in a rational way because hallucinations and delusional thinking are not the same thing despite how often people use these terms interchangeably as though they describe the same experience. While hallucinations through psychosis may be co-occurring with delusional thinking, this is not always the case and should not always be assumed to be present.
We could debate whether or not psychosis is ever a standalone mental health condition that can be diagnosed separately from any other, but I am of the opinion that it is always a symptom of some other cause, whether that be mental illness, brain injury, or substance use.
As already noted, violence in psychosis is not a common event, in fact most people who experience it are far more likely to be victims of others who take advantage of them in their vulnerable state than they are to be the perpetrators of violent crimes themselves. In cases where they do inflict violence it’s almost always a process of escalation building up to that level where warning signs and behavioral symptoms have been ignored, downplayed, or simply gone unaddressed.
The things I described about my friend and I’s experiences were happening to us without the necessity of any illicit substances, but substance use triggering mental illness, and specifically psychosis, is becoming more common as both legal and illicit use continues to incorporate newer organic, genetically modified, and synthetic substances as an unhealthy coping mechanism for the challenges teens and young adults face while going through the coming-of-age phase in their lives. Although, I’ve recently learned that children as young as 10 are also now experiencing substance-induced psychosis due to the ease of availability.
While adverse experiences remain the predominant and primary trigger for the onset of mental health conditions in children, teens, and young adults, hallucinogens (also known as psychedelics) are substances that alter brain chemistry and disrupt the brain’s ability to connect with physical reality. We’re talking LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, cannabis, and MDMA (ecstasy) – which has a dual classification as a stimulant. These substances and others are a secondary factor in circumstances where adverse childhood experiences are not the primary factor. Genetic susceptibility is always a potential contributing factor.
Substance use or self-medicating as a maladaptive coping mechanism is extremely common in those with a mental health condition. This behavior frequently leads to dependency or addiction and compounds the symptoms of the mental health condition, exacerbating it by creating a co-occurring condition. Creating a situation where the person is now facing both a mental health condition and a substance use challenge. Other common substance groups used for maladaptive coping include analgesics, depressants, and stimulants.
Substance use has not been an ever-present or prolonged part of my journey with a mental health condition. I’ve never used any illicit substance, I never smoked so much as a cigarette. While I tended to avoid alcohol (a type of depressant) as I never enjoyed the taste, I did get blackout drunk at a wedding in my twenties after getting dumped by my date just days before the wedding. After that experience, I swore I’d never get drunk again, and I haven’t. I no longer drink alcohol at all.
I was pre-disposed to developing a mental health condition due to genetics, but the onset of symptoms did not occur until being triggered during adolescence, a time when adverse experiences were occurring one after another and being layered on top of each other. Childhood sexual and physical trauma, psychological abuse, and religious trauma were the precursors to my foray into mental illness.
My symptoms really became visible at age 14, expressed via depression and suicidal ideation that I wrote about at the time in a private journal. I believe early medical/psychological intervention could have prevented the worst things that were yet to come had my parents been educated on what signs to look for and how to effectively react because the warning signs were brought to their attention when they found and read my journal.
They asked me about the journal but didnโt take it seriously when I lied to their faces and said it was just creative writing. They knew that something was happening to me, they didn’t understand it and chose not to take action, whether that was due to lack of knowledge, lack of will, or fear of knowing the truth and the false belief that shame or guilt would be brought on to the family by accepting and embracing the truth.
At age 16, I attempted suicide. Neither they nor anyone else found out about this event until years later. Where my parents fumbled, one of my high school teachers succeeded. She intervened when I was 17, slowly and subtly building a rapport and trust relationship with me when she noticed the warning signs and the behavioral symptoms being expressed. She knew what to look for because she herself was struggling with a mental health condition, something she shared with me during our conversations.
I think in today’s world, she would have been fired from her job had the school found out that she was spending time with me outside of school, even inviting me to her house. From their perspective it probably would have looked like she was grooming me, and it’s possible people in town may have thought we were in some kind of sexual relationship because we would go out to eat and to the movies together. But that was not at all the nature of our time together.
What was really happening was that she was giving me stability and a support system, a safe space to talk about what I was experiencing. I had nowhere to go, I had no one else I felt I could turn to. Through this trust relationship, she got me to open up about what I was experiencing and was able to connect me to a mental health counselor when I turned 18.
I wish I could tie this into a cute little bow and give a perfect ending after her subtle intervention, but in reality a lot of wild experiences happened over the next few years, including different diagnoses, the hallucinations I previously mentioned, more suicidality, hospitalization, ruined relationships, an abrupt military discharge, other self-destructive behavior, and years of medication and therapy, but her early intervention was truly the beginning of my recovery journey and she is one of a few critical people who saw and heard me and intervened, and she is one of the reasons I am alive today.
Throughout my time at high school she kept me alive. She showed me that life with a mental health condition was possible, that I could keep going and grow successfully into adulthood, that what I was experiencing was not the end of my life but a mere detour, she gave me connection and perhaps more importantly she gave me hope. She saved my life, a fact I have shared with her on several occasions.
The life we are living when we are young is not the life we will live when we’re older. The experiences we’re having, no matter how dark they may be at the time, are transitory – they do not last forever. The thing about youth is that it blinds us to the impermanence of time. We believe that the way our lives are in any given moment will be that way forever. It is so very hard to see beyond today, every moment feels like an eternity and the possibility of change or transformation sounds unachievable. The path toward progress feels daunting and overwhelming because we focus so much on the end that we fail to understand that it can only be accomplished by taking small steps at a time. Instead of looking at the horizon, it is better to look at the ground with every step we take.
The greatest lesson that Buddhism ever taught me was that change is the only absolute. The day I truly embraced that notion was a day of liberation for me. Did it cure me of my mental health struggles? No, because that’s not possible, but what did change was my perspective, my understanding of and expectations for myself, and my interpretation of my pain, and of life in general.
The first time my teacher from high school talked to me about my mental health and shared with me her own struggles, I cried, and I did so not just because it was a sad conversation but because for the first time in my life I didnโt feel alone and not feeling alone is a big step in the healing process.
Recovery is possible and it doesn’t always mean someone is cured. Many mental health conditions cannot be cured, which is why it is classified as a disorder instead of disease. Recovery is not a static point in time, it’s not marked by a single event or some kind of finish line. It’s difficult and challenging, and there are external barriers, internal obstacles, and setbacks. Recovery is a state of being, an ongoing effort to remain in equilibrium. Living life in recovery is possible, and all the ups and downs are worth it.
I could have died as a teenager in 2002, but I didn’t. I could have missed out on so much, but I haven’t. Make no mistake, a lot of unfortunate stuff has happened along the way and continues to happen. I have lost cherished people who I thought would be a part of my life for decades to come. The loss of Ricardo Reyes in 2022 was particularly hard for me because it was so unexpected, he had been a part of my life for almost twenty years, and he kept me alive after my discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps with his patience, grace, acceptance, and support as I stumbled and crawled my way back from that pit of shame, confusion, regret, isolation, and self-hatred.
There is a time and a place for grief, there is a time to cry and wallow in despair, we must make space in our lives to embrace and reflect on our experiences and the emotions that come with them, and we must work our way through all of life’s hardships, both the emotional and the clinical, but I also think that it’s important to remember that these things should be acknowledged as temporary moments and experiences. The memories may last, but the events do not and the negative effects of those events also shouldn’t last.
Living with a mental health condition or substance misuse means carrying both the weight of struggle and the fragile hope of survival. What has kept me here has been a combination of treatment, even when imperfect, and human connection, even when fleeting. These small but powerful interventions have mattered as much as any prescribed medication.
More than twenty-five years into this journey, I can say that survival has not been about one single breakthrough but about a series of moments, moments of help accepted, moments of kindness offered, moments of realizing I wasnโt entirely alone. My coming-of-age story isnโt about being cured; itโs about learning to keep living despite the darkness, and accepting that pain does not have to define the whole of my existence.
Recovery for me has always been a journey and not a destination. The expectation that recovery does not include relapse is a delusion that time will break for those who believe it. Relapse is not the end of the road, it is merely a detour. The dream that I will one day wake up and everything will be wonderful from that point forward had to be shattered in order for me to fully embrace recovery. The understanding that I’ll have good days, months, or years, but just as equally have bad days, months, or years, was a lesson I needed to learn and I’m grateful I learned it in my early twenties.
Change is not only possible, it is the only absolute. Remembering that has saved me from a lot of unnecessary suffering. I learned this lesson when I converted to Buddhism, it was one of the best decisions of my life and the most important one along my journey. I do not believe I would have survived my early twenties if I had not embraced the Dharma.
If I spent all of my time dwelling on all of the negatives over the last two decades I’d have never noticed or experienced the profound moments I’ve been able to witness and live through. If you or someone you know is not okay, there is hope and there is help. There is life and there is joy on the other side of struggle. And I don’t mean that fake happiness that people pretend to feel, I mean authentic joy that comes when it should and recedes when it must.
The lie people tell themselves of how they should be happy all the time is delusional thinking that causes more problems than it solves. Happiness is an emotion and emotions fluctuate, we can no more be happy and mentally well all the time than we can be angry, guilty, sad, or any other emotion. Like everything in life, emotions are impermanent. Freedom comes when we let go of the lie of permanence.
From a mental health perspective, we all want autonomy, self-efficacy, and to live a self-directed life. I have always found that the biggest impediment to this is misunderstanding what it means to be free. โTo be free is to no longer be at the mercy of our own expectations of others. What attitudes we expect others to have, what behaviors we expect others to enact, and what choices we expect others to make.
We do not get to control the internal motives or external actions of other people. The sooner we purge ourselves of this delusion the sooner we are liberated from the trappings of possessiveness, of cravings for power over others, of the self-righteous belief that we know what’s best for others and that others must satisfy our needs and wants. At no point in my life did I struggle with this more than in my teens and early twenties.
Perhaps the reason we try so desperately to control others is because most of the time we cannot even control our own feelings and thoughts, instead we merely find ourselves at the mercy of every fleeting internal and external sensation, reacting wildly to everything as though we are some kind of feral animal trapped in a corner with no way out.
But herein lay the truth, the only way out is in. If ever there was an obvious sign of mental wellbeing it is the ability to regulate our own desires and emotions by establishing healthy coping mechanisms, practicing awareness and mindfulness, and by not becoming a victim of our own delusions.
On the long road between childhood and adulthood there are many challenges, especially with mental health, but with some initiative to do the hard work of discovering who we are and letting go of the burdens we all too often choose to carry around, we can make it through this tumultuous time in our lives as better people than the ones we started as. We should also be so lucky as to find good people along the way who can support us without robbing us of our autonomy.
As an adult I have come to realize that the best people to bring into your life are those who allow you the space and time to live a self-directed life, who empower you without controlling you, and who do not hold you back or weigh you down.
To use a Buddhist analogy, think about a horse-drawn carriage traveling at night: there’s the horse, a driver, the carriage, and a lantern. In this analogy you do not want friends that are like the horse who has no concern for anyone but itself and who would run wild if given the chance except that it has no freedom of choice. Nor do you want a friend like the driver whose sole desire is to control and command. You also don’t want friends who are like the carriage that is simply along for the ride and exists without any impetus. Instead find friends like the lantern, who is always there ever-so-quietly shining a light on potential joys and potential dangers, not telling you where to go or what to do or who to be, just illuminating the darkness to reveal all possible paths with the reassurance and patience to wait for you to choose which way to go.
It has been more than a decade since the death of Colin Robert Lloyd Madsen. There are still many unanswered questions surrounding his death. We (his friends and family) know that his death did not result from his own volition. His life was taken from him, either directly with intent to kill or indirectly through torture and neglect while being illegally detained.
Regardless of intention, the result was the same: his life was taken from him and he was taken from those who loved and adored him.
Colin was, and in a residual way still is, one of the best human beings I have ever met. Though we always speak well of the dead, we should have spoken just as well of them while they were alive. One cannot simply express the compassion this young man had.
For those of us who practice Buddhism (a deep interest of Colin’s), we resolve ourselves to walk and speak with loving-kindness, to live in the moment, to attach ourselves to nothing, to give more than we receive, to kiss the Earth with our feet, to acknowledge every living thing, and in-so-doing offer it our love. Colin made the effort to do these things as often as he could.
I know no one gentler, no one more supportive, no one more the embodiment of peace in every step than Colin.
More than 10 years have passed since his death. The sun rises and the sun sets, the moon phases through another cycle, and yet we remain without answers and without justice.
The loss of a life is often compared to the flame of a candle being snuffed out, a flickering little flame fighting against the darkness for some small amount of time until it can no longer. I don’t think candlelight represents Colin very well, he’s something more than that.
Perhaps more like starlight, temporarily obscured by a dark cloud, vanishing from our eyes, but still he remains there somewhere just beyond, glowing as he always did, not for the mere 30,000 sunrises and sunsets of the average human life, but for trillions, just waiting to be seen again, if only you had the patience and the clarity to see him, too brilliant to be long forgotten, too resilient to be long hidden from the world by a mere wispy little cloud.
Not every path we walk will lead us to closure, sometimes the path just keeps on going and we long for the hand we once held, the now vacant hand we have come to know as grief. There is no timeline for bereavement, nor for anger, nor any emotion. No one can tell you when it’s time for you to stop feeling anything. Especially when the circumstances resulting in that loss remain unresolved.
I strongly believe that for as long as we remember Colin, then he is still with us, a light that forever carries on. But for his mom, Dana, a battle carried on long after his passing. A battle against people, nations, to recognize and amend the wrong that has been committed and to prevent it from happening to other families. The people responsible for not just Colin’s death, but the attempt to cover up their actions, mislead those seeking the truth, and to tarnish the very nature of his character. These people remain unscathed, and it is an outrage.
Colin was like the modern version of a 19th century progressive philosopher, it was like he was simultaneously born in the right and the wrong century. He was uninterested in things that modern young adult Americans get immersed in, but at the same time he was very forward thinking and open to new experiences.
We get caught in the gravity of the character and behavior and charm of certain people during our lifetimes, drifting in and out, seeing how they have grown and shifted and blended and evolved and faded and pulsed and ignited over the years. Over time they are transformed, not just in their own mind but in ours, they become way more human, way more real than they had ever been before.
Sharing your thoughts and feelings and passions is a remarkable gift that feeds your own soul most importantly, and that of those who hear you. The people that cherish you as more than a mere passing amusement will always find their way to you if you live your passions and open yourself to the highs and lows of that experience. This is what Colin did on a daily basis.
He touched so many lives, not just with his incessant desire to know how others think and feel, but with his honesty and openness. He did not just seek inspiration, he was inspiration. There can be nothing more extraordinary than to know that you have inspired others and touched deeply their very souls, something so commendable and worthy of every accolade.
I have come to learn that the people we meet throughout our lives become a piece of us, a part of our own story, and so when we lose those people we lose a part of ourselves. Of course some fragment of who they were remains with us, but we also have this emptiness, like some kind of hunger pain, but in our heart.
We remain forever changed by the grief of our loss. Sure, the sun still rises, the birds still sing, sometimes we laugh in momentary lapses of the reality of the horror we live, but it will never be the same, it always looms overhead like a dark cloud. Nothing can be as it was before, impermanence is the only absolute.
To help you learn more about Colin, I want to share the below documentary film which I played a small role in helping produce. This film is incredibly important and personal to me, and while I do not feel that any film could ever express the injustice, the violation, the anger, or the grief of loss that all of Colin Madsen’s family and other friends have felt since 2016, I do feel that it justly highlights what that terrible experience felt like at the time it occurred.
Watching the completed film left me shaken and disturbed because it brought back all of the things I felt at the time they happened all those years ago. There are photos and video footage in this film I have never before seen, not because I did not previously have access to them but because I chose not to expose myself to them in fear that they would replace my last memories of a living, breathing Colin with the cruelty of humanity.
I will never forget the panic, the fear, the anxiety, the wrenching sensation inside of me during those days he was missing, nor will I ever forget the morning I learned his body had been found. I was standing in my kitchen during the early morning hours before sunrise, scrolling through social media hoping to find someone posting that Colin had been found alive.
Instead, I found a post announcing that his body had been found, that Colin was dead. I collapsed to my kitchen floor, in shock, in grief, in regret, in so many emotions.
When you watch this film, you will learn my experience was not unique. Everyone who knew Colin shared in the horror that unfolded during his vanishing, his death, and the years that have followed.
For me it was a catalyst, a moment that marked a shift in my perception of life, in my understanding of love and loss, of what it means to endure the human experience, primarily because it was the start of a series of subsequent deaths in my family and among my friends, even my pets died. For several years, it felt as though it would not end until everyone I knew was dead.
More importantly, this film also gracefully touches on the beautiful person that Colin was, the person that I want others to know him as. So often in stories about crimes we find ourselves captivated by the depravity of the criminal act and the villains who perpetrated it, we rarely feel deeply connected to or understand who the person that lost their life was, they just become another victim.
For the past 10 years I have repeatedly shared my thoughts and feelings about Colin, about who he was, why his life mattered and still matters, why the injustice committed against him was so vile and why he was the least among us to deserve enduring it. Please take the opportunity to learn more about Colin, the person, and not just Colin the victim. He was so much more than his death.
I do not believe I will ever know or meet someone in my life again more benevolent than Colin. You would’ve had to spent time with him to truly understand. In some small way, I feel that this documentary grants viewers the opportunity to glimpse into his human nature. I hope you will share this documentary with others, not solely for the sake of justice but also because in-so-doing you will also share his light.
This post was a follow-up to a previous publication from 2017.
Thรญch Nhแบฅt Hแบกnh’s journal entries, Fragrant Palm Leaves, is a gem of a little book providing so much insight and strangely enough also comfort. I say strange because the selected journal entries were penned from 1962 to 1966, right in the midst of the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975. The pages are haunted by this fact continuously, as though it were a shadow, and in many ways it was an enormous shadow that weighed upon Thรญch Nhแบฅt Hแบกnh as he wrote every word. This book is one of two I’ve really grown to cherish deeply these past few years. I’ve been carrying it with me almost everywhere I go.
In 1966 he requested the journal be taken for safe keeping and published in the event that he may be killed for his activism. He wanted to leave something behind that would offer to the world some semblance of what he had been devoting his life to, the notion that Buddhism was not merely something to read and learn about but something to do, what he referred to as “Engaged Buddhism.” Both beautiful and mournful, his collected journal entries are perhaps one of my favorite books that I’ve purchased of the many he published throughout his life.
The first book of his I read was The Miracle of Mindfulness, which I came across back in 2006 when I was 19 years old. At the time I was going through and recovering from a really challenging experience in my life and his words were a gift for me, and in a slow but peaceful way ultimately changed the trajectory of my life.
He has guided me through a lot of darkness, and not just in my youth. He has done so not by leading me by the hand but by illuminating the path so that I could see my own way through. This is the very nature of a Bodhisattva, to suspend one’s own path for the sake of others.
When Thรญch Nhแบฅt Hแบกnh passed away in January of 2022 it felt like something in the world was lost that could not be replaced. Despite the absence of his living body in the world, I remain grateful for him and his continued presence in my life. His body may have been impermanent but his presence remains within his recorded teachings for as long as they are needed and appreciated. And for me I think and hope it will be a lifetime.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts from the book:
August 18, 1962, United States “To me evenings are beautiful and happy. Evening, like morning, is active, full of change and vitality. It is not a time of fading. Evening announces the arrival of the full array of night life, when nature is so active. Humans rest at night, but moon, stars, water, clouds, insects, and grasses throb with life. The time I would call sorrowful is midday, around one or two in the afternoon. At midday, all natural activity comes to a halt. There isn’t a voice to be heard. There isn’t even a thread of wind, and the trees are as still as corpses. The dormant sky stretches beyond measure, and the sun hypnotizes the earth and her myriad creatures with its fierce and fiery eye. Then, at the nudging of a cloud, the earth begins to turn once more, and the spell is broken. If you’ve ever awakened from a nap at the exact moment that the sun paralyzes the earth, you will hear the call. I have heard it hundreds of times, and each time my heart trembles. Barely awake, the sea of my subconscious mind floods my being. I hear the universe calling me home, and my whole body responds. I heard that call four times at Phuong Boi. Never had trees stood so still or sky stretched so high. My being was overcome with an intense longing to return, to follow that ineffable call. I felt as though I were standing at a threshold obscured by dense fog. If only I could dispel the fog, I would be able to see. See what? I did not know. But I was certain it would reveal my deepest longing.”
December 21, 1962, United States “When icy winter comes, it is unforgiving to all things young, tender, and insecure. One must grow beyond youthful uncertainty to survive. Maturity and determination are necessary. Seeing the courageous, solid way that trees prepare for winter helps me appreciate the lessons I’ve learned.”
December 23, 1962, United States “At first it seemed like a passing cloud. But after several hours, I began to feel my body turning to smoke and floating away. I became a faint wisp of a cloud. I had always thought of myself as a solid entity, and suddenly I saw that I’m not solid at all. This wasn’t philosophical or even an enlightenment experience. It was just an ordinary impression, completely ordinary. I saw that the entity I had taken to be “me” was really a fabrication. My true nature, I realized, was much more real, both uglier and more beautiful than I could have imagined.”
“I am often on the verge of tears or laughter. But beneath all of these emotions, what else is there? How can I touch it? If there isn’t anything, why would I be so certain that there is?… I understood that I am empty of ideals, hopes, viewpoints, or allegiances. I have no promises to keep with others. In that moment, the sense of myself as an entity among other entities disappeared. I knew that this insight did not arise from disappointment, despair, fear, desire, or ignorance. A veil lifted silently and effortlessly. That is all. If you beat me, stone me, or even shoot me, everything that is considered to be “me” will disintegrate. Then, what is actually there will reveal itself – faint as smoke, elusive as emptiness, and yet neither smoke nor emptiness; neither ugly, nor not ugly; beautiful, yet not beautiful. It is like a shadow on a screen. At that moment, I had the deep feeling that I had returned.”
“I became a battlefield. I couldn’t know until the storm was over if I would survive, not in the sense of my physical life, but in the deeper sense of my core self. I experienced destruction upon destruction, and felt a tremendous longing for the presence of those I love, even though I knew that if they were present, I would have to chase them away or run away myself. When the storm finally passed, layers of inner mortar lay crumbled. On the now deserted battlefield, a few sunbeams peeked through the horizon, too weak to offer any warmth to my weary soul. I was full of wounds, yet experienced an almost thrilling sense of aloneness. No one would recognize me in my new manifestation. No one close to me would know it was I. Friends want you to appear in the familiar form they know. They want you to remain intact, the same. But that isn’t possible. How could we continue to live if we were changeless? To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible… Youth is a time for seeking truth. Years ago I wrote in my journal that even if it destroys you, you must hold to the truth. I knew early on that finding truth is not the same as finding happiness. You aspire to see the truth, but once you have seen it, you cannot avoid suffering. Otherwise, you’ve seen nothing at all.”
December 12, 1964, Vietnam “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar. The best medicine to chase away the heart’s dark isolation is to make direct contact with life’s sufferings, to touch and share the anxieties and uncertainties of others. Loneliness comes from locking yourself in a false shell. You think of yourself as a separate, self-contained entity not in relation to others. Buddhists call this “attachment to self.” In reality, we are empty of a separate self. But we needn’t take the Buddhists’ word for it. Looking deeply, we can see that a person is not a separate self.”
February 11, 1965, Vietnam “Zen is not merely a system of thought. Zen infuses our whole being with the most pressing question we have. It is an urgent life-and-death struggle in which we either break through or fall into a swirling abyss. It is necessary for us to face such perilous moments alone, moments that will determine the rest of our lives. Zen includes concentrated meditation sessions during which we might experience one breakthrough after another, encounter dangers, or die alone in failure.”
July 12, 1965, Vietnam “Last year, I went to the British Museum. I was fascinated by the preserved remains of a human body buried five thousand years ago. The body was lying on its left side with its knees folded up against its chest. Head, arms, and legs faced left. Every detail of the man’s body had been preserved. I could see strands of hair, his ankles, each intact finger and toe… As I stood engrossed, an indescribable feeling rippled through my body. A little girl, about eight years old, stood beside me and asked in a worried voice, “Will that happen to me?” I trembled and looked at this tender flower of humanity, this vulnerable child without any means to defend herself, and I said, “No, this will never happen to you.” I lied about something that Chandaka, the Buddha’s charioteer, never lied about to Siddhartha… That night, after walking outside in the snow, I came down with a cold… I took two aspirins before covering myself with blankets. I was unable to sleep, partly because of the aspirins… I tossed and turned until at one point I realized that I was lying in the same position as the body in the British Museum. Without thinking, I pressed my hands together to see if my flesh had hardened into rock. My conscious mind did not initiate this gesture, but it did not reject it as silly, either. At that moment I felt perfectly at peace. Not one sad or anxious thought entered my mind. I saw that my body as a five-thousand-year-old mummy and my body lying in bed in the present moment are the same. Ideas of past, present, and future dissolved, and I was standing at the luminous threshold of a reality that transcends time, space, and action. I arose and sat in meditation the rest of the night. Waterfalls of consciousness cascaded through my being. Large raindrops and swirling streams cleansed, penetrated, and fed me. All that remained was a deeply rooted peace. I sat like a mountain and smiled… One night can change a person’s life. One night can open doors for all other nights. I almost saw my true face; I was about to break through.”
You can learn more about Thรญch Nhแบฅt Hแบกnh and his legacy by visiting the Plum Village.
In the pursuit of happiness we find ourselves chasing after many things: the right relationship partner, the dream job, the perfect home, the best vehicle, the latest tech gadget, but upon receipt of any of these things we merely find a short-lived excitement, a rush of enjoyment up until the sensation begins to fade in time.
In this falling-out of happiness we sometimes ask ourselves why that thing doesn’t make us happy anymore, and when that “thing” is a person we find ourselves wondering if we ever actually loved them at all or if it was just the excitement of something new and different. When the luster of “newness” has given way to everyday boringness, what are we supposed to think or feel? What does it all mean? When someone says, “I’m not happy,” or “I just want to find happiness,” what do they really mean?
People can make us happy, that part is actually quite true. Other human beings can bring happiness into our lives just as the taste of ice cream, or a birthday gift, a beautiful sunset, or anything else we’ve learned to find joy in. What we often don’t consider is the cost of that happiness. After all, it cannot be free, nothing in life comes without a degree of debt. The cost of happiness is impermanence.
We must come to accept the reality that happiness is an emotion like anger, sadness, fear, guilt, disgust, love, and all the rest. Emotions were never meant to be anything more than temporary. We’re not always happy for the same reason we’re not always angry, sad, afraid, ashamed, or any other emotion. We’re not meant to be happy all the time, it’s unnatural, it goes against our nature as living beings experiencing life. To always be happy would not be a gift, but a delusion, an illness, a curse, just as it is to be angry or sad all the time. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
Impermanence is the only absolute, and breaking the delusion that permanence of any kind is possible, is the only cure to our dissatisfaction with our lives, regardless of what or who no longer brings us happiness. Even contentment, our default emotional state, does not last forever – it too must give way to the emotional spectrum from time to time. I think perhaps it would do us a great service to live an examined life and to stop pondering whether or not we are happy or if someone or something makes us happy, and begin to ask ourselves if we are content.
We’ve all seen it online and most of us have probably done it: committing a social faux pas in the comments section of social media posts, YouTube videos, news articles, and forums.
Though we’ve had centuries of revolving lessons on an ever-evolving modern social etiquette, and for millennia ethics philosophers have debated how people should behave in all aspects of society, today it would seem we are lacking in any significant contributions for a much needed social skills training in cyberspace behavior.
Take the time to read the comments section of an obituary where someone died in a particularly shocking accident, homicide, or from suicide and you’ll find more than expressions of sympathy. There is a high probability that you’ll also find disrespect to the deceased or their family, unfounded and offensive conspiracy theories, tribalism between commenters, inflated egos on righteousness, hyperbole, hysteria and any number of other reactionary behaviors and expressed emotions. Some of the behavior is reminiscent of what you’d expect from children who have not yet learned proper social etiquette and, perhaps more importantly, self-awareness with emotional regulation.
It’s okay to feel confused, to feel angry, to feel scared, to feel threatened, to feel sad, all of these emotions are completely normal, especially for situations where someone’s death has been particularly violent or unexpected, but how we choose to experience or react to and express those emotions is critical for our own wellbeing and our ability to navigate social interactions and relationships effectively.
It’s never okay to be an internet troll and blurt out the first thing that pops into our heads, especially when we’re feeling very emotional, particularly extreme emotions like anger, as they blur our ability to rationally make decisions. Anxiety or nervousness, fear, and sadness are also strong emotions that can play a significant role in the words and phrases we choose to use and how we express them.
The false sense of anonymity we often feel online disconnects us from the consequences of the things we post or comment, especially in times of social and political turmoil. When in cyberspace, we dawn a delusional state of mind where we believe that we can vent our heightened emotional states freely without consequence and post angry or hysterical comments and then just scroll on to the next emotionally triggering post or simply close the browser window or smartphone app, and not have to acknowledge the very real human faces behind the other usernames and how our words may affect those people. Especially when those people are the friends and family of the deceased.
I would compare that level of disgust and discomfort to someone walking into a restaurant, dropping their pants, and taking a shit right on the floor and then walking right back out. The behavior is socially bizarre, spiteful, derogatory, and shameful for the person doing it and unhealthy and very disturbing for the people unfortunate enough to witness it. The vast majority of us would not commit such an act in public, yet people do this online every day and there are consequences for them and society because of it. Least of all it reveals how mentally unwell the perpetrator is, essentially an audacious and ineffective cry for help.
Unregulated emotional outbursts and ill-thought expressions are why many websites and software applications no longer have options for commentary or allow it to be turned off. The very fact that general audiences cannot be trusted enough to engage in socially acceptable commentary which meets most online community guidelines, has set a precedent for the establishment of online social skills training, something that in my opinion should be instituted in schools – beginning in the elementary level.
It’s true that online chat and forum moderators have been around since the late 1990s, but back then far fewer people were online and they generally assisted moderators with identifying and removing inappropriate content. Today, we seem to grant people some type of collective permission to share outrageous commentary and behavior, it’s essentially rewarded with attention that only serves to encourage even more bad conduct. Attention or fame is the modern social currency and the current value of volatile and controversial behavior is very high.
There was a time when we had a sense that what we posted online would be heavily scrutinized for betraying any social norms because back then cyberspace was all new territory, we relied heavily on the influences and infrastructure of standardized in-person social interactions. Perhaps the most concerning aspect of bad social behavior online is that it is no longer staying online. An emboldened and unfettered cyber-lifestyle seems to be encroaching on our real-world social interactions, particularly in the last ten years.
While there are many reasons why people are currently walking around on a hair-trigger and exploding at anyone who so much as looks at them the wrong way, I believe that the rise of social media use has dramatically increased bad social etiquette at public venues, transportation stations, and other heavily populated spaces. Respect seems to have gone the way of proper salutations and valedictions – a once finely crafted and elaborate custom in written communications. I’m certainly not the only one to notice, comment threads reliably showcase people trying to keep the peace and report inappropriate content, but I fear their struggle is futile unless we take online social behavior more seriously.
Ask any parent about pre-teen and adolescent bullying online and you’ll see I’m not alone in this sentiment. Simply put, much more needs to be done about how people conduct themselves online. Perhaps at the core of this issue is why people seem to have given up on the notion of respecting others as human beings with thoughts and emotions, and instead seem to prefer to view people online as objects for amusement and vitriol. For me, it speaks volumes to the state of mental health and the very concerning reality that many people are mentally unwell and not receiving the treatment (in whatever form) they very clearly and desperately need.
Breaking the Silence Around the Mental Health Emergency
It’s Christmas Day and I’ve been reading This Book Could Save Your Life, which I started the other day, it’s a very important book that should be in the hands of every family. I’ll tell you more about it in a minuteโฆ
I live with a mental health condition that causes me to have suicidal thoughts and behavior. My mental health struggles began at age 14, I became suicidal at age 16 and enacted a plan to take my life. I survived that experience, only to become suicidal again at age 19. Up to that point, almost no one knew these things were happening to me, and then someone at my job finally noticed and intervened and I got medical and mental health treatment. Unfortunately, I became suicidal again at age 22.
I have been in and out of treatment for my mental health condition for the last seventeen years. Sometimes systems of care and support have been effective, but often times they have failed. There are many reasons why I am still alive today. Medication and therapy have sometimes been helpful, but my condition has been rather treatment resistant. Friends, family, and sometimes even strangers have made a major positive impact, even when they thought their words or actions were only minor acts of kindness.
In the words of Nelson Mandela, “I’m not an optimistic person, I’m a prisoner of hope.” The hope that change is not only possible but absolute, has kept me going when everything and everyone else has failed. Not my therapist, my medication, not family, or my friends, not my fitness routine or my meditation practice, not even time in nature have been foolproof. When all else has failed, hope has kept me alive and half the time I’m not even sure what I’m hoping for, just anything different I suppose. Something new and different, doesn’t even have to be better.
According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, each day, about 130 Americans die by suicide, that’s about one person every 11 minutes. Of those, about 70% are men, and over half involve firearms. There are many factors that contribute to suicide and not every suicide is the result of the same circumstances.
Some suicides are the result of mental illness that is either untreated or that is being treated with a method that is ineffective, but actually not all suicides are related to mental illness. Some are the result of immense pressures such as bullying, or feelings of failure such as losing a job or relationship, feelings of isolation and loneliness, or from extreme grief due to losing a loved one, to only name a few.
While not every suicide is the result of mental illness, every suicide is tied to mental health. Let me repeat that: not every person has a mental illness, but every person has mental health.
No matter the cause of suicide, surveys show that more than 90% of Americans believe that it is preventable.
Prevention is challenging and it takes many elements to be effective. Everything from education and resources, to skilled intervention, mental health crisis services, effective treatment and medical care, systems of community support, and peer support all play an important role in maintaining mental wellness in the face of adversity, whether that adversity is a mental illness, bullying, financial issues, relationship problems, loneliness, grief, or any other contributing factor.
There are always warning signs prior to suicide, but the challenge with warning signs is that sometimes people go to great lengths to hide them by concealing their thoughts and emotions or physical activities, or those around them do not know what is or is not a warning sign. Not every person at risk of dying by suicide will exhibit the same warning signs either, which makes any kind of blanket statement about signs to look for somewhat unhelpful.
Age is another major factor. A 10 or 14-year-old’s life is drastically different than a 24 or 68-year-old’s. A child or young teen is more likely to be experiencing bullying or a mental illness in its very early stages, whereas a young adult or middle-aged person is more likely to be experiencing financial or relationship issues, social isolation, substance use and/or the symptoms of an untreated mental illness they’ve been battling for decades.
Now back to the bookโฆ written by 22-year-old Ben West, the eldest of three brothers from rural Kent County in southern England, U.K., it tells the story of how he lost his younger brother, Sam, to suicide in January of 2018, when Sam was only 15 years old and Ben was age 17.
The book discusses their early life, alongside their youngest brother, Tom, who was only 13 at the time of Sam’s death, and what they experienced as Sam began to display symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as depression. Ben explains how he knew next-to-nothing about mental health as a teenager and reflects on how he wished mental health education would have been part of school curriculum.
As the book progresses, Ben retells what happened the night Sam took his own life in their family home and how that experience impacted Ben and his family as it happened and then later the ripple effects of that tragedy. It is a very raw telling of a horrific experience that has been lived and continues to be lived by so many families around the world.
What sets Ben’s book apart from many others is that he has been immensely active in mental health transformation, primarily in the United Kingdom. In fact, you may have heard of him or seen him before on the news, as he began speaking about what happened to his family and the tragic state of mental health services both inside the U.K. and around the world, which garnered him international attention. The Diana Award, a U.K. charity that recognizes young people for making change in the world, announced Ben as their 2019 Legacy Award recipient.
Ben has spent the last 4 years campaigning hard to make real and positive changes to mental health services, from improvements to the U.K. National Health Service and to support systems within schools. His proximity to and involvement in these causes put him in close quarters with public figures and politicians, including an encounter with the then U.K. Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
Ben speaks both loudly and intelligently about the subject of mental health, at a time when we need such voices more than ever. While he may be British, I feel that this book is an asset to any family, regardless of whether you’re British or American. It is a reminder that understanding mental health is incredibly important, not just for your own sake but for your family’s.
It’s also a reminder that the warning signs for suicide may not be so obvious and that they may be more subtle than you may expect. It’s also a testament to the fact that both U.K. and U.S. mental health services are lacking and need our attention and support both financially and politically to actually be effective.
And perhaps most of all, the book is an ode to personal resiliency in the face of great tragedy. No one would have blamed Ben for recoiling inside himself and never again speaking of his brother’s death or the mental illness that led to it, or the broken system that failed them. He could have just mucked on with his life, undoubtedly grief-stricken but otherwise unmoved to speak his painful truth to the world and fight for the wellbeing of others and their families.
The least anyone could do in the struggle against the festering and overwhelming epidemic of ineffective mental health systems of care and treatment, and the dimly lit understanding of what to do when faced with the need to seek such services for yourself or someone you care for, is to read this book and perhaps you will discover the inspiration to find your own voice and use it to make these systems and processes better.
Ben’s parents have established a charity in Sam’s honor, The Sam West Foundation, dedicated to connecting those in need to mental health resources and services.
I have lived in Osage County, Missouri my whole life, my family has done so for generations. Many, if not most, of the people who live here would tell you that they feel like they can be themselves, live the life they want, that they have a sense of belonging and support, and see this whole county as their close-knit community. But I have never felt that way.
Growing up here I tried to appear as though I fit into this place and among these people, but inside I never felt that way. I tried to mimic the behaviors I saw, repeat the words I heard, attempting to convince others and shamefully myself that I was at home here. But Osage County has never felt like home to me because I never felt as though I could safely be me.
Instead my childhood was filled with overwhelming fear and crushing anxiety, I grew up feeling an ever present paranoia, like I was in danger all day and every day, except for the moments that I was alone. Alone, I could be me, I could think and feel without external judgement, without the risk of being discovered and ostracized, I could feel safe. I learned very young that people were mean and hateful and I came to the conclusion that this equated adulthood.
Even in the safety of isolation, I was not entirely free. As a kid, I listened and observed the adults around me, including my parents, other family members, teachers, church and community members, paying attention to the things they said and the things they did. Learning their opinions and beliefs and measuring myself against those ideals and coming to the understanding that I was not good enough, that I was not good at all. They taught me to hate myself, to feel shame and guilt for things beyond my ability to ever control or change.
Eleven-year-old me began to question his sexuality when puberty struck, without even knowing what the word sexuality meant and at that point I probably never even heard the word before. That young version of me had thoughts and feelings he could not explain nor fully understand, but he had heard adults around him describe such thoughts and feelings as bad, in both a religious context and in a general social one. Building up trauma that would one day break down the door to his mind, leading to a lifetime of mental illness.
I was only a child and yet I understood that if anyone knew that I was having these uncontrollable thoughts and feelings that I would be an outcast, and as a child you fear greatly the process and the consequences of abandonment and rejection, both real and imagined. A child’s imagination is perhaps the most destructive, but the real is no less painful to endure.
I want you to take the time to imagine this if you cannot personally relate to it. Think about when you were 11 years old, or look around you at your kids or kids in your family or school or community. Consider what it might be like to be a child with a massive secret that if the adults or even other kids around him found out, his external life would be the same kind of hell his internal life has been. Imagine the burden, the weight on that kid’s shoulders, the fear and the anxiety. Some of the kids you know right now are experiencing this trauma, and believe you me it is trauma.
By age 13, I was no longer questioning my sexuality, I knew what the thoughts and feelings I was having meant, even if I didn’t know a thing about the science or psychology of human sexuality. I knew what was happening with my mind and body, I knew what it meant when my heart fluttered when I talked to another boy I liked, I knew what it meant when I wanted another boy’s attention, to be more than just his best friend, and the intense jealousy I felt when he spent recess with someone else.
I knew what it meant when I wondered what it would be like to kiss another boy, to hug another boy. I knew what it meant when I marveled at another boy’s body and his athletic ability, or his humor, or the way it felt when he so much as touched me on the arm. I knew what it meant to deeply yearn to confide in him, trust in him, to protect him, and the desire to explore the physical changes that were happening to us both as we experienced that strange thing called puberty.
I was afraid and ashamed of all of it. I learned to hate these thoughts and feelings. In time I grew to hate other people who harbored the very same thoughts and feelings I had, and eventually I hated myself so much that I thought it was better that I kill myself than fall in love with another boy. All because of the words and actions of the adults around me who indirectly taught me that such thoughts and feelings were to be repressed and concealed because they were wrong, evil, sick, disgusting, among a myriad of other negatives.
When adults look at kids and say or think that they don’t know or experience things that adults do, those adults are only being dishonest with themselves and have either forgotten their own childhood or somehow made it through that time in their life blissfully unaware of themselves and their experiences. Kids may not fully understand what’s happening to them or what they are experiencing in their mind, but they are far more aware than many adults are willing to accept.
Throughout adolescence and young adulthood I was fully aware that Osage County was not an LGBTQ+ friendly place and that the people who used phrases like “be kind to others” really only meant “be kind to others like us.” I knew it meant that if you were different you were on the outside of this so-called community, and quite frankly it isn’t hard to not fit into their expected mold. If you’re not heterosexual, religiously Catholic/Christian, or politically Republican, you are likely a minority here. I certainly do not represent any of those three classifications and have not for many years.
Being a minority means you are on the outskirts of a community. It means that the resources, services, and even experiences that are readily available to others are either less available to you or you are discouraged from accessing them. Osage County has never been a welcoming place for people who are different, at least not during my lifetime.
When I came out in 2008, people literally told me that I should leave because I won’t be accepted here. I had people who were my “friends” that not only backed away from me but also ceased all communication with me, some even attacked and blocked me on social media because their Christian beliefs required them to view me as sinful, corrupt, and as a disease that needed to be purged from their life.
Childhood trauma is often a doorway for mental health conditions and substance use disorders to arise in teens and young adults, sometimes leading to suicide. Mental health conditions, substance use, and suicidality are prevalent enough in the general population, but they are even more common in the LGBTQ+ population for the reasons I’ve described throughout this writing.
Our attitudes, behaviors, and choices are powerfully influential. Oftentimes we are communicating to or influencing kids without even realizing it if we do not practice mindfulness and self-awareness. If adults do not want to teach judgement and hate to children, then adults need to stop practicing judgement and hate.
You can learn more about my personal journey with sexuality in my article titled, A Journey Called Hope. Other articles of similar interest are as follows:
If you or someone you know is an LGBTQ+ youth in need of resources and crisis services please reach out to the The Trevor Project, the worldโs largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization dedicated to the mental and emotional wellbeing of LGBTQ+ youth. Additional resources can be accessed through the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention or by utilizing the below links.
There is so much I wish that I could have told you, so much that I wish I could have done for you. If only I could travel through time to 2002 and be a part of your life, maybe somehow things could have been different for you. Instead I am forced to write a letter to a ghost, a person that no longer exists as anything more than a memory, a whisper in the silence, an echo in the places you used to wander.
I thought about making this letter witty and fun, the type that would make a person laugh and feel warm and fuzzy. But let’s be honest, you wouldn’t have been able to relate to warm and fuzzy. The only thing you knew was a withering vitality, like a neglected plant yearning for water. The language in your head was one of coldness, of a jagged sort, brittle and painful. A kind of smothering darkness, a foggy disillusionment for the dawning years of young adulthood that were still just a subtle glow on the far horizon of your life.
I look in your eyes and I see the pain you were feeling. I’d like to believe that if I had been there with you as someone you knew walking through the halls of your high school, or maybe someone sitting next to you in your classrooms, that I would see it, that I would see the hurt in your eyes, the confusion, the breaking from reality, the birthing of madness. That I would have seen your fear of being noticed and yet quite contradictorily your deep yearning to be known.
I have to hand it to you, your attempts to hide it were worthy of commendation. How anyone could continue to function in your blooming delirium while the walls were caving in, as if everything was fine, was quite frankly astonishing. The amount of pressure, not just the external social pressure, but the internal pressure, all threatening to make you implode and explode simultaneously, the burden was tremendous. Your ability to juggle all of these aspects of your life was remarkable, but that whisp of desperation you felt, that smoldering sensation, that sinking feeling, I’m sorry to say eventually surpassed even your ability to control and hide, and in time it over took you.
Every so often I pull out your poetry and I read through the words that you left behind for me so long ago, some kind of vain attempt to bring you back among the living. Whether or not you knew it in your 16-year-old mind, you were recording and sending me messages from across time and space, and while I cannot honestly say that I understand the meaning in all of them, in most of them the hidden truth reveals itself in a way that you were always too afraid to do with your voice. Like blood that drips from an open wound, the off-white pages were the receptacle of the fears, the secrets, and the yearning, all bleeding out from within you, from all your broken places, saturating and staining the paper.
Many of your poems and prose were about feeling trapped, imprisoned by both yourself and forces outside of you, such as in this piece:
Mirrored Windows
In this fortress of sorrow there are no windows to the world.
When I look into them all that I see is me.
Sometimes I cry for I cannot see the skies of ever-changing time.
The darkness tells me secrets of the happiness beyond these four blood-stained walls.
I yearn to escape my prison, but I am held here by bars of shame and hate.
Reading through the words you left behind it becomes pretty clear that this is how you survived. It would have been impossible for you to hold all of it in, all of the anxiety, the stress, the shame, guilt, regret, hate, confusion, distrust, fear, anger, desire, hurt, and all the other emotions you were experiencing. You refrained from telling others, you avoided most social interactions, and instead you turned to that pen and notepad, and as if through some type of magical spell you opened a portal into yourself and out poured the painful thoughts and feelings that were swelling up inside of you.
You had already convinced yourself years earlier that people wouldn’t understand you if you had even been able to speak the words to describe what was happening inside you. This ink-stained artwork was all that you had, the only way you could get the pain out of your head, a short-lived moment of relief, like the sun breaking between the storm clouds relentlessly thundering inside your mind, just before plunging you back into the abyss that left you panicked and withdrawn.
All these years later your courage still inspires me. You thought yourself broken and incapable of being repaired, you felt as though pieces of you had been stolen away and scattered beyond your reach, but even in the dizzying array of troubles within your mind there remained this little flickering light of hope. As small and futile as it may have seemed to you at the time, that little glimmer of hope empowered you to carry on, even on the darkest nights that you or I have ever known.
It was in this myriad of emotional and mental states that you came to question everything that you had been told, everything that you had ever believed to be true about yourself and about life. It wasn’t enough that your perception of self was shattered, so too did your perception of everything outside of you. No one would have blamed you if you had laid there and given in to the overwhelming loss of identity and purpose, but you didn’t do that. You got up and you went searching for answers, searching for what it meant to be you, what it meant to be alive in the world and why so much of it resulted in suffering.
What came after was a sundering and a surrendering, a letting go of what you had always clung to for safety, and a desperate wading into troubled waters that grew ever deeper the further you traveled towards the other shore far into the distance. Cast adrift into the unknown, you felt more alone than you had ever been in your young life, afraid and distraught you paddled feverishly, trying to keep your head above the surface, afraid of the dark below you that harbored everything you wanted to pretend didn’t exist. Beneath those depths was a loss of innocence and a reckoning that was unavoidable.
You swam for as long as you could, you tried so very hard to reach the refuge of the other shore, but the waters took you and you slipped beneath the surface and into the cold, from which you would never return. By the time the sun breached across the horizon, what emerged from the depths was not you, it was something else entirely. You, my youthful innocence, died down there and I arose into being, forever changed by the experience.
Sometimes I think I can hear your murmurs or whispers, your dreams echoing inside of me, remnants of hope for what once was but that can never be again. I am so very sorry for the tragedy that befell you, but without your unwanted sacrifice I would have never stood upon the other shore. Though still besieged by the same darkness that haunted you, your passing has allowed me to walk through the golden door and onto the middle path beyond. A path toward the truth behind the veil of illusionary permanence, toward the compassion at the end of the cycle of suffering, and toward the wisdom of untethering from the notion of self.
For many teens and adults who are facing sadness or are feeling down about a recent event or disappointing experience, or who may not be feeling as optimistic about life as they used to, or who are perhaps feeling heartache over an ended relationship or friendship or even undergoing grief from loss, the practice of self-care can be very beneficial and there are a wide variety of actions through this practice that can be taken to help them get through that low point in an otherwise healthy mindset.
But for those feeling moderate to severe depression, which is a diagnosable and treatable mental health condition, many self-care activities or suggestions are not enough to surmount the overwhelming symptoms they may be experiencing. For most people facing this level of uphill battle, professional mental health services may be necessary. They were for me.
When someone has some type of accidental fall and they are feeling or showing signs of a broken arm, would you tell them to go outside and get some sunshine, go for a brisk walk, pick up a new hobby, spend money to spoil themselves, or listen and sing along to their favorite song to feel better? No, of course not, you would take them to a medical professional, perhaps with persuasion if they are initially reluctant.
Yet in mental health we do exactly the opposite of what we should do. We avoid and downplay, we pretend like it’s not happening, we keep it a secret, we allow ourselves to be silenced due to shame and guilt, and we refuse to get help in the unrealistic belief that it will magically go away on its own. But it won’t because mental health conditions don’t work like that. You can’t grow out of it because it’s not a life phase, you cannot just “get over it” because it’s not a perspective or chosen state of mind.
While the causes of moderate to severe depression are still being researched and debated and the question of whether or not it is a chemical imbalance or something else entirely remains unanswered, we do know that it’s more than feeling like you’re in a funk. There are both psychological and physical health consequences to having untreated moderate to severe depression, especially in the long-term.
More than likely there are many contributing factors beyond a chemical imbalance or malfunctioning neurons, including such factors as untreated trauma and life challenges related to finances, family, social pressures, internally and externally induced stress and anxiety, unhealthy coping mechanisms like substance use, or the symptoms of another untreated or undiagnosed mental health condition like PTSD and/or a co-occurring substance use disorder.
For cases of moderate to severe depression, I urge people to reach out to a professional mental health services provider, whether that’s directly to a counselor or indirectly through a conversation with a primary care medical provider who can connect someone to mental health services.
As a certified peer specialist and as someone with lived experience with bipolar disorder which has interrupted and interfered with my life for the past 23 years, I want to tell you that there is no shame in seeking help. We seek medical assistance for physical ailments, so it makes sense to seek assistance for mental ailments as well.
As someone who has gone through multiple counselors and therapists, and a psychiatrist, I know that not every person you reach out to can be helpful or even competent. To be honest, some doctors, counselors and therapists are not effective at their jobs, some should even have their licenses revoked. If you don’t like your mental health provider, leave them and get another one! With the rise of telehealth and online providers we are no longer bound by our physical locations when it comes to seeking help.
There are many different kinds of counselors and therapists with a wide range of specialties who are trained in different types of therapy or treatment modalities. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Psychotherapy (talk therapy), and support groups, are just some of the most common types of therapy but there are so many other types that are specific to certain situations or specific needs or goals.
Just because someone is young does not mean they are immune to developing mental health conditions, in fact quite the opposite is true. Youth are at the greatest risk because most symptoms of mental health conditions develop at the onset of puberty or well into the 20’s. Youth within the age range of 10 to 24 years should be regularly evaluated for the signs and symptoms of mental health conditions. The earlier it can be diagnosed the more we can prevent years of unnecessary suffering.
My mental health struggles started when I was 14 years old, suicidality started at age 16, hospitalization happened at age 19, and another suicidal episode happened at age 22. My hospitalization at age 19 occurred just a few months after I had dropped out of college and had started working a full-time job. I was encouraged by a coworker to self-admit into a local hospital’s inpatient behavioral health ward after an uncharacteristic emotional outburst at work and my disclosure that I was having suicidal thoughts.
A lot had led up to that moment. My previous career goal had recently been crushed, I had hated college and withdrew my enrollment, I was battling with self-acceptance, struggling with a then undiagnosed and consequently untreated mental health condition, and unaddressed childhood trauma.
Life was hell for me at the time and I had already been suicidal for 3 years prior to that intervention. I was scared and confused but knew that if I didn’t accept external help that I would take my own life because I saw my life and my pain as one synonymous struggle. In my overwhelmed mind I convinced myself that ending my life would end my pain. It’s not that I wanted to die, I just didn’t want to hurt anymore and I was so exhausted from the emotional rollercoaster of thinking of ways to end my life/pain. Once I arrived at the hospital and filled out the paperwork, I was admitted for a mandatory 72-hour hold and while it didn’t magically fix everything, the experience really was a positive turning point for me.
As someone who has been involved in behavioral health personally and professionally for years, I know that not everyone supports inpatient behavioral health ward stays, primarily due to the cost, and that concern is absolutely valid, especially for those without health insurance. Thankfully, today many other crisis resources and services are available, some of them cost-free and often times a mental health crisis can be addressed without a hospital stay through such options as mental health and substance use crisis hotlines or lifelines and affiliated mobile response teams. All things I wish had been available to me when I was a teenager and young adult.
I have been in and out of therapy for decades, I have been hospitalized for suicidal behavior, have had one abandoned suicide attempt, I have received multiple diagnoses from a psychiatrist and physicians, and have been prescribed nearly a dozen different antidepressants and mood stabilizers throughout that time.
BUT I have also had a long career working full-time with only a few interruptions due to my mental health condition, I also live financially independent. My point in telling you this is that recovery and a life beyond a mental health condition is possible. My life has been interrupted but not brought to an end. Depression as a symptom of my bipolar disorder is a hiccup in the grander scheme of my life, and while it comes back from time to time, it’s just an interval. You too can get through depression if you take care of yourself and get professional treatment when you need it.
Above all else, know that there is hope and help, never be ashamed to seek help for mental health issues, doing so is literally no different than seeking help for physical health issues. There are many crisis lifelines and helplines available that didn’t exist all those years ago when I needed help. They are free, confidential, and the crisis counselors staffed for these lines have extensive training to respond to any mental health crisis.
The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline of 988 is accessible to anyone in the U.S. for call or text. They can provide assistance during a mental health crisis, such as when someone is having suicidal thoughts.
The Crisis Text Line, if you are in the U.S. or in Canada, can be reached by texting the word HELLO to the telephone number 741741 or if you live in the U.K. the telephone number is 85258 or if you live in Ireland the number is 50808. They can provide assistance with any kind of mental or emotional distress, including thoughts of suicide.
The Military/Veterans Crisis Line in the U.S. can also be reached by calling the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 and then pressing the extension number 1 when prompted, or if you send a text to 988 just let them know in your message that you are a current member of the military or are a veteran. You can also text the alternate number 838255.
For members of the LGBTQ+ there is The Trevor Project. You can call their lifeline at 1-866-488-7386 or you may text their lifeline at 678678. They have other online resources such as a private social network and online chat options, all can be accessed at their website hyperlinked above.
All of the above listed crisis and helplines will connect you with trained adult crisis counselors, and are available 24 / 7 / 365 and have various language options available. They can also provide you with resources and connect you with local mental health services where you live. You can contact them about your own struggle or you can contact them on behalf of a family member or friend who may be struggling.
For situations specifically involving substance use in the United States, the National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357 can provide recovery treatment referral options and other helpful information. For situations resulting from a human-caused or natural disaster, the U.S. government established the Disaster Distress Helpline at 1-800-985-5990 to call and 66746 to text in order to receive crisis counseling and support for those impacted emotionally by such disasters.
The Teen Line is an option for teenagers wanting to speak with someone their own age. They can be reached by phone call at 1-800-852-8336 during the hours of 6 PM – 10 PM PST (9 PM – 1 AM EST) every night, they can also be reached by texting the word TEEN to 839863 between the hours of 6 PM – 9 PM PST (9 PM – 12 AM EST). Phone calls and texts are confidential, except in emergency situations. The line is operated by high school teens volunteering their time to support their fellow teens and it is a crisis line accredited by the American Association of Suicidology, a well-known organization in the behavioral health industry. The line is operated by professionally-trained teenage volunteers based in Los Angeles, California. Despite their headquarters in California more than 70% of their incoming phone calls and texts actually come from outside the state and those they support are spread across the United States.
According to the American Psychiatric Association Foundation, employees with depression miss on average 31.4 days per year and an additional 27.9 days of being unproductive when they report for work and are unable to focus due to the symptoms of depression.
Various studies show that 30% โ 50% of all adults in the U.S. will experience mental health issues at some point in their lifetime. Itโs estimated that 20 million Americans currently have a substance use disorder and that 7.9 million have mental health issues and a substance use disorder such as alcohol and drug addiction.
According to the World Health Organization, depression and anxiety alone, globally costs one trillion per year in lost productivity. This number is expected to reach six trillion by 2036. Globally, more than 300 million people (18% of which are in the U.S.) suffer from depression, many of which have some form of anxiety.
Negative work environments can lead to physical and mental health issues, substance abuse, absenteeism, and financial losses due to lost productivity.
The World Economic Forum proposed five responses to these issues:
Implementation and enforcement of health and safety policies and practices, including identification of distress, harmful use of psychoactive substances, and physical and mental illness. These policies should include resources to manage such issues.
The dissemination of information to employees regarding available support.
Involve employees in decision-making to convey a feeling of control and participation, and involving them in organizational practices that support a healthy work-life balance.
Programs for career development of employees.
Recognizing and rewarding the contributions of employees.
Cost-benefit analysis research on strategies to address mental health, concludes net benefits. Every dollar put into enhanced treatment for common mental disorders such as anxiety, results in a return of four dollars.
The Anxiety and Depression Association of America reports that only 36.9% of those who suffer from anxiety ever seek treatment.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) conducted a national U.S. survey that was published in 2014, revealing that anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders are the most common mental health issues.
In an August 2013 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and 125 other contributors, titled The State of U.S. Health, 1990-2010: Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factors, neuropsychiatric disorders are the leading cause of disability in the United States.
The World Health Organization has declared depression the leading single cause of disability globally, and the National Institute of Mental Health has declared this single disorder the leading cause of disability in Americans aged 15 โ 44 years.
According to a study published in February 2015 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, employees with major depressive disorder costs the U.S. economy more than $200 billion each year, and 50% of those costs are incurred on the employer. That exceeds the total economic costs of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and obesity.
The Depression and Anxiety Journal of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (DAJ/ADAA) reported in 2010 that 1/3 of the costs incurred by employers from employees with these types of mental health issues are a direct result of lost productivity. In 2010, the DAJ of the ADAA published another study showing that reduced productivity of depressed employees had capital costs of $2 billion per month in the U.S.
More than 50% of those suffering from moderate depression and 40% of those suffering from severe depression, never seek treatment.
According to three separate studies, there is a direct connection between suffering from physical illness and mental illness, in that one often leads to the other, what is known as comorbidity or multi-morbidity (British Medical Journal BMJ Sept. 2012; Journal of American Medical Association โ Psychiatry Oct. 2007; The Kingโs Fund Think Tank 2012).
This comorbidity doubles or even triples the costs of treatment according to a 2014 report by the American Psychiatric Association in conjunction with Milliman Inc.
A study published in the Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience (2007), those suffering from depression were twice as likely to develop coronary artery disease or experience a stroke, and were four times more likely to die within six months after a heart attack.
Former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy M.D., M.Sc., wrote in the Harvard Business Review (Sept. 2017), โOur understanding of Biology, psychology, and the workplace calls for companies to make fostering social connections a strategic priority.โ
Dr. Murthy laid out the case for addressing workplace loneliness, an often overlooked but equally important factor in workplace mental health, by making these three points:
Lonely workers are unhealthy โ greater risk of cardiovascular disease, compromised immunity, increased risk of depression, shortened lifespan.
Isolation in the workplace is costly โ mental sluggishness from a lack of social supports leads to impaired productivity, loss of creativity, and interferes with decision-making. This impacts an organizationโs revenue, spending, and performance through increased โsick leaveโ and health insurance claims.
Modern workplace contributes to the challenge โ with a focus on productivity and task completion, little time is spent on building social connections (team building).
Dr. Murthy recommends the following strategies to create workplace social connections:
Evaluate the organizationโs current state of social connection by asking employees whether they feel valued and whether the corporate culture supports connectedness.
Build understanding at all levels about high-quality relationships at work.
Make strengthening social connections an organization-wide strategic priority.
Encourage employees to seek help when needed and to help each other.
Create opportunities for employees to learn more about each other, including personal experiences and interest outside of work.
For more than a decade I found myself at work witnessing, hearing about, or personally experiencing behavioral health challenges that were not effectively handled or addressed by management staff or by the employer as a whole. Not because no one cared, but because people were woefully unprepared, untrained, and uneducated on best practices.
Behavioral health is a term that encapsulates both mental health conditions and substance use disorders. For years, I have expressed my concerns regarding how behavioral health in the workplace has been both viewed and treated, and for years I have been either ignored or not taken seriously. In 2018, I finally found myself in a position where my voice had at least a minimal opportunity to be heard by leadership and for the next few years I pushed for change.
While the majority of my proposals were not considered (including the most important one), some of the smaller efforts were approved and we were at least able to bring some degree of educational opportunities about behavioral health to our employees. One of these included a partnership with the a local university’s psychology department.
Leadership’s unwillingness to take my concerns regarding behavioral health in the workplace seriously and their lack of earnest desire to consider my other proposals for positive change, eventually added to the list of reasons I resigned. This mindset of not settling for a workplace that doesn’t take mental health seriously is something that I am not alone in. These past few years have shown that employees are fed-up with employers who don’t care about their mental health and don’t provide them with the time, resources, and support needed to fend off burnout and other common workplace mental health issues.
Typically the barrier preventing positive change in the workplace for behavioral health challenges is not caused by the employees, but by the employer and their leadership team, who for any number of reasons tends to avoid the topic. This avoidance allows people to continue to suffer, generally in silence, to the point that they leave, and once word gets out that the employer is not a safe and supportive place to work, other people will not want to apply for their job openings.
From employees struggling with substance use disorders or mental health conditions, to supervisory and management staff being overwhelmed by employees struggling with these types of behavioral health challenges, there has been and continues to be a need for training and education, as well as policy and procedure change in the workplace.
Both private and public companies have the opportunity to make fundamental changes to how behavioral health challenges are addressed in their workplace and an opportunity to make a positive change in our society for those who struggle with these challenges and those who care for them.
I support any initiative taking steps to make these improvements and urge employers to do more for employees with substance use challenges and mental health conditions. There are programs and initiatives already established for support in the workplace and more than likely employer’s already have employees qualified and willing to lead any such initiative if they’d just be given the chance to make a positive change through education, training, policy and procedure transformation!
Now is always the time to advocate for mental health changes in the workplace, not just for those currently employed but also for those who may be prospective employment candidates. There are public and private organizations offering programs to support mental health in the workplace, and also state and federal grants, tax credits, tax deductions, and other financial incentives for businesses that employ candidates with mental health conditions, mental disabilities, or who are in recovery from substance use disorders.
Here are some general recommended best practices for organizations and management staff to get started on supporting mental health in the workplace. This list is by no means all inclusive nor in any great detail, it should be considered a starting point.
Implement health and safety policies and practices
Mental health is often viewed as the “ugly duckling” of the health industry. Everyone knows it exists but no one wants to acknowledge it as real or talk about it. For this reason, policies and practices that we would find appalling if implemented for physical health are deemed acceptable when enforced for mental health. People have to jump through burning hoops just in the hopes that their insurance company might help pay for the services they need for their mental health condition or substance use disorder (if they can even find effective services). This same type of “cold shoulder” and obstacle course towards treatment is forced on mental health in the workplace too, where even though scheduling regular medical doctor check-ups are encouraged and time-off permitted for even the slightest onset of the sniffles, employers do not believe that “mental health days” are a real and justifiable cause for using sick leave, or in some cases employers do not even allow their employees to use their sick leave for mental therapy sessions.
Too many employees are afraid to tell their employers they are struggling with their mental health and chose to suffer in secrecy and silence out of fear of punishment and other negative consequences, which leads to the employee’s self-isolation, reluctance to seek help, a risk of prolonged untreated mental illness, a decrease in work productivity from the employee, loss profits for the employer, and the list goes on. Burnout, anxiety, depression, substance use, and eating disorders are all leading mental health issues that are finally being discussed in today’s workplace, and any employer not equipped to address these issues will not fair well in an era where we as a society are finally starting to acknowledge that mental health is real.
When employers contract with employee assistance programs (EAP) they need to ensure that the program is comprehensive and effective. Through these programs employees often have access to a limited number of free counseling sessions and access to other resources and services, but not all programs are made equal. Sometimes there are limitations and restrictions on the free counseling sessions that make them ineffective.
Be mental health aware and learn to recognize signs of distress
Anonymous workplace surveys regarding employee mental health and substance use and the effectiveness of provided resources and services can assist an employer with gauging their current workforce overall mental wellbeing. Not every employee will be honest with their answers due to fear of being discovered/identified or even retaliated against no matter how anonymous the data collection process may be, but most employees will be forthcoming with their struggles and their feedback. The results of these surveys can often be eye-opening, but more importantly they direct an employer toward what types of resources and services their employees are in need of, what’s working and what isn’t. There must be a robust regulatory system in place to review the feedback and actually implement necessary changes to improve employee resources and services.
Awareness of employee behavior can save lives, for example when an employee who has always had good attendance suddenly starts coming in late or missing entire days without an obvious explanation, it may be a warning sign that something is impacting the employee’s mental health. The employee doesn’t need to be contacted for reprimand or threatened with termination, they need a compassionate employer to reach out and ask what type of support may help them return to work. The old model of punishment for undesired behavior needs to be replaced with a model of compassion and support or the high turnover rates will continue.
There are a variety of programs that can be implemented in the workplace to teach both management and staff what signs and symptoms to look for when someone may be experiencing a mental health crisis. One of the most commonly utilized programs in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia is Mental Health First Aid.
Educate on topics such as substance use and mental health conditions
Learning how to identify someone who may be experiencing a mental health crisis is important, but it’s just as important to learn about behavioral health in general. Human resource departments should be equipped with providing educational opportunities to employees about commonly experienced mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and available treatment options. This is not about diagnosing or directly treating an employee, this is about empowerment through education, it’s about eliminating the stigma of mental health and substance use that often keeps people from seeking help, and it’s about illuminating the truth of just how prevalent and treatable these challenges really are.
If an employer’s HR department is not equipped to provide this type of education, most EAPs have contracts with counselors and other mental health educators who can host educational seminars about these topics both in-person and online, but this should not be a once-a-year opportunity, these educational seminars should be routine and occur regularly every quarter and cover a wide variety of mental health topics.
Share information and resources for treatment, self-care and symptom management
Improving resource and service awareness should extend beyond just new employee orientation because onboarding is often a rushed process and leaves new employees overwhelmed and unable to remember everything thing they’ve been told or shown. Information regarding what mental health services are provided via their EAP should be regularly identified via emails, discussed via meetings, and posted on walls in communal spaces. It is recommended that the information be provided to them quarterly but no less than bi-annually.
Since life does not just happen during the day, employees should also be provided with resources and services they can contact at night after work for assistance and support with various life challenges connected to mental health. If the EAP does not provide 24/7 assistance and support, employees should be provided with the contact information for the various state and national mental crisis organizations that do.
Most EAPs can provide information about self-care and symptom management, but their are also many non-profit organizations that are more than willingly to provide brochures, pamphlets, booklets, and print-outs about what someone can do to better cope with a mental health condition or substance use disorder. These items can be placed in communal or centralized locations within the workplace to provide employee’s the opportunity to take them home. They also have posters that employers can hang up around the workspace.
For more comprehensive support or treatment services, most countries have a national organization that provides mental health services or can connect people to organizations that do. In the United States, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) retains a registry of organizations that provide behavioral health treatment.
Involve team members in practices that support a healthy work-life balance
In addition to burnout, anxiety, depression, eating disorders and substance use, another very common mental health issue faced by employees is loneliness. It is not enough to provide employees with information and access to resources and services, they also need the motivation to utilize them and this can be very difficult if they are isolated at home and in the workplace.
Providing employees with opportunities to partake in activities inside and outside of the workplace builds a stronger sense of community. While the “company bowling team” and the “holiday party” have been long-standing staples of the workforce experience, more attention needs to be placed on mental health related experiences such as retreats focused on mental wellness, community walks focused on mental health awareness, and volunteering programs focused on coming together to help those in need.
Workplace peer support groups can provide a crucial opportunity for employees to talk with their peers about what they are experiencing in their personal lives that is impacting their work life or what they are experiencing at work that is impacting all other aspects of their lives. Studies have shown that most adults meet new friends at work and this is especially true for men who find it more challenging to make friends after school compared to women. Peer support groups are a great way for people with common experiences to not only meet one another, but to also support one another.
The general benefits of peer support groups include:
Creates a confidential environment where individuals struggling with a behavioral health condition or related circumstance can openly discuss what they are experiencing or struggling with and be able to receive emotional support from those with a similar condition or circumstance.
Permits social validation for their struggle without the stigma or the insecure and judgmental responses from those who do not have a lived experience with, or understanding of, a behavioral health condition or related circumstance.
Provides an opportunity for those who often struggle alone with a behavioral health condition or related circumstance to communicate with, learn from, and recover or grow alongside those who are similarly affected by their condition or circumstance, establishing a network through which factual information, proven methods, and helpful resources can be openly exchanged.
It’s important to understand that there is a difference between a therapy support group and a peer support group. Peer support groups are peer-led and cannot provide therapy or any other type of treatment for a mental health condition or substance use disorder, whereas a therapy support group is led by a clinical licensed mental health practitioner. There are many other important factors when establishing peer support groups and these factors increase when considering establishing them within a specific employer. The Canada Life Assurance Company has provided a short but comprehensive outline for starting this type of program, and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) published a short article on the topic in 2018. Beyond this key information, there are mental health non-profits qualified and willing to assist in the establishment of peer support groups within a workplace, but the first place to request assistance is through the employer’s EAP.
Provide access to career development opportunities
As a former professional development instructor I cannot advocate enough about how important professional development opportunities are to the overall wellbeing of an employee and the overall success of a workplace. This goes beyond the core basics of any workplace education curriculum such as leadership training, conflict management, team building, and communication. Employers should be implementing a wide variety of programs, including tuition reimbursement, cross-training, mentorship, apprenticeship, and job creation/trade/exchange.
Part of my advocacy is to encourage workplaces to incorporate behavioral health education into the curriculum because the sooner we normalize conversations around mental health, the sooner we allow people who are struggling to feel less alienated, less stigmatized, less ashamed, and less hopeless. Employees have every right to learn about the mental health challenges they may face during their career, whether these challenges arise due to their personal life or their professional life because in both cases they will impact them in the workplace.
Professional development is more than just knowledge though, it is also about what employees do with that knowledge and their ability to be successful in their career. Success is not a clearly defined concept, not everyone views it in the same way nor measures it by the same standards and that’s a good thing. Regardless of how an employee perceives success, they all want to have a sense of purpose, meaning, and fulfillment in their lives, and for a lot of people their job is the primary source of these things, and it therefore falls on the employer to provide these types of opportunities for employees. The consequence of not doing so is the employee choosing to leave and look for a better employment experience elsewhere.
Recognizing and rewarding the contributions of employees is not new, but not all employers put effort into doing this, or when they do, it is generic and disingenuous or it’s overkill. Like all things in life, moderation is important because too much of a good thing can become monotonous and lose the power of its meaning. Kind of like cake, it’s great until someone starts baking you a cake every single day – then you get real sick of it real quick. Recognition and reward should not be treated like a participation trophy, the saturation of this type of program can quickly lead to it having the opposite effect as originally intended. Recognition, reward, and celebration of success should be reserved for those achievements that have truly gone above and beyond expectation and have honestly garnered such a degree of attention.
The bottom line is that employees are an investment, they are the single most valuable and important asset to an employer and their mental health needs to be recognized as a matter of great concern. If a policy or practice is not to the benefit of employee mental health then it needs to be seriously scrutinized and reconsidered, which means that there must always be contingency plans set in place for modifying or amending any process, procedure, or practice to reduce the negative impacts on employees. Failure to do so reflects poorly on the employer and their leadership, for any organization ill-equipped to care for its employees is ill-equipped to provide services to its customers.
You will find research and data supporting the need for these types of changes via the following private and public organizations:
Memento Vivere 
Bildungsroman: The Trials of Transitory Transformation
Posted on June 17, 2026 by Kฤphen
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My senior year of high school, 2004
Coming-of-age is terrifying and speaking as someone who turned 40 several months ago, so much of my life has not gone the way I imagined it would when I was younger. When I was a child, an hour felt like days but now that I’m reaching middle-age I feel as though a week passes as quickly as a day.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where my life has gone and how quickly time has passed. I’ve been reflecting on the advice that older people gave me when I was younger, about how I needed to go to new places and do new things, and that somehow my life would slow down through the experiencing process. Unfortunately, I have not found that to be true. Instead, I have found that the only thing that is true is that change is the only constant, that impermanence is the only absolute.
I have begun to think that I need to focus more on what I’ve gained from experiences and less on trying to have more and more of them in a futile attempt to slow down time. For example, courage and authenticity are things I’ve really taken to heart over the years. Life is an adventure and like any adventure things don’t always go to plan. What’s important is to not get caught up in the mistakes and choose instead to simply acknowledge them as the learning experiences they are and move on the wiser.
When I was 16, I was too afraid of the social pressures of conformity and the risk of receiving judgement to feel like I could live authentically. Years of my life were spent in pain pretending to be someone I wasn’t just to feel like I could fit in and be accepted. But the person the people around me accepted was not me, only a shadow of who I really was, a mask I put on to feel normal and safe.
When I was 22 and had just been discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps I realized that I would rather live an authentic life not knowing what was to come than to die having lived a life not my own. It was in that experience that I learned courage was self-acceptance and authenticity.
Life is about letting go of the desire to control everything, that was a lesson I had to learn too. Not all of my goals would be accomplished, not all of my dreams would come true. I had to stop seeing myself as a failure and start seeing myself as a person.
The hardest thing we will ever do is be ourselves in a world that constantly tells us that we are never enough, to let go of other people’s expectations for who we are and how we choose to live our lives. This is particularly true in our teens and early adult years, what is frequently referred to these days as the “emerging adult” phase of life.
It is a time in our lives when we are becoming our own person with our own identity outside of our old life, old friendships, away from our parents and family, and perhaps most importantly separating ourselves from our old actions, beliefs, and choices. We are becoming someone new, someone changed by time, experience, and consequence, and that transformation is often fraught with confusion, questioning, pain and an unbecoming of the old self to make room for a more authentic self.
This unbecoming can feel scary because it means letting go. We humans love to hold on, hold on to the past, to familiar ideals, old narratives, old stories, to our old selves because old feels comfortable, but growth does not come from what is comfortable or easy, it comes from the unknown, from adversity.
Everything in life is like leaves falling from a tree, we can’t force them all to land where we want, only some. I have learned that we need to just admire them as they fall into their own self-directed place and appreciate the beauty that chaos and impermanence brings.
While I think the advice that those older people told me when I was young about how I needed to travel was good advice to access opportunities for experience, I don’t think it was helpful in discovering more about who I am as a person. Far too often, we travelย abroadย or go out into the wildernessย in the hopes ofย findingย ourselves only to discoverย that what we’re really doing isย attempting to escape ourselvesย in a new location.ย Only to learn that we are everywhere we go. The best we can hope for is to come back from those voyages, understanding that the only path we ever needed to traverse was inward to begin the hard work of personal development.ย To “come home” as they say, to know ourselves perhaps for the first time in our lives.
Life is strange, I admit we often do need to be removed from our normal circumstances, either in the sense of ordinary physical location or in mental routine, multiple times before we finally see that the common denominator in what troubles us is actually us and the massively unanswered question of who we are. It is a lesson in self-actualization, self-acceptance, and more often than not self-forgiveness.
The most difficult challenge any of us will ever face in life is to master ourselves. Doing this is both a quiet and a lonely path, one without audience or fanfare, a long and arduous path of painful truths that reveal secrets and trauma deeply held, and the letting go of the falsehoods we conceal ourselves behind in fear of disappointment and judgement. It is a transformation into authenticity, delivered in solitude, and we are both the giver and the gift.
One of the biggest hurdles I needed to face between the ages of 14 and 22 was my mental health, something that no older person ever gave me advice about until it was already too late and I was in the deepest, darkest places mentally. My story is not uncommon, for most people that timespan between 10 and 24 years of age is saturated with mental health hardship and the vast majority of us are woefully unprepared to endure it because such topics were not part of standard school curriculum nor common conversations within our households growing up.
At any given moment, 31 million Americans are struggling with a mental health condition, 19 million are struggling with a substance use disorder, and 11 million are contemplating suicide.
Mental health issues are widespread and very common as 1 in 5 Americans are currently living with a mental health condition or substance use disorder, 1 in 2 will struggle with either or both at some point in their lifetime and 50% of them will experience the onset of symptoms by age 14. The majority of which will not actively seek treatment due to a variety of reasons, including stigma, cost, and physical access to services.
Statistically, someone experiencing a mental health crisis is more likely to be a victim of a crime than the perpetrator of it, yet we often see in film and television that people experiencing a mental health crisis are dangerous or scary. The statistics range depending on what organization we collect the data from, but reports suggest that anywhere from 10 – 30% of Americans with mental illness will have an encounter with law enforcement at some point, but the majority of these encounters include petty infractions like jaywalking and disorderly conduct, as well as substance use. Violent crimes are in the minority of encounters.
As someone who has lived with a serious mental health condition for more than twenty-five years I know all too well the consequences of untreated mental illness, as well as the lack of education about mental health and the relevant signs and symptoms of mental illness. Mental health conditions are still shunned today, but they are far better understood than they were 50, 40, or even 30 years ago.
Someone once asked me to describe what it’s like having a serious mental illness and so I described it as the following…
Something that I have been noticing more and more frequently in recent years is psychosis in teens and young adults. If you attend a mental health conference (as I do) it’s a topic that is getting a lot of attention, much of it related to substance use triggering the onset of psychosis in teens and young adults. As someone who had experience with short-term psychosis in my early twenties, I know it’s a topic that makes people uncomfortable and fearful. If we are living in a world where more teens and young adults will be experiencing psychosis as part of their coming-of-age story then I think it’s a topic that deserves a little more attention when we talk about the challenges of this phase of our lives.
I experienced auditory and visual hallucinations in my early twenties where the things I saw and heard were, in many ways, very real to me and indiscernible from any other person who could be in the room speaking with me. I could see them and hear them like any other living thing, I could have conversations with them. However, the beings that talked to me were floating disembodied heads. Their voices were loud and angry, telling me horrible things about myself and other people, telling me to do horrible things to myself and other people.
Today, I am a certified peer specialist in the mental health industry and I know a whole hell of a lot more about mental health conditions and substance use challenges than I did back then. But still, even at that young age, I knew the things I was seeing and hearing were not actually real, no matter how real they appeared or sounded, I knew that they couldn’t possibly be real because they defied everything I knew to be possible. Floating disembodied heads that talk are not real, voices telling me to kill myself didn’t make logical sense, no amount of reasoning could justify their existence or the truthfulness of what they were telling me.
Perhaps if these things had happened to me when I was even younger it’s possible I could have believed they were real, but at the time I experienced them I had already determined that I didn’t believe in ghosts, demons, spirits, or any supernatural stuff and I’ve always been a very skeptical person. The floating heads screaming at me may as well have looked like the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, and I would not have thought them any more absurd.
This of course was just my experience, not everyone has the same experience, and I do believe that some people are more impressionable than others, particularly due to age, skill in mindfulness, level of skepticism, cultural and religious background, and personal life experience.
When I was younger I had a friend who lived with schizophrenia, and early in his diagnosis he didn’t always take his medication routinely. One time when we were hanging out he forgot his meds and skipped a dose or two. That night he began seeing what he described as demons dancing around the room playing musical instruments, he said I was a demon too. He got up and went outside after feeling overwhelmed by everything he was seeing and hearing. He knew these things couldn’t be real and yet they seemed to be really happening and he became afraid.
In both of our experiences we were always in control of our actions, we could still think for ourselves in a rational way because hallucinations and delusional thinking are not the same thing despite how often people use these terms interchangeably as though they describe the same experience. While hallucinations through psychosis may be co-occurring with delusional thinking, this is not always the case and should not always be assumed to be present.
We could debate whether or not psychosis is ever a standalone mental health condition that can be diagnosed separately from any other, but I am of the opinion that it is always a symptom of some other cause, whether that be mental illness, brain injury, or substance use.
As already noted, violence in psychosis is not a common event, in fact most people who experience it are far more likely to be victims of others who take advantage of them in their vulnerable state than they are to be the perpetrators of violent crimes themselves. In cases where they do inflict violence it’s almost always a process of escalation building up to that level where warning signs and behavioral symptoms have been ignored, downplayed, or simply gone unaddressed.
The things I described about my friend and I’s experiences were happening to us without the necessity of any illicit substances, but substance use triggering mental illness, and specifically psychosis, is becoming more common as both legal and illicit use continues to incorporate newer organic, genetically modified, and synthetic substances as an unhealthy coping mechanism for the challenges teens and young adults face while going through the coming-of-age phase in their lives. Although, I’ve recently learned that children as young as 10 are also now experiencing substance-induced psychosis due to the ease of availability.
While adverse experiences remain the predominant and primary trigger for the onset of mental health conditions in children, teens, and young adults, hallucinogens (also known as psychedelics) are substances that alter brain chemistry and disrupt the brain’s ability to connect with physical reality. We’re talking LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, cannabis, and MDMA (ecstasy) – which has a dual classification as a stimulant. These substances and others are a secondary factor in circumstances where adverse childhood experiences are not the primary factor. Genetic susceptibility is always a potential contributing factor.
Substance use or self-medicating as a maladaptive coping mechanism is extremely common in those with a mental health condition. This behavior frequently leads to dependency or addiction and compounds the symptoms of the mental health condition, exacerbating it by creating a co-occurring condition. Creating a situation where the person is now facing both a mental health condition and a substance use challenge. Other common substance groups used for maladaptive coping include analgesics, depressants, and stimulants.
Substance use has not been an ever-present or prolonged part of my journey with a mental health condition. I’ve never used any illicit substance, I never smoked so much as a cigarette. While I tended to avoid alcohol (a type of depressant) as I never enjoyed the taste, I did get blackout drunk at a wedding in my twenties after getting dumped by my date just days before the wedding. After that experience, I swore I’d never get drunk again, and I haven’t. I no longer drink alcohol at all.
I was pre-disposed to developing a mental health condition due to genetics, but the onset of symptoms did not occur until being triggered during adolescence, a time when adverse experiences were occurring one after another and being layered on top of each other. Childhood sexual and physical trauma, psychological abuse, and religious trauma were the precursors to my foray into mental illness.
My symptoms really became visible at age 14, expressed via depression and suicidal ideation that I wrote about at the time in a private journal. I believe early medical/psychological intervention could have prevented the worst things that were yet to come had my parents been educated on what signs to look for and how to effectively react because the warning signs were brought to their attention when they found and read my journal.
They asked me about the journal but didnโt take it seriously when I lied to their faces and said it was just creative writing. They knew that something was happening to me, they didn’t understand it and chose not to take action, whether that was due to lack of knowledge, lack of will, or fear of knowing the truth and the false belief that shame or guilt would be brought on to the family by accepting and embracing the truth.
At age 16, I attempted suicide. Neither they nor anyone else found out about this event until years later. Where my parents fumbled, one of my high school teachers succeeded. She intervened when I was 17, slowly and subtly building a rapport and trust relationship with me when she noticed the warning signs and the behavioral symptoms being expressed. She knew what to look for because she herself was struggling with a mental health condition, something she shared with me during our conversations.
I think in today’s world, she would have been fired from her job had the school found out that she was spending time with me outside of school, even inviting me to her house. From their perspective it probably would have looked like she was grooming me, and it’s possible people in town may have thought we were in some kind of sexual relationship because we would go out to eat and to the movies together. But that was not at all the nature of our time together.
What was really happening was that she was giving me stability and a support system, a safe space to talk about what I was experiencing. I had nowhere to go, I had no one else I felt I could turn to. Through this trust relationship, she got me to open up about what I was experiencing and was able to connect me to a mental health counselor when I turned 18.
I wish I could tie this into a cute little bow and give a perfect ending after her subtle intervention, but in reality a lot of wild experiences happened over the next few years, including different diagnoses, the hallucinations I previously mentioned, more suicidality, hospitalization, ruined relationships, an abrupt military discharge, other self-destructive behavior, and years of medication and therapy, but her early intervention was truly the beginning of my recovery journey and she is one of a few critical people who saw and heard me and intervened, and she is one of the reasons I am alive today.
Throughout my time at high school she kept me alive. She showed me that life with a mental health condition was possible, that I could keep going and grow successfully into adulthood, that what I was experiencing was not the end of my life but a mere detour, she gave me connection and perhaps more importantly she gave me hope. She saved my life, a fact I have shared with her on several occasions.
The life we are living when we are young is not the life we will live when we’re older. The experiences we’re having, no matter how dark they may be at the time, are transitory – they do not last forever. The thing about youth is that it blinds us to the impermanence of time. We believe that the way our lives are in any given moment will be that way forever. It is so very hard to see beyond today, every moment feels like an eternity and the possibility of change or transformation sounds unachievable. The path toward progress feels daunting and overwhelming because we focus so much on the end that we fail to understand that it can only be accomplished by taking small steps at a time. Instead of looking at the horizon, it is better to look at the ground with every step we take.
The greatest lesson that Buddhism ever taught me was that change is the only absolute. The day I truly embraced that notion was a day of liberation for me. Did it cure me of my mental health struggles? No, because that’s not possible, but what did change was my perspective, my understanding of and expectations for myself, and my interpretation of my pain, and of life in general.
The first time my teacher from high school talked to me about my mental health and shared with me her own struggles, I cried, and I did so not just because it was a sad conversation but because for the first time in my life I didnโt feel alone and not feeling alone is a big step in the healing process.
Recovery is possible and it doesn’t always mean someone is cured. Many mental health conditions cannot be cured, which is why it is classified as a disorder instead of disease. Recovery is not a static point in time, it’s not marked by a single event or some kind of finish line. It’s difficult and challenging, and there are external barriers, internal obstacles, and setbacks. Recovery is a state of being, an ongoing effort to remain in equilibrium. Living life in recovery is possible, and all the ups and downs are worth it.
I could have died as a teenager in 2002, but I didn’t. I could have missed out on so much, but I haven’t. Make no mistake, a lot of unfortunate stuff has happened along the way and continues to happen. I have lost cherished people who I thought would be a part of my life for decades to come. The loss of Ricardo Reyes in 2022 was particularly hard for me because it was so unexpected, he had been a part of my life for almost twenty years, and he kept me alive after my discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps with his patience, grace, acceptance, and support as I stumbled and crawled my way back from that pit of shame, confusion, regret, isolation, and self-hatred.
There is a time and a place for grief, there is a time to cry and wallow in despair, we must make space in our lives to embrace and reflect on our experiences and the emotions that come with them, and we must work our way through all of life’s hardships, both the emotional and the clinical, but I also think that it’s important to remember that these things should be acknowledged as temporary moments and experiences. The memories may last, but the events do not and the negative effects of those events also shouldn’t last.
Living with a mental health condition or substance misuse means carrying both the weight of struggle and the fragile hope of survival. What has kept me here has been a combination of treatment, even when imperfect, and human connection, even when fleeting. These small but powerful interventions have mattered as much as any prescribed medication.
More than twenty-five years into this journey, I can say that survival has not been about one single breakthrough but about a series of moments, moments of help accepted, moments of kindness offered, moments of realizing I wasnโt entirely alone. My coming-of-age story isnโt about being cured; itโs about learning to keep living despite the darkness, and accepting that pain does not have to define the whole of my existence.
Recovery for me has always been a journey and not a destination. The expectation that recovery does not include relapse is a delusion that time will break for those who believe it. Relapse is not the end of the road, it is merely a detour. The dream that I will one day wake up and everything will be wonderful from that point forward had to be shattered in order for me to fully embrace recovery. The understanding that I’ll have good days, months, or years, but just as equally have bad days, months, or years, was a lesson I needed to learn and I’m grateful I learned it in my early twenties.
Change is not only possible, it is the only absolute. Remembering that has saved me from a lot of unnecessary suffering. I learned this lesson when I converted to Buddhism, it was one of the best decisions of my life and the most important one along my journey. I do not believe I would have survived my early twenties if I had not embraced the Dharma.
If I spent all of my time dwelling on all of the negatives over the last two decades I’d have never noticed or experienced the profound moments I’ve been able to witness and live through. If you or someone you know is not okay, there is hope and there is help. There is life and there is joy on the other side of struggle. And I don’t mean that fake happiness that people pretend to feel, I mean authentic joy that comes when it should and recedes when it must.
The lie people tell themselves of how they should be happy all the time is delusional thinking that causes more problems than it solves. Happiness is an emotion and emotions fluctuate, we can no more be happy and mentally well all the time than we can be angry, guilty, sad, or any other emotion. Like everything in life, emotions are impermanent. Freedom comes when we let go of the lie of permanence.
From a mental health perspective, we all want autonomy, self-efficacy, and to live a self-directed life. I have always found that the biggest impediment to this is misunderstanding what it means to be free. โTo be free is to no longer be at the mercy of our own expectations of others. What attitudes we expect others to have, what behaviors we expect others to enact, and what choices we expect others to make.
We do not get to control the internal motives or external actions of other people. The sooner we purge ourselves of this delusion the sooner we are liberated from the trappings of possessiveness, of cravings for power over others, of the self-righteous belief that we know what’s best for others and that others must satisfy our needs and wants. At no point in my life did I struggle with this more than in my teens and early twenties.
Perhaps the reason we try so desperately to control others is because most of the time we cannot even control our own feelings and thoughts, instead we merely find ourselves at the mercy of every fleeting internal and external sensation, reacting wildly to everything as though we are some kind of feral animal trapped in a corner with no way out.
But herein lay the truth, the only way out is in. If ever there was an obvious sign of mental wellbeing it is the ability to regulate our own desires and emotions by establishing healthy coping mechanisms, practicing awareness and mindfulness, and by not becoming a victim of our own delusions.
On the long road between childhood and adulthood there are many challenges, especially with mental health, but with some initiative to do the hard work of discovering who we are and letting go of the burdens we all too often choose to carry around, we can make it through this tumultuous time in our lives as better people than the ones we started as. We should also be so lucky as to find good people along the way who can support us without robbing us of our autonomy.
As an adult I have come to realize that the best people to bring into your life are those who allow you the space and time to live a self-directed life, who empower you without controlling you, and who do not hold you back or weigh you down.
To use a Buddhist analogy, think about a horse-drawn carriage traveling at night: there’s the horse, a driver, the carriage, and a lantern. In this analogy you do not want friends that are like the horse who has no concern for anyone but itself and who would run wild if given the chance except that it has no freedom of choice. Nor do you want a friend like the driver whose sole desire is to control and command. You also don’t want friends who are like the carriage that is simply along for the ride and exists without any impetus. Instead find friends like the lantern, who is always there ever-so-quietly shining a light on potential joys and potential dangers, not telling you where to go or what to do or who to be, just illuminating the darkness to reveal all possible paths with the reassurance and patience to wait for you to choose which way to go.
Colin Madsen: A Decade Without Answers
Posted on June 8, 2026 by Kฤphen
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It has been more than a decade since the death of Colin Robert Lloyd Madsen. There are still many unanswered questions surrounding his death. We (his friends and family) know that his death did not result from his own volition. His life was taken from him, either directly with intent to kill or indirectly through torture and neglect while being illegally detained.
Regardless of intention, the result was the same: his life was taken from him and he was taken from those who loved and adored him.
Colin was, and in a residual way still is, one of the best human beings I have ever met. Though we always speak well of the dead, we should have spoken just as well of them while they were alive. One cannot simply express the compassion this young man had.
For those of us who practice Buddhism (a deep interest of Colin’s), we resolve ourselves to walk and speak with loving-kindness, to live in the moment, to attach ourselves to nothing, to give more than we receive, to kiss the Earth with our feet, to acknowledge every living thing, and in-so-doing offer it our love. Colin made the effort to do these things as often as he could.
I know no one gentler, no one more supportive, no one more the embodiment of peace in every step than Colin.
More than 10 years have passed since his death. The sun rises and the sun sets, the moon phases through another cycle, and yet we remain without answers and without justice.
The loss of a life is often compared to the flame of a candle being snuffed out, a flickering little flame fighting against the darkness for some small amount of time until it can no longer. I don’t think candlelight represents Colin very well, he’s something more than that.
Perhaps more like starlight, temporarily obscured by a dark cloud, vanishing from our eyes, but still he remains there somewhere just beyond, glowing as he always did, not for the mere 30,000 sunrises and sunsets of the average human life, but for trillions, just waiting to be seen again, if only you had the patience and the clarity to see him, too brilliant to be long forgotten, too resilient to be long hidden from the world by a mere wispy little cloud.
Not every path we walk will lead us to closure, sometimes the path just keeps on going and we long for the hand we once held, the now vacant hand we have come to know as grief. There is no timeline for bereavement, nor for anger, nor any emotion. No one can tell you when it’s time for you to stop feeling anything. Especially when the circumstances resulting in that loss remain unresolved.
I strongly believe that for as long as we remember Colin, then he is still with us, a light that forever carries on. But for his mom, Dana, a battle carried on long after his passing. A battle against people, nations, to recognize and amend the wrong that has been committed and to prevent it from happening to other families. The people responsible for not just Colin’s death, but the attempt to cover up their actions, mislead those seeking the truth, and to tarnish the very nature of his character. These people remain unscathed, and it is an outrage.
Colin was like the modern version of a 19th century progressive philosopher, it was like he was simultaneously born in the right and the wrong century. He was uninterested in things that modern young adult Americans get immersed in, but at the same time he was very forward thinking and open to new experiences.
We get caught in the gravity of the character and behavior and charm of certain people during our lifetimes, drifting in and out, seeing how they have grown and shifted and blended and evolved and faded and pulsed and ignited over the years. Over time they are transformed, not just in their own mind but in ours, they become way more human, way more real than they had ever been before.
Sharing your thoughts and feelings and passions is a remarkable gift that feeds your own soul most importantly, and that of those who hear you. The people that cherish you as more than a mere passing amusement will always find their way to you if you live your passions and open yourself to the highs and lows of that experience. This is what Colin did on a daily basis.
He touched so many lives, not just with his incessant desire to know how others think and feel, but with his honesty and openness. He did not just seek inspiration, he was inspiration. There can be nothing more extraordinary than to know that you have inspired others and touched deeply their very souls, something so commendable and worthy of every accolade.
I have come to learn that the people we meet throughout our lives become a piece of us, a part of our own story, and so when we lose those people we lose a part of ourselves. Of course some fragment of who they were remains with us, but we also have this emptiness, like some kind of hunger pain, but in our heart.
We remain forever changed by the grief of our loss. Sure, the sun still rises, the birds still sing, sometimes we laugh in momentary lapses of the reality of the horror we live, but it will never be the same, it always looms overhead like a dark cloud. Nothing can be as it was before, impermanence is the only absolute.
To help you learn more about Colin, I want to share the below documentary film which I played a small role in helping produce. This film is incredibly important and personal to me, and while I do not feel that any film could ever express the injustice, the violation, the anger, or the grief of loss that all of Colin Madsen’s family and other friends have felt since 2016, I do feel that it justly highlights what that terrible experience felt like at the time it occurred.
Watching the completed film left me shaken and disturbed because it brought back all of the things I felt at the time they happened all those years ago. There are photos and video footage in this film I have never before seen, not because I did not previously have access to them but because I chose not to expose myself to them in fear that they would replace my last memories of a living, breathing Colin with the cruelty of humanity.
I will never forget the panic, the fear, the anxiety, the wrenching sensation inside of me during those days he was missing, nor will I ever forget the morning I learned his body had been found. I was standing in my kitchen during the early morning hours before sunrise, scrolling through social media hoping to find someone posting that Colin had been found alive.
Instead, I found a post announcing that his body had been found, that Colin was dead. I collapsed to my kitchen floor, in shock, in grief, in regret, in so many emotions.
When you watch this film, you will learn my experience was not unique. Everyone who knew Colin shared in the horror that unfolded during his vanishing, his death, and the years that have followed.
For me it was a catalyst, a moment that marked a shift in my perception of life, in my understanding of love and loss, of what it means to endure the human experience, primarily because it was the start of a series of subsequent deaths in my family and among my friends, even my pets died. For several years, it felt as though it would not end until everyone I knew was dead.
More importantly, this film also gracefully touches on the beautiful person that Colin was, the person that I want others to know him as. So often in stories about crimes we find ourselves captivated by the depravity of the criminal act and the villains who perpetrated it, we rarely feel deeply connected to or understand who the person that lost their life was, they just become another victim.
For the past 10 years I have repeatedly shared my thoughts and feelings about Colin, about who he was, why his life mattered and still matters, why the injustice committed against him was so vile and why he was the least among us to deserve enduring it. Please take the opportunity to learn more about Colin, the person, and not just Colin the victim. He was so much more than his death.
I do not believe I will ever know or meet someone in my life again more benevolent than Colin. You would’ve had to spent time with him to truly understand. In some small way, I feel that this documentary grants viewers the opportunity to glimpse into his human nature. I hope you will share this documentary with others, not solely for the sake of justice but also because in-so-doing you will also share his light.
This post was a follow-up to a previous publication from 2017.
Fragrant Palm Leaves – Thรญch Nhแบฅt Hแบกnh
Posted on July 16, 2023 by Kฤphen
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Thรญch Nhแบฅt Hแบกnh’s journal entries, Fragrant Palm Leaves, is a gem of a little book providing so much insight and strangely enough also comfort. I say strange because the selected journal entries were penned from 1962 to 1966, right in the midst of the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975. The pages are haunted by this fact continuously, as though it were a shadow, and in many ways it was an enormous shadow that weighed upon Thรญch Nhแบฅt Hแบกnh as he wrote every word. This book is one of two I’ve really grown to cherish deeply these past few years. I’ve been carrying it with me almost everywhere I go.
In 1966 he requested the journal be taken for safe keeping and published in the event that he may be killed for his activism. He wanted to leave something behind that would offer to the world some semblance of what he had been devoting his life to, the notion that Buddhism was not merely something to read and learn about but something to do, what he referred to as “Engaged Buddhism.” Both beautiful and mournful, his collected journal entries are perhaps one of my favorite books that I’ve purchased of the many he published throughout his life.
The first book of his I read was The Miracle of Mindfulness, which I came across back in 2006 when I was 19 years old. At the time I was going through and recovering from a really challenging experience in my life and his words were a gift for me, and in a slow but peaceful way ultimately changed the trajectory of my life.
He has guided me through a lot of darkness, and not just in my youth. He has done so not by leading me by the hand but by illuminating the path so that I could see my own way through. This is the very nature of a Bodhisattva, to suspend one’s own path for the sake of others.
When Thรญch Nhแบฅt Hแบกnh passed away in January of 2022 it felt like something in the world was lost that could not be replaced. Despite the absence of his living body in the world, I remain grateful for him and his continued presence in my life. His body may have been impermanent but his presence remains within his recorded teachings for as long as they are needed and appreciated. And for me I think and hope it will be a lifetime.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts from the book:
August 18, 1962, United States
“To me evenings are beautiful and happy. Evening, like morning, is active, full of change and vitality. It is not a time of fading. Evening announces the arrival of the full array of night life, when nature is so active. Humans rest at night, but moon, stars, water, clouds, insects, and grasses throb with life. The time I would call sorrowful is midday, around one or two in the afternoon. At midday, all natural activity comes to a halt. There isn’t a voice to be heard. There isn’t even a thread of wind, and the trees are as still as corpses. The dormant sky stretches beyond measure, and the sun hypnotizes the earth and her myriad creatures with its fierce and fiery eye. Then, at the nudging of a cloud, the earth begins to turn once more, and the spell is broken. If you’ve ever awakened from a nap at the exact moment that the sun paralyzes the earth, you will hear the call. I have heard it hundreds of times, and each time my heart trembles. Barely awake, the sea of my subconscious mind floods my being. I hear the universe calling me home, and my whole body responds. I heard that call four times at Phuong Boi. Never had trees stood so still or sky stretched so high. My being was overcome with an intense longing to return, to follow that ineffable call. I felt as though I were standing at a threshold obscured by dense fog. If only I could dispel the fog, I would be able to see. See what? I did not know. But I was certain it would reveal my deepest longing.”
December 21, 1962, United States
“When icy winter comes, it is unforgiving to all things young, tender, and insecure. One must grow beyond youthful uncertainty to survive. Maturity and determination are necessary. Seeing the courageous, solid way that trees prepare for winter helps me appreciate the lessons I’ve learned.”
December 23, 1962, United States
“At first it seemed like a passing cloud. But after several hours, I began to feel my body turning to smoke and floating away. I became a faint wisp of a cloud. I had always thought of myself as a solid entity, and suddenly I saw that I’m not solid at all. This wasn’t philosophical or even an enlightenment experience. It was just an ordinary impression, completely ordinary. I saw that the entity I had taken to be “me” was really a fabrication. My true nature, I realized, was much more real, both uglier and more beautiful than I could have imagined.”
“I am often on the verge of tears or laughter. But beneath all of these emotions, what else is there? How can I touch it? If there isn’t anything, why would I be so certain that there is?… I understood that I am empty of ideals, hopes, viewpoints, or allegiances. I have no promises to keep with others. In that moment, the sense of myself as an entity among other entities disappeared. I knew that this insight did not arise from disappointment, despair, fear, desire, or ignorance. A veil lifted silently and effortlessly. That is all. If you beat me, stone me, or even shoot me, everything that is considered to be “me” will disintegrate. Then, what is actually there will reveal itself – faint as smoke, elusive as emptiness, and yet neither smoke nor emptiness; neither ugly, nor not ugly; beautiful, yet not beautiful. It is like a shadow on a screen. At that moment, I had the deep feeling that I had returned.”
“I became a battlefield. I couldn’t know until the storm was over if I would survive, not in the sense of my physical life, but in the deeper sense of my core self. I experienced destruction upon destruction, and felt a tremendous longing for the presence of those I love, even though I knew that if they were present, I would have to chase them away or run away myself. When the storm finally passed, layers of inner mortar lay crumbled. On the now deserted battlefield, a few sunbeams peeked through the horizon, too weak to offer any warmth to my weary soul. I was full of wounds, yet experienced an almost thrilling sense of aloneness. No one would recognize me in my new manifestation. No one close to me would know it was I. Friends want you to appear in the familiar form they know. They want you to remain intact, the same. But that isn’t possible. How could we continue to live if we were changeless? To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible… Youth is a time for seeking truth. Years ago I wrote in my journal that even if it destroys you, you must hold to the truth. I knew early on that finding truth is not the same as finding happiness. You aspire to see the truth, but once you have seen it, you cannot avoid suffering. Otherwise, you’ve seen nothing at all.”
December 12, 1964, Vietnam
“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar. The best medicine to chase away the heart’s dark isolation is to make direct contact with life’s sufferings, to touch and share the anxieties and uncertainties of others. Loneliness comes from locking yourself in a false shell. You think of yourself as a separate, self-contained entity not in relation to others. Buddhists call this “attachment to self.” In reality, we are empty of a separate self. But we needn’t take the Buddhists’ word for it. Looking deeply, we can see that a person is not a separate self.”
February 11, 1965, Vietnam
“Zen is not merely a system of thought. Zen infuses our whole being with the most pressing question we have. It is an urgent life-and-death struggle in which we either break through or fall into a swirling abyss. It is necessary for us to face such perilous moments alone, moments that will determine the rest of our lives. Zen includes concentrated meditation sessions during which we might experience one breakthrough after another, encounter dangers, or die alone in failure.”
July 12, 1965, Vietnam
“Last year, I went to the British Museum. I was fascinated by the preserved remains of a human body buried five thousand years ago. The body was lying on its left side with its knees folded up against its chest. Head, arms, and legs faced left. Every detail of the man’s body had been preserved. I could see strands of hair, his ankles, each intact finger and toe… As I stood engrossed, an indescribable feeling rippled through my body. A little girl, about eight years old, stood beside me and asked in a worried voice, “Will that happen to me?” I trembled and looked at this tender flower of humanity, this vulnerable child without any means to defend herself, and I said, “No, this will never happen to you.” I lied about something that Chandaka, the Buddha’s charioteer, never lied about to Siddhartha… That night, after walking outside in the snow, I came down with a cold… I took two aspirins before covering myself with blankets. I was unable to sleep, partly because of the aspirins… I tossed and turned until at one point I realized that I was lying in the same position as the body in the British Museum. Without thinking, I pressed my hands together to see if my flesh had hardened into rock. My conscious mind did not initiate this gesture, but it did not reject it as silly, either. At that moment I felt perfectly at peace. Not one sad or anxious thought entered my mind. I saw that my body as a five-thousand-year-old mummy and my body lying in bed in the present moment are the same. Ideas of past, present, and future dissolved, and I was standing at the luminous threshold of a reality that transcends time, space, and action. I arose and sat in meditation the rest of the night. Waterfalls of consciousness cascaded through my being. Large raindrops and swirling streams cleansed, penetrated, and fed me. All that remained was a deeply rooted peace. I sat like a mountain and smiled… One night can change a person’s life. One night can open doors for all other nights. I almost saw my true face; I was about to break through.”
You can learn more about Thรญch Nhแบฅt Hแบกnh and his legacy by visiting the Plum Village.
On the Nature of Happiness
Posted on March 14, 2023 by Kฤphen
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In the pursuit of happiness we find ourselves chasing after many things: the right relationship partner, the dream job, the perfect home, the best vehicle, the latest tech gadget, but upon receipt of any of these things we merely find a short-lived excitement, a rush of enjoyment up until the sensation begins to fade in time.
In this falling-out of happiness we sometimes ask ourselves why that thing doesn’t make us happy anymore, and when that “thing” is a person we find ourselves wondering if we ever actually loved them at all or if it was just the excitement of something new and different. When the luster of “newness” has given way to everyday boringness, what are we supposed to think or feel? What does it all mean? When someone says, “I’m not happy,” or “I just want to find happiness,” what do they really mean?
People can make us happy, that part is actually quite true. Other human beings can bring happiness into our lives just as the taste of ice cream, or a birthday gift, a beautiful sunset, or anything else we’ve learned to find joy in. What we often don’t consider is the cost of that happiness. After all, it cannot be free, nothing in life comes without a degree of debt. The cost of happiness is impermanence.
We must come to accept the reality that happiness is an emotion like anger, sadness, fear, guilt, disgust, love, and all the rest. Emotions were never meant to be anything more than temporary. We’re not always happy for the same reason we’re not always angry, sad, afraid, ashamed, or any other emotion. We’re not meant to be happy all the time, it’s unnatural, it goes against our nature as living beings experiencing life. To always be happy would not be a gift, but a delusion, an illness, a curse, just as it is to be angry or sad all the time. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
Impermanence is the only absolute, and breaking the delusion that permanence of any kind is possible, is the only cure to our dissatisfaction with our lives, regardless of what or who no longer brings us happiness. Even contentment, our default emotional state, does not last forever – it too must give way to the emotional spectrum from time to time. I think perhaps it would do us a great service to live an examined life and to stop pondering whether or not we are happy or if someone or something makes us happy, and begin to ask ourselves if we are content.
If this topic interests you, consider reading The Power of Purpose, Meaning, and Fulfillment.
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis, please access my immediate assistance resource page. A comprehensive listing of online and phone resources and services is also available.
Online Etiquette
Posted on March 13, 2023 by Kฤphen
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We’ve all seen it online and most of us have probably done it: committing a social faux pas in the comments section of social media posts, YouTube videos, news articles, and forums.
Though we’ve had centuries of revolving lessons on an ever-evolving modern social etiquette, and for millennia ethics philosophers have debated how people should behave in all aspects of society, today it would seem we are lacking in any significant contributions for a much needed social skills training in cyberspace behavior.
Take the time to read the comments section of an obituary where someone died in a particularly shocking accident, homicide, or from suicide and you’ll find more than expressions of sympathy. There is a high probability that you’ll also find disrespect to the deceased or their family, unfounded and offensive conspiracy theories, tribalism between commenters, inflated egos on righteousness, hyperbole, hysteria and any number of other reactionary behaviors and expressed emotions. Some of the behavior is reminiscent of what you’d expect from children who have not yet learned proper social etiquette and, perhaps more importantly, self-awareness with emotional regulation.
It’s okay to feel confused, to feel angry, to feel scared, to feel threatened, to feel sad, all of these emotions are completely normal, especially for situations where someone’s death has been particularly violent or unexpected, but how we choose to experience or react to and express those emotions is critical for our own wellbeing and our ability to navigate social interactions and relationships effectively.
It’s never okay to be an internet troll and blurt out the first thing that pops into our heads, especially when we’re feeling very emotional, particularly extreme emotions like anger, as they blur our ability to rationally make decisions. Anxiety or nervousness, fear, and sadness are also strong emotions that can play a significant role in the words and phrases we choose to use and how we express them.
The false sense of anonymity we often feel online disconnects us from the consequences of the things we post or comment, especially in times of social and political turmoil. When in cyberspace, we dawn a delusional state of mind where we believe that we can vent our heightened emotional states freely without consequence and post angry or hysterical comments and then just scroll on to the next emotionally triggering post or simply close the browser window or smartphone app, and not have to acknowledge the very real human faces behind the other usernames and how our words may affect those people. Especially when those people are the friends and family of the deceased.
I would compare that level of disgust and discomfort to someone walking into a restaurant, dropping their pants, and taking a shit right on the floor and then walking right back out. The behavior is socially bizarre, spiteful, derogatory, and shameful for the person doing it and unhealthy and very disturbing for the people unfortunate enough to witness it. The vast majority of us would not commit such an act in public, yet people do this online every day and there are consequences for them and society because of it. Least of all it reveals how mentally unwell the perpetrator is, essentially an audacious and ineffective cry for help.
Unregulated emotional outbursts and ill-thought expressions are why many websites and software applications no longer have options for commentary or allow it to be turned off. The very fact that general audiences cannot be trusted enough to engage in socially acceptable commentary which meets most online community guidelines, has set a precedent for the establishment of online social skills training, something that in my opinion should be instituted in schools – beginning in the elementary level.
It’s true that online chat and forum moderators have been around since the late 1990s, but back then far fewer people were online and they generally assisted moderators with identifying and removing inappropriate content. Today, we seem to grant people some type of collective permission to share outrageous commentary and behavior, it’s essentially rewarded with attention that only serves to encourage even more bad conduct. Attention or fame is the modern social currency and the current value of volatile and controversial behavior is very high.
There was a time when we had a sense that what we posted online would be heavily scrutinized for betraying any social norms because back then cyberspace was all new territory, we relied heavily on the influences and infrastructure of standardized in-person social interactions. Perhaps the most concerning aspect of bad social behavior online is that it is no longer staying online. An emboldened and unfettered cyber-lifestyle seems to be encroaching on our real-world social interactions, particularly in the last ten years.
While there are many reasons why people are currently walking around on a hair-trigger and exploding at anyone who so much as looks at them the wrong way, I believe that the rise of social media use has dramatically increased bad social etiquette at public venues, transportation stations, and other heavily populated spaces. Respect seems to have gone the way of proper salutations and valedictions – a once finely crafted and elaborate custom in written communications. I’m certainly not the only one to notice, comment threads reliably showcase people trying to keep the peace and report inappropriate content, but I fear their struggle is futile unless we take online social behavior more seriously.
Ask any parent about pre-teen and adolescent bullying online and you’ll see I’m not alone in this sentiment. Simply put, much more needs to be done about how people conduct themselves online. Perhaps at the core of this issue is why people seem to have given up on the notion of respecting others as human beings with thoughts and emotions, and instead seem to prefer to view people online as objects for amusement and vitriol. For me, it speaks volumes to the state of mental health and the very concerning reality that many people are mentally unwell and not receiving the treatment (in whatever form) they very clearly and desperately need.
To learn about how to effectively practice empathy in social engagements, I recommend my past post How to Practice Empathy and Prevent Emotional Impotence.
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis, please access my immediate assistance resource page. A comprehensive listing of online and phone resources and services is also available.
Book Review: This Book Could Save Your Life
Posted on December 25, 2022 by Kฤphen
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This Book Could Save Your Life:
Breaking the Silence Around the Mental Health Emergency
It’s Christmas Day and I’ve been reading This Book Could Save Your Life, which I started the other day, it’s a very important book that should be in the hands of every family. I’ll tell you more about it in a minuteโฆ
I live with a mental health condition that causes me to have suicidal thoughts and behavior. My mental health struggles began at age 14, I became suicidal at age 16 and enacted a plan to take my life. I survived that experience, only to become suicidal again at age 19. Up to that point, almost no one knew these things were happening to me, and then someone at my job finally noticed and intervened and I got medical and mental health treatment. Unfortunately, I became suicidal again at age 22.
I have been in and out of treatment for my mental health condition for the last seventeen years. Sometimes systems of care and support have been effective, but often times they have failed. There are many reasons why I am still alive today. Medication and therapy have sometimes been helpful, but my condition has been rather treatment resistant. Friends, family, and sometimes even strangers have made a major positive impact, even when they thought their words or actions were only minor acts of kindness.
In the words of Nelson Mandela, “I’m not an optimistic person, I’m a prisoner of hope.” The hope that change is not only possible but absolute, has kept me going when everything and everyone else has failed. Not my therapist, my medication, not family, or my friends, not my fitness routine or my meditation practice, not even time in nature have been foolproof. When all else has failed, hope has kept me alive and half the time I’m not even sure what I’m hoping for, just anything different I suppose. Something new and different, doesn’t even have to be better.
According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, each day, about 130 Americans die by suicide, that’s about one person every 11 minutes. Of those, about 70% are men, and over half involve firearms. There are many factors that contribute to suicide and not every suicide is the result of the same circumstances.
Some suicides are the result of mental illness that is either untreated or that is being treated with a method that is ineffective, but actually not all suicides are related to mental illness. Some are the result of immense pressures such as bullying, or feelings of failure such as losing a job or relationship, feelings of isolation and loneliness, or from extreme grief due to losing a loved one, to only name a few.
While not every suicide is the result of mental illness, every suicide is tied to mental health. Let me repeat that: not every person has a mental illness, but every person has mental health.
No matter the cause of suicide, surveys show that more than 90% of Americans believe that it is preventable.
Prevention is challenging and it takes many elements to be effective. Everything from education and resources, to skilled intervention, mental health crisis services, effective treatment and medical care, systems of community support, and peer support all play an important role in maintaining mental wellness in the face of adversity, whether that adversity is a mental illness, bullying, financial issues, relationship problems, loneliness, grief, or any other contributing factor.
There are always warning signs prior to suicide, but the challenge with warning signs is that sometimes people go to great lengths to hide them by concealing their thoughts and emotions or physical activities, or those around them do not know what is or is not a warning sign. Not every person at risk of dying by suicide will exhibit the same warning signs either, which makes any kind of blanket statement about signs to look for somewhat unhelpful.
Age is another major factor. A 10 or 14-year-old’s life is drastically different than a 24 or 68-year-old’s. A child or young teen is more likely to be experiencing bullying or a mental illness in its very early stages, whereas a young adult or middle-aged person is more likely to be experiencing financial or relationship issues, social isolation, substance use and/or the symptoms of an untreated mental illness they’ve been battling for decades.
There are plenty of resources out there that can provide you with suggestions on some of the warning signs to look for, such as the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention or the National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Now back to the bookโฆ written by 22-year-old Ben West, the eldest of three brothers from rural Kent County in southern England, U.K., it tells the story of how he lost his younger brother, Sam, to suicide in January of 2018, when Sam was only 15 years old and Ben was age 17.
The book discusses their early life, alongside their youngest brother, Tom, who was only 13 at the time of Sam’s death, and what they experienced as Sam began to display symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as depression. Ben explains how he knew next-to-nothing about mental health as a teenager and reflects on how he wished mental health education would have been part of school curriculum.
As the book progresses, Ben retells what happened the night Sam took his own life in their family home and how that experience impacted Ben and his family as it happened and then later the ripple effects of that tragedy. It is a very raw telling of a horrific experience that has been lived and continues to be lived by so many families around the world.
What sets Ben’s book apart from many others is that he has been immensely active in mental health transformation, primarily in the United Kingdom. In fact, you may have heard of him or seen him before on the news, as he began speaking about what happened to his family and the tragic state of mental health services both inside the U.K. and around the world, which garnered him international attention. The Diana Award, a U.K. charity that recognizes young people for making change in the world, announced Ben as their 2019 Legacy Award recipient.
Ben has spent the last 4 years campaigning hard to make real and positive changes to mental health services, from improvements to the U.K. National Health Service and to support systems within schools. His proximity to and involvement in these causes put him in close quarters with public figures and politicians, including an encounter with the then U.K. Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
Ben speaks both loudly and intelligently about the subject of mental health, at a time when we need such voices more than ever. While he may be British, I feel that this book is an asset to any family, regardless of whether you’re British or American. It is a reminder that understanding mental health is incredibly important, not just for your own sake but for your family’s.
It’s also a reminder that the warning signs for suicide may not be so obvious and that they may be more subtle than you may expect. It’s also a testament to the fact that both U.K. and U.S. mental health services are lacking and need our attention and support both financially and politically to actually be effective.
And perhaps most of all, the book is an ode to personal resiliency in the face of great tragedy. No one would have blamed Ben for recoiling inside himself and never again speaking of his brother’s death or the mental illness that led to it, or the broken system that failed them. He could have just mucked on with his life, undoubtedly grief-stricken but otherwise unmoved to speak his painful truth to the world and fight for the wellbeing of others and their families.
The least anyone could do in the struggle against the festering and overwhelming epidemic of ineffective mental health systems of care and treatment, and the dimly lit understanding of what to do when faced with the need to seek such services for yourself or someone you care for, is to read this book and perhaps you will discover the inspiration to find your own voice and use it to make these systems and processes better.
Ben’s parents have established a charity in Sam’s honor, The Sam West Foundation, dedicated to connecting those in need to mental health resources and services.
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis, please access myย immediate assistanceย resource page.ย A comprehensive listing ofย online and phone resources and servicesย is also available.
A Safe Place to Call Home: The Childhood Trauma of Growing Up LGBTQ+ in Small-Town America
Posted on October 11, 2022 by Kฤphen
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I have lived in Osage County, Missouri my whole life, my family has done so for generations. Many, if not most, of the people who live here would tell you that they feel like they can be themselves, live the life they want, that they have a sense of belonging and support, and see this whole county as their close-knit community. But I have never felt that way.
Growing up here I tried to appear as though I fit into this place and among these people, but inside I never felt that way. I tried to mimic the behaviors I saw, repeat the words I heard, attempting to convince others and shamefully myself that I was at home here. But Osage County has never felt like home to me because I never felt as though I could safely be me.
Instead my childhood was filled with overwhelming fear and crushing anxiety, I grew up feeling an ever present paranoia, like I was in danger all day and every day, except for the moments that I was alone. Alone, I could be me, I could think and feel without external judgement, without the risk of being discovered and ostracized, I could feel safe. I learned very young that people were mean and hateful and I came to the conclusion that this equated adulthood.
Even in the safety of isolation, I was not entirely free. As a kid, I listened and observed the adults around me, including my parents, other family members, teachers, church and community members, paying attention to the things they said and the things they did. Learning their opinions and beliefs and measuring myself against those ideals and coming to the understanding that I was not good enough, that I was not good at all. They taught me to hate myself, to feel shame and guilt for things beyond my ability to ever control or change.
Eleven-year-old me began to question his sexuality when puberty struck, without even knowing what the word sexuality meant and at that point I probably never even heard the word before. That young version of me had thoughts and feelings he could not explain nor fully understand, but he had heard adults around him describe such thoughts and feelings as bad, in both a religious context and in a general social one. Building up trauma that would one day break down the door to his mind, leading to a lifetime of mental illness.
I was only a child and yet I understood that if anyone knew that I was having these uncontrollable thoughts and feelings that I would be an outcast, and as a child you fear greatly the process and the consequences of abandonment and rejection, both real and imagined. A child’s imagination is perhaps the most destructive, but the real is no less painful to endure.
I want you to take the time to imagine this if you cannot personally relate to it. Think about when you were 11 years old, or look around you at your kids or kids in your family or school or community. Consider what it might be like to be a child with a massive secret that if the adults or even other kids around him found out, his external life would be the same kind of hell his internal life has been. Imagine the burden, the weight on that kid’s shoulders, the fear and the anxiety. Some of the kids you know right now are experiencing this trauma, and believe you me it is trauma.
By age 13, I was no longer questioning my sexuality, I knew what the thoughts and feelings I was having meant, even if I didn’t know a thing about the science or psychology of human sexuality. I knew what was happening with my mind and body, I knew what it meant when my heart fluttered when I talked to another boy I liked, I knew what it meant when I wanted another boy’s attention, to be more than just his best friend, and the intense jealousy I felt when he spent recess with someone else.
I knew what it meant when I wondered what it would be like to kiss another boy, to hug another boy. I knew what it meant when I marveled at another boy’s body and his athletic ability, or his humor, or the way it felt when he so much as touched me on the arm. I knew what it meant to deeply yearn to confide in him, trust in him, to protect him, and the desire to explore the physical changes that were happening to us both as we experienced that strange thing called puberty.
I was afraid and ashamed of all of it. I learned to hate these thoughts and feelings. In time I grew to hate other people who harbored the very same thoughts and feelings I had, and eventually I hated myself so much that I thought it was better that I kill myself than fall in love with another boy. All because of the words and actions of the adults around me who indirectly taught me that such thoughts and feelings were to be repressed and concealed because they were wrong, evil, sick, disgusting, among a myriad of other negatives.
When adults look at kids and say or think that they don’t know or experience things that adults do, those adults are only being dishonest with themselves and have either forgotten their own childhood or somehow made it through that time in their life blissfully unaware of themselves and their experiences. Kids may not fully understand what’s happening to them or what they are experiencing in their mind, but they are far more aware than many adults are willing to accept.
Throughout adolescence and young adulthood I was fully aware that Osage County was not an LGBTQ+ friendly place and that the people who used phrases like “be kind to others” really only meant “be kind to others like us.” I knew it meant that if you were different you were on the outside of this so-called community, and quite frankly it isn’t hard to not fit into their expected mold. If you’re not heterosexual, religiously Catholic/Christian, or politically Republican, you are likely a minority here. I certainly do not represent any of those three classifications and have not for many years.
Being a minority means you are on the outskirts of a community. It means that the resources, services, and even experiences that are readily available to others are either less available to you or you are discouraged from accessing them. Osage County has never been a welcoming place for people who are different, at least not during my lifetime.
When I came out in 2008, people literally told me that I should leave because I won’t be accepted here. I had people who were my “friends” that not only backed away from me but also ceased all communication with me, some even attacked and blocked me on social media because their Christian beliefs required them to view me as sinful, corrupt, and as a disease that needed to be purged from their life.
Childhood trauma is often a doorway for mental health conditions and substance use disorders to arise in teens and young adults, sometimes leading to suicide. Mental health conditions, substance use, and suicidality are prevalent enough in the general population, but they are even more common in the LGBTQ+ population for the reasons I’ve described throughout this writing.
Our attitudes, behaviors, and choices are powerfully influential. Oftentimes we are communicating to or influencing kids without even realizing it if we do not practice mindfulness and self-awareness. If adults do not want to teach judgement and hate to children, then adults need to stop practicing judgement and hate.
You can learn more about my personal journey with sexuality in my article titled, A Journey Called Hope. Other articles of similar interest are as follows:
If you or someone you know is an LGBTQ+ youth in need of resources and crisis services please reach out to the The Trevor Project, the worldโs largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization dedicated to the mental and emotional wellbeing of LGBTQ+ youth. Additional resources can be accessed through the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention or by utilizing the below links.
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis, please access my immediate assistance resource page. A comprehensive listing of online and phone resources and services is also available.
20 Years Later
Posted on September 8, 2022 by Kฤphen
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20 Years Later:
A Letter to a Lost Teenager
There is so much I wish that I could have told you, so much that I wish I could have done for you. If only I could travel through time to 2002 and be a part of your life, maybe somehow things could have been different for you. Instead I am forced to write a letter to a ghost, a person that no longer exists as anything more than a memory, a whisper in the silence, an echo in the places you used to wander.
I thought about making this letter witty and fun, the type that would make a person laugh and feel warm and fuzzy. But let’s be honest, you wouldn’t have been able to relate to warm and fuzzy. The only thing you knew was a withering vitality, like a neglected plant yearning for water. The language in your head was one of coldness, of a jagged sort, brittle and painful. A kind of smothering darkness, a foggy disillusionment for the dawning years of young adulthood that were still just a subtle glow on the far horizon of your life.
I look in your eyes and I see the pain you were feeling. I’d like to believe that if I had been there with you as someone you knew walking through the halls of your high school, or maybe someone sitting next to you in your classrooms, that I would see it, that I would see the hurt in your eyes, the confusion, the breaking from reality, the birthing of madness. That I would have seen your fear of being noticed and yet quite contradictorily your deep yearning to be known.
I have to hand it to you, your attempts to hide it were worthy of commendation. How anyone could continue to function in your blooming delirium while the walls were caving in, as if everything was fine, was quite frankly astonishing. The amount of pressure, not just the external social pressure, but the internal pressure, all threatening to make you implode and explode simultaneously, the burden was tremendous. Your ability to juggle all of these aspects of your life was remarkable, but that whisp of desperation you felt, that smoldering sensation, that sinking feeling, I’m sorry to say eventually surpassed even your ability to control and hide, and in time it over took you.
Every so often I pull out your poetry and I read through the words that you left behind for me so long ago, some kind of vain attempt to bring you back among the living. Whether or not you knew it in your 16-year-old mind, you were recording and sending me messages from across time and space, and while I cannot honestly say that I understand the meaning in all of them, in most of them the hidden truth reveals itself in a way that you were always too afraid to do with your voice. Like blood that drips from an open wound, the off-white pages were the receptacle of the fears, the secrets, and the yearning, all bleeding out from within you, from all your broken places, saturating and staining the paper.
Many of your poems and prose were about feeling trapped, imprisoned by both yourself and forces outside of you, such as in this piece:
Reading through the words you left behind it becomes pretty clear that this is how you survived. It would have been impossible for you to hold all of it in, all of the anxiety, the stress, the shame, guilt, regret, hate, confusion, distrust, fear, anger, desire, hurt, and all the other emotions you were experiencing. You refrained from telling others, you avoided most social interactions, and instead you turned to that pen and notepad, and as if through some type of magical spell you opened a portal into yourself and out poured the painful thoughts and feelings that were swelling up inside of you.
You had already convinced yourself years earlier that people wouldn’t understand you if you had even been able to speak the words to describe what was happening inside you. This ink-stained artwork was all that you had, the only way you could get the pain out of your head, a short-lived moment of relief, like the sun breaking between the storm clouds relentlessly thundering inside your mind, just before plunging you back into the abyss that left you panicked and withdrawn.
All these years later your courage still inspires me. You thought yourself broken and incapable of being repaired, you felt as though pieces of you had been stolen away and scattered beyond your reach, but even in the dizzying array of troubles within your mind there remained this little flickering light of hope. As small and futile as it may have seemed to you at the time, that little glimmer of hope empowered you to carry on, even on the darkest nights that you or I have ever known.
It was in this myriad of emotional and mental states that you came to question everything that you had been told, everything that you had ever believed to be true about yourself and about life. It wasn’t enough that your perception of self was shattered, so too did your perception of everything outside of you. No one would have blamed you if you had laid there and given in to the overwhelming loss of identity and purpose, but you didn’t do that. You got up and you went searching for answers, searching for what it meant to be you, what it meant to be alive in the world and why so much of it resulted in suffering.
What came after was a sundering and a surrendering, a letting go of what you had always clung to for safety, and a desperate wading into troubled waters that grew ever deeper the further you traveled towards the other shore far into the distance. Cast adrift into the unknown, you felt more alone than you had ever been in your young life, afraid and distraught you paddled feverishly, trying to keep your head above the surface, afraid of the dark below you that harbored everything you wanted to pretend didn’t exist. Beneath those depths was a loss of innocence and a reckoning that was unavoidable.
You swam for as long as you could, you tried so very hard to reach the refuge of the other shore, but the waters took you and you slipped beneath the surface and into the cold, from which you would never return. By the time the sun breached across the horizon, what emerged from the depths was not you, it was something else entirely. You, my youthful innocence, died down there and I arose into being, forever changed by the experience.
Sometimes I think I can hear your murmurs or whispers, your dreams echoing inside of me, remnants of hope for what once was but that can never be again. I am so very sorry for the tragedy that befell you, but without your unwanted sacrifice I would have never stood upon the other shore. Though still besieged by the same darkness that haunted you, your passing has allowed me to walk through the golden door and onto the middle path beyond. A path toward the truth behind the veil of illusionary permanence, toward the compassion at the end of the cycle of suffering, and toward the wisdom of untethering from the notion of self.
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis, please access my immediate assistance resource page. A comprehensive listing of online and phone resources and services is also available.
Seeking Help for Depression
Posted on September 7, 2022 by Kฤphen
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For many teens and adults who are facing sadness or are feeling down about a recent event or disappointing experience, or who may not be feeling as optimistic about life as they used to, or who are perhaps feeling heartache over an ended relationship or friendship or even undergoing grief from loss, the practice of self-care can be very beneficial and there are a wide variety of actions through this practice that can be taken to help them get through that low point in an otherwise healthy mindset.
But for those feeling moderate to severe depression, which is a diagnosable and treatable mental health condition, many self-care activities or suggestions are not enough to surmount the overwhelming symptoms they may be experiencing. For most people facing this level of uphill battle, professional mental health services may be necessary. They were for me.
When someone has some type of accidental fall and they are feeling or showing signs of a broken arm, would you tell them to go outside and get some sunshine, go for a brisk walk, pick up a new hobby, spend money to spoil themselves, or listen and sing along to their favorite song to feel better? No, of course not, you would take them to a medical professional, perhaps with persuasion if they are initially reluctant.
Yet in mental health we do exactly the opposite of what we should do. We avoid and downplay, we pretend like it’s not happening, we keep it a secret, we allow ourselves to be silenced due to shame and guilt, and we refuse to get help in the unrealistic belief that it will magically go away on its own. But it won’t because mental health conditions don’t work like that. You can’t grow out of it because it’s not a life phase, you cannot just “get over it” because it’s not a perspective or chosen state of mind.
While the causes of moderate to severe depression are still being researched and debated and the question of whether or not it is a chemical imbalance or something else entirely remains unanswered, we do know that it’s more than feeling like you’re in a funk. There are both psychological and physical health consequences to having untreated moderate to severe depression, especially in the long-term.
More than likely there are many contributing factors beyond a chemical imbalance or malfunctioning neurons, including such factors as untreated trauma and life challenges related to finances, family, social pressures, internally and externally induced stress and anxiety, unhealthy coping mechanisms like substance use, or the symptoms of another untreated or undiagnosed mental health condition like PTSD and/or a co-occurring substance use disorder.
For cases of moderate to severe depression, I urge people to reach out to a professional mental health services provider, whether that’s directly to a counselor or indirectly through a conversation with a primary care medical provider who can connect someone to mental health services.
As a certified peer specialist and as someone with lived experience with bipolar disorder which has interrupted and interfered with my life for the past 23 years, I want to tell you that there is no shame in seeking help. We seek medical assistance for physical ailments, so it makes sense to seek assistance for mental ailments as well.
As someone who has gone through multiple counselors and therapists, and a psychiatrist, I know that not every person you reach out to can be helpful or even competent. To be honest, some doctors, counselors and therapists are not effective at their jobs, some should even have their licenses revoked. If you don’t like your mental health provider, leave them and get another one! With the rise of telehealth and online providers we are no longer bound by our physical locations when it comes to seeking help.
There are many different kinds of counselors and therapists with a wide range of specialties who are trained in different types of therapy or treatment modalities. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Psychotherapy (talk therapy), and support groups, are just some of the most common types of therapy but there are so many other types that are specific to certain situations or specific needs or goals.
Just because someone is young does not mean they are immune to developing mental health conditions, in fact quite the opposite is true. Youth are at the greatest risk because most symptoms of mental health conditions develop at the onset of puberty or well into the 20’s. Youth within the age range of 10 to 24 years should be regularly evaluated for the signs and symptoms of mental health conditions. The earlier it can be diagnosed the more we can prevent years of unnecessary suffering.
My mental health struggles started when I was 14 years old, suicidality started at age 16, hospitalization happened at age 19, and another suicidal episode happened at age 22. My hospitalization at age 19 occurred just a few months after I had dropped out of college and had started working a full-time job. I was encouraged by a coworker to self-admit into a local hospital’s inpatient behavioral health ward after an uncharacteristic emotional outburst at work and my disclosure that I was having suicidal thoughts.
A lot had led up to that moment. My previous career goal had recently been crushed, I had hated college and withdrew my enrollment, I was battling with self-acceptance, struggling with a then undiagnosed and consequently untreated mental health condition, and unaddressed childhood trauma.
Life was hell for me at the time and I had already been suicidal for 3 years prior to that intervention. I was scared and confused but knew that if I didn’t accept external help that I would take my own life because I saw my life and my pain as one synonymous struggle. In my overwhelmed mind I convinced myself that ending my life would end my pain. It’s not that I wanted to die, I just didn’t want to hurt anymore and I was so exhausted from the emotional rollercoaster of thinking of ways to end my life/pain. Once I arrived at the hospital and filled out the paperwork, I was admitted for a mandatory 72-hour hold and while it didn’t magically fix everything, the experience really was a positive turning point for me.
As someone who has been involved in behavioral health personally and professionally for years, I know that not everyone supports inpatient behavioral health ward stays, primarily due to the cost, and that concern is absolutely valid, especially for those without health insurance. Thankfully, today many other crisis resources and services are available, some of them cost-free and often times a mental health crisis can be addressed without a hospital stay through such options as mental health and substance use crisis hotlines or lifelines and affiliated mobile response teams. All things I wish had been available to me when I was a teenager and young adult.
I have been in and out of therapy for decades, I have been hospitalized for suicidal behavior, have had one abandoned suicide attempt, I have received multiple diagnoses from a psychiatrist and physicians, and have been prescribed nearly a dozen different antidepressants and mood stabilizers throughout that time.
BUT I have also had a long career working full-time with only a few interruptions due to my mental health condition, I also live financially independent. My point in telling you this is that recovery and a life beyond a mental health condition is possible. My life has been interrupted but not brought to an end. Depression as a symptom of my bipolar disorder is a hiccup in the grander scheme of my life, and while it comes back from time to time, it’s just an interval. You too can get through depression if you take care of yourself and get professional treatment when you need it.
Above all else, know that there is hope and help, never be ashamed to seek help for mental health issues, doing so is literally no different than seeking help for physical health issues. There are many crisis lifelines and helplines available that didn’t exist all those years ago when I needed help. They are free, confidential, and the crisis counselors staffed for these lines have extensive training to respond to any mental health crisis.
The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline of 988 is accessible to anyone in the U.S. for call or text. They can provide assistance during a mental health crisis, such as when someone is having suicidal thoughts.
The Crisis Text Line, if you are in the U.S. or in Canada, can be reached by texting the word HELLO to the telephone number 741741 or if you live in the U.K. the telephone number is 85258 or if you live in Ireland the number is 50808. They can provide assistance with any kind of mental or emotional distress, including thoughts of suicide.
The Military/Veterans Crisis Line in the U.S. can also be reached by calling the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 and then pressing the extension number 1 when prompted, or if you send a text to 988 just let them know in your message that you are a current member of the military or are a veteran. You can also text the alternate number 838255.
For members of the LGBTQ+ there is The Trevor Project. You can call their lifeline at 1-866-488-7386 or you may text their lifeline at 678678. They have other online resources such as a private social network and online chat options, all can be accessed at their website hyperlinked above.
All of the above listed crisis and helplines will connect you with trained adult crisis counselors, and are available 24 / 7 / 365 and have various language options available. They can also provide you with resources and connect you with local mental health services where you live. You can contact them about your own struggle or you can contact them on behalf of a family member or friend who may be struggling.
For situations specifically involving substance use in the United States, the National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357 can provide recovery treatment referral options and other helpful information. For situations resulting from a human-caused or natural disaster, the U.S. government established the Disaster Distress Helpline at 1-800-985-5990 to call and 66746 to text in order to receive crisis counseling and support for those impacted emotionally by such disasters.
The Teen Line is an option for teenagers wanting to speak with someone their own age. They can be reached by phone call at 1-800-852-8336 during the hours of 6 PM – 10 PM PST (9 PM – 1 AM EST) every night, they can also be reached by texting the word TEEN to 839863 between the hours of 6 PM – 9 PM PST (9 PM – 12 AM EST). Phone calls and texts are confidential, except in emergency situations. The line is operated by high school teens volunteering their time to support their fellow teens and it is a crisis line accredited by the American Association of Suicidology, a well-known organization in the behavioral health industry. The line is operated by professionally-trained teenage volunteers based in Los Angeles, California. Despite their headquarters in California more than 70% of their incoming phone calls and texts actually come from outside the state and those they support are spread across the United States.
Workplace Mental Health
Posted on September 1, 2022 by Kฤphen
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According to the American Psychiatric Association Foundation, employees with depression miss on average 31.4 days per year and an additional 27.9 days of being unproductive when they report for work and are unable to focus due to the symptoms of depression.
Various studies show that 30% โ 50% of all adults in the U.S. will experience mental health issues at some point in their lifetime. Itโs estimated that 20 million Americans currently have a substance use disorder and that 7.9 million have mental health issues and a substance use disorder such as alcohol and drug addiction.
According to the World Health Organization, depression and anxiety alone, globally costs one trillion per year in lost productivity. This number is expected to reach six trillion by 2036. Globally, more than 300 million people (18% of which are in the U.S.) suffer from depression, many of which have some form of anxiety.
Negative work environments can lead to physical and mental health issues, substance abuse, absenteeism, and financial losses due to lost productivity.
The World Economic Forum proposed five responses to these issues:
Cost-benefit analysis research on strategies to address mental health, concludes net benefits. Every dollar put into enhanced treatment for common mental disorders such as anxiety, results in a return of four dollars.
The Anxiety and Depression Association of America reports that only 36.9% of those who suffer from anxiety ever seek treatment.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) conducted a national U.S. survey that was published in 2014, revealing that anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders are the most common mental health issues.
In an August 2013 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and 125 other contributors, titled The State of U.S. Health, 1990-2010: Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factors, neuropsychiatric disorders are the leading cause of disability in the United States.
The World Health Organization has declared depression the leading single cause of disability globally, and the National Institute of Mental Health has declared this single disorder the leading cause of disability in Americans aged 15 โ 44 years.
According to a study published in February 2015 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, employees with major depressive disorder costs the U.S. economy more than $200 billion each year, and 50% of those costs are incurred on the employer. That exceeds the total economic costs of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and obesity.
The Depression and Anxiety Journal of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (DAJ/ADAA) reported in 2010 that 1/3 of the costs incurred by employers from employees with these types of mental health issues are a direct result of lost productivity. In 2010, the DAJ of the ADAA published another study showing that reduced productivity of depressed employees had capital costs of $2 billion per month in the U.S.
More than 50% of those suffering from moderate depression and 40% of those suffering from severe depression, never seek treatment.
According to three separate studies, there is a direct connection between suffering from physical illness and mental illness, in that one often leads to the other, what is known as comorbidity or multi-morbidity (British Medical Journal BMJ Sept. 2012; Journal of American Medical Association โ Psychiatry Oct. 2007; The Kingโs Fund Think Tank 2012).
This comorbidity doubles or even triples the costs of treatment according to a 2014 report by the American Psychiatric Association in conjunction with Milliman Inc.
A study published in the Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience (2007), those suffering from depression were twice as likely to develop coronary artery disease or experience a stroke, and were four times more likely to die within six months after a heart attack.
Former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy M.D., M.Sc., wrote in the Harvard Business Review (Sept. 2017), โOur understanding of Biology, psychology, and the workplace calls for companies to make fostering social connections a strategic priority.โ
Dr. Murthy laid out the case for addressing workplace loneliness, an often overlooked but equally important factor in workplace mental health, by making these three points:
Dr. Murthy recommends the following strategies to create workplace social connections:
For more than a decade I found myself at work witnessing, hearing about, or personally experiencing behavioral health challenges that were not effectively handled or addressed by management staff or by the employer as a whole. Not because no one cared, but because people were woefully unprepared, untrained, and uneducated on best practices.
Behavioral health is a term that encapsulates both mental health conditions and substance use disorders. For years, I have expressed my concerns regarding how behavioral health in the workplace has been both viewed and treated, and for years I have been either ignored or not taken seriously. In 2018, I finally found myself in a position where my voice had at least a minimal opportunity to be heard by leadership and for the next few years I pushed for change.
While the majority of my proposals were not considered (including the most important one), some of the smaller efforts were approved and we were at least able to bring some degree of educational opportunities about behavioral health to our employees. One of these included a partnership with the a local university’s psychology department.
Leadership’s unwillingness to take my concerns regarding behavioral health in the workplace seriously and their lack of earnest desire to consider my other proposals for positive change, eventually added to the list of reasons I resigned. This mindset of not settling for a workplace that doesn’t take mental health seriously is something that I am not alone in. These past few years have shown that employees are fed-up with employers who don’t care about their mental health and don’t provide them with the time, resources, and support needed to fend off burnout and other common workplace mental health issues.
Typically the barrier preventing positive change in the workplace for behavioral health challenges is not caused by the employees, but by the employer and their leadership team, who for any number of reasons tends to avoid the topic. This avoidance allows people to continue to suffer, generally in silence, to the point that they leave, and once word gets out that the employer is not a safe and supportive place to work, other people will not want to apply for their job openings.
From employees struggling with substance use disorders or mental health conditions, to supervisory and management staff being overwhelmed by employees struggling with these types of behavioral health challenges, there has been and continues to be a need for training and education, as well as policy and procedure change in the workplace.
Both private and public companies have the opportunity to make fundamental changes to how behavioral health challenges are addressed in their workplace and an opportunity to make a positive change in our society for those who struggle with these challenges and those who care for them.
I support any initiative taking steps to make these improvements and urge employers to do more for employees with substance use challenges and mental health conditions. There are programs and initiatives already established for support in the workplace and more than likely employer’s already have employees qualified and willing to lead any such initiative if they’d just be given the chance to make a positive change through education, training, policy and procedure transformation!
Now is always the time to advocate for mental health changes in the workplace, not just for those currently employed but also for those who may be prospective employment candidates. There are public and private organizations offering programs to support mental health in the workplace, and also state and federal grants, tax credits, tax deductions, and other financial incentives for businesses that employ candidates with mental health conditions, mental disabilities, or who are in recovery from substance use disorders.
Here are some general recommended best practices for organizations and management staff to get started on supporting mental health in the workplace. This list is by no means all inclusive nor in any great detail, it should be considered a starting point.
The bottom line is that employees are an investment, they are the single most valuable and important asset to an employer and their mental health needs to be recognized as a matter of great concern. If a policy or practice is not to the benefit of employee mental health then it needs to be seriously scrutinized and reconsidered, which means that there must always be contingency plans set in place for modifying or amending any process, procedure, or practice to reduce the negative impacts on employees. Failure to do so reflects poorly on the employer and their leadership, for any organization ill-equipped to care for its employees is ill-equipped to provide services to its customers.
You will find research and data supporting the need for these types of changes via the following private and public organizations:
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis, please access my immediate assistance resource page. A comprehensive listing of online and phone resources and services is also available.
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