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Soren, we are officially in the second half of season one of the Inspired Insights podcast.
Hooray!
I have to say, I just, when I think about this experience of doing this with you, I
just smile.
What our listeners might not know is that we've talked about this for about two years.
That's true.
Yeah, yeah.
And we're really, we're starting to hit our stride now.
We're hitting our stride.
So for today's episode, we wanted to really talk about some of the unique differences
of our experiences with mental health and wellness from your experience as the receiver
of mental health services and my experiences as the deliverer, the deliverer of mental
health services.
Yeah.
I think that this will be a super interesting parallel because I think that providers and
patients are frustrated right now with the system that we have to address mental health
crisis.
And I think by only through a cooperation of caretakers and those that are being cared
for can we create like a better industry to treat some of these issues.
So why don't you start it off?
Well, I'm thinking about part of what makes you you is your openness today, maybe not
so much in the past, but your openness today of sharing your experience.
Yeah, yeah.
And I know I've leaned on you a lot the last year to help with some projects I was involved
with and you've got some projects coming up where you and even your mom are going to be
in a position of influence to share your experiences from a child and parent perspective on what
it felt like, what worked, what didn't work when you were experiencing your times of crisis.
Yeah.
I totally agree.
My mother and I have talked a lot about what we wish would have happened and what we think
was really helpful when interacting with the mental health industry.
And obviously, by the time I was going to the ER and going to inpatient stuff like that,
I was already in the weeds of it.
And I like I don't feel like the treatment that I received was tailored or effective.
Yeah, right.
You're very open about that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So by way of a little bit of background for our listeners and viewers who might not know
what the behavioral health system of our state or country looks like, what I will share is
that, generally speaking, right, wrong, or indifferent, when an individual of any age
is experiencing an acute crisis at risk of harming themselves or somebody else, the general
solution is get to your local emergency department.
There are certainly areas of our country where they have maybe access to a behavioral health
ER or emergency room or emergency department.
Those are few and far between.
And so in our state here in Maine and across the country, any given day, there are four
year olds to 40 year olds to 80 year olds sitting in an emergency department next to
accident victims next to people who are actively in an overdose situation waiting for something
in terms of an intervention.
I was like, when I went to the, well, I went to the ER on numerous occasions, but when
I went to the ER for the second time after attempting, but like, not really, it was mostly
just a very serious set of lacerations and strong mental health difficulties.
I was put in a glass box, monitored.
Literally.
And I sat there doing nothing with no active therapy, well-being treated like an alien,
like a prisoner that couldn't be trusted at all with anything for three days until I even
heard word of where I was going to be going for inpatient.
And my inpatient experience, I felt much the same.
I didn't feel like it.
I was attempting, they were attempting to help me, although they were.
I felt like I was being put into a prison because I'd misbehaved.
Yeah.
It felt punitive.
Yeah.
And I think it's safe to say in the behavioral health community and with my colleagues, universally
we would share that the emergency room, the emergency department is the absolute worst
place to put an individual of any age who's in an acute crisis, in an acute behavioral
health crisis.
We all agree.
The providers that work at the emergency departments would agree.
It is not conducive to healing.
It's not therapeutic.
And yet for decades, that's the only solution we've had.
Well it's just like the norm.
It's ingrained itself, not as like a solution, but a constant.
It's like the go between, between treatment.
Especially for like, the emergency room is the reaction to acute situations.
And for acute situations, you need immediate response.
But now we have a backup in the mental health system that I experienced firsthand where
we have like tens of patients, at least in Bangor, like a very quite small town, tens
of patients like from youth.
Like I had a seven year old across me in the hallway, across from me in the hallway, to
like elderly patients just sitting in an emergency room for days.
Who are physically healthy, but are meeting criteria for a higher level of care that prevents
them from being able to go home safely.
And there's no place else to go.
So when you say you were there for three days, like I just want to hit pause on that.
And for our folks listening, imagine spending three days without a drop of privacy, multiple
changes of shift, working with multiple provider of every type with nothing to do.
Well, what it did was when I first admitted into the emergency room, I had just gone through
a very extreme experience.
Like it was a breaking point for me.
I was like, I can't do this anymore.
I need something to happen.
And I was very willing and open.
And I've talked to my mother about this.
I was very willing and open to receive treatment.
You finally were at a point where I was ready to do something and I didn't want to do something
previously.
And then I sat in the emergency room for a day.
I sat with open, oozing wounds for seven hours sitting in a bed.
And then I sat for another day and I started to get fatigued and I didn't want to be in
there anymore.
Because they had given me antipsychotics so I was feeling like brain dead and like nothing
was happening.
And then by like day two, I was like, I just want to leave here.
Like I am so done with whatever this is.
I'll do anything to leave here.
And then my mom and my parents were like, you have to go to inpatient.
And everybody who had evaled me said I had to go to inpatient.
But I was like, Jesus Christ, no.
And it got to the point where I was stuck in with a pink slip.
Which would mean going to the hospital against your will.
Yeah, yeah.
Going to inpatient against my will.
Because I had been like sitting in a glass chamber watching other people in a mental
health crisis around me.
Like it was hellish, I'd say.
And it made me so averse to treatment.
I was like, oh, if this is what treatment looks like, I want nothing to do with it.
Yeah.
Well, we often use the term behavioral health crisis.
Like we've said it already in this episode that our country is in a behavioral health
crisis.
I think when people hear that, they think we're only talking about the behavioral health
needs.
Like how many people need services.
When I say that our country has a behavioral health crisis, I'm as much talking about the
demand for services as I am the absence of effective interventions, effective levels
of care that are going to meet the patient, the client, the person experiencing the struggle,
where they need to be met.
Yeah.
I think like what's something specific to like mental illness is, or rather mental health
crises, is that it is so tailored to the individual.
In order to help someone, you need a very like niche situation specific to them.
And it needs to be like a community connection thing.
Yeah.
Whereas like the clinical setting, at least that I engaged with right now, there was no
connection.
Yeah.
There was no engagement.
And it didn't feel individualized.
It felt emotionless.
It felt like I was already feeling like a number and I was going to end my life and
just be a number.
And I was feeling very like nihilistic.
And then I entered the emergency room and I was shown in real life that I was just a
number.
Yeah.
Oh, that breaks my heart.
I was so empty.
Yeah.
It breaks my heart and I know it's so common.
Like it's a shared...
It's such a shared experience of people of any age.
You ask anybody who's been to an emergency department due to a behavioral health crisis,
nobody raves about like any part of that experience.
I would love to see the day that someone is like, oh my goodness, my experience in the
emergency department.
Yeah.
Beautiful.
And I'm just going to throw this out there and you're welcome to bat it right back at
me.
For some, maybe not you, but for some as truly awful as that experience, as punitive as that
experience felt, I wonder if for some they stayed alive.
Yeah.
If the only thing, if the only benefit that came from that is they're alive today.
Like I don't necessarily, I'm not going to say that we can't do better because we have
to do better than what we are doing today, now.
And if the end result of that experience is that person is still here today, there's a
part of me going like, all right, I'll take it.
In the absence of anything else, it could be worse.
I agree.
And I know people and I've met other youth that have been in such a, like I was in such
a high level of crisis that if I hadn't been in the emergency room, yeah, I probably would
have attempted again within like two to three days.
Yeah.
That's so insightful of you though to be able to say that now.
Yeah.
Well, like I understand the value of that and I understand that like, yes, sometimes
we just need to put people in a stasis chamber, but like you can be productive with it.
Yeah.
Humane.
Yeah.
And I think often what I have seen, and I'm curious if you would agree, what I have often
seen is in times of crisis, behavioral health, especially crisis, we seem to lose the humanity
of the folks that we're working with.
And I think that's kind of what you were saying when you were saying you felt reduced to a
number.
Yeah.
Your humanity was removed and you were literally the patient bracelet number.
Yeah.
I was.
Yeah.
This is just my data.
Yeah.
I, you know, I, um, for folks that have not been in that experience, I, you know, I don't
wish it on anyone.
And as you were referencing in the absence of another thing, if that is, if that is the
best and only solution we have today, oh, I'm, I'm cautious to not get too much.
Yeah.
Well, there's like, there's a fine line between burning a system down and changing and rebuilding
a system.
Right.
And like, I feel like our entire health field right now has gotten so necessarily corrupted,
corrupted, but like bloated and inefficient.
And it is not serving patients.
Yeah.
So if we attempt to augment that, then it might disrupt the system and that's like,
people will die if the system is disrupted.
True.
Right.
And it creates even more inefficiencies.
True.
So it's really, it's a very tenuous situation between trying to change something that is
essential so that we can make it better and save more lives and trying to avoid ending
more lives today as we change it.
Yeah.
And we don't have like a maintenance break for a hospital.
You just can't.
Right.
Because there are, there is no pause.
Yeah.
That's, yeah, that's super insightful.
You know, and as a provider, I for decades have, have sat with families in tears describing
their emergency room experience, which sounds very similar to the experience you just described.
And I've sat with them in that, in that pain.
And I've then heard for some, the ability to say, but my kid is still here.
Yeah.
So I, I agree with you.
I love how you said that, that some systems might need a burn down, but some systems we
can't afford to burn.
How do we change the foundation?
How do we change and redo the scaffolding around the building while it's still actively
doing what it's doing?
I don't know the answer to that.
Well, I don't, I don't even feel like I'm qualified to speak on that because I'm not
a mental health professional.
I just have my own experience and like the experience of my friends.
Yes.
And I think world, according to Chris, the more we listen to folks who have the lived
experience, the more we allow folks who have experienced our care to help inform how we
do things differently or maybe better.
Yeah.
How powerful is that?
Like, I think healthcare, traditionally speaking has been a system where we have silenced the
voices, the perspectives of the end user of the service because we are too busy valuing
the education and the advanced degrees of the people who are delivering the service.
Yeah.
I think we've got to get exactly what this podcast episode is intending to do.
Your experience, my experience, your parents experience at the same table to talk about
how do we do this better?
Yeah.
Well, we need to create like a round table of patient and providers so that we can cooperate
to create a better system.
Yeah.
And be willing, speaking from the provider perspective, be willing to hear feedback,
be willing to hear, be open to hearing that what you did kept me alive and there's value
obviously there.
Yeah.
And I don't feel like I was seen as a human while I was there.
Yeah.
Well, like I remember thinking like I was to some extent traumatized and reinvigorated
in my like self-destructive ways.
Through that experience.
Oh wow.
Because like, especially in my inpatient stay, the person like managing the floor that I
was on, I don't mean to like, well, she pulled out the DSM-5 and told me that I had multiple
personality disorders.
Yeah.
Like she was like, Oh, doesn't this sound familiar?
Oh yeah.
Sorry.
I just said a silly voice, but anyway.
And then she gave me a model to behave like.
She told me that I was an awful person.
Wow.
Not like directly, but she was like, Oh, you're exhibiting these antisocial behaviors.
Yeah.
So you felt.
So I felt like I was being told like I'm an awful person.
And then I was like, okay, I guess I'll do that then.
Right.
Cause I was given a model to behave like.
And like through my entire inpatient stay, I was having sharps.
I hurt myself on the floor.
I like three days before my release, I gave them a pile of sharps that I just held on
my person the entire time.
Cause I was accumulating them.
I had sprues.
I had like backs of pens, like a metal bit.
But I, one, once I was in the unit, at first I was willing to engage with it, but then
it felt like I was playing a game between people who hated me and like myself attempting
to survive in like a unit.
And I think a lot of that was to my like resistance that had been harbored in the, that had been
created by the emergency department.
But also like, it was just such a toxic situation for me because it reaffirmed all of my distaste
for mental health treatment.
I had purposefully gone off of therapy like the summer before because I felt like I was
better than my therapist and they weren't doing anything, which was to some extent my
fault because I wasn't opening up.
And I was being intentionally manipulative because I thought it was amusing.
But like, A, I refused to engage with the mental health field, but when I tried to,
I was rejected or I felt rejected, which then made me not want to engage with it even more.
And then when I like the three, two months after I went to inpatient, I like opened my
wrists one morning before school and I went to the unit.
I had to get like 46 stitches.
And then the discussion was, so you have to go back to inpatient, but I was like, have
you checked the notes from my last inpatient stay?
And they didn't send me back because it was so unproductive.
And then later that month, another really intense experience happened.
And the question was, are you going to like residential or not?
And that was a breaking point for me.
And that was like sort of the catalyst to my transition.
The idea of needing to go to a place for nine months, a year, a year plus for a level of
intense treatment.
Would you say there was a wake up call moment there for you?
Actually, I haven't thought about it like this before, but like my fear of receiving
treatment in a clinical setting made me realize that I needed to treat myself.
Right.
Like the catalyst for my transition was being afraid of going to be treated in a clinical
setting.
Yeah.
Which is, that's crazy.
I feel like, cause maybe this is unique to me, but I was so fearful and resistant to
treatment in a clinical setting that I realized that I needed to change myself.
Yeah.
Which is, I feel like that's crazy.
The fact that I was so distasteful of treatment in like a hospital setting that I like changed
my own mental health situation on my own.
Yeah.
Well, it speaks, yeah, it's powerful for sure.
It speaks to me though about really our responsibility as providers to do exactly what you've referenced.
Treat their treatment, treat the patient, the client as an active participant who has
voice and choice in the process and engage with caregivers and families in a way that
the individual, especially a young person feels services and support wrapped around
them instead of that it's a boxing match and whoever swings hardest is going to win.
Yeah.
Except both people are losing.
Right?
Yeah.
Cause nobody wins literally like in those situations.
Yeah.
I mean, you have a powerful story.
You have had the experience of the last several years, I think to process through your story
as you've referenced your relationship with your parents and members of your family is
so open to be able to now talk about anything together and share the story for our listeners
that are hearing your story and maybe thinking like, wow, Sorin is so cavalier talking about
these horrendous things.
I want our listeners to know that you and your family have lived this.
Yeah.
You've talked about it a lot.
Yeah.
And your ability to relate to your story where it is now is not you dismissing the seriousness
of where you were.
It comes with extensive treatment.
Yeah.
And that has been aligned and medications that you've been able to now use in a way
that has been helpful and now come off to not necessarily need those medications.
You and your family have been there, done that.
Yeah.
And so how you're talking about it now, it comes from a lot of conversations.
Yeah.
And my discussion of this is not dismissing it as you said, but it is a result of the
amount of effort and time that I've put into dissecting my past, understanding my emotions,
communicating with my family to attempt to unwind the negative trauma that has been experienced
around those things so that I can dissect them and discuss them in an open forum and
attempt to use my experience to inform others.
It's been a long journey to get to the place where I am.
And I think my personality to some extent is uniquely suited to talking about things
like this because I, just as a human being, are not squeamish to talk about anything.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah.
You're the way you're certainly wired in a way that makes this more comfortable.
Yeah.
But you also said a little bit ago, something I want to come back to readiness, readiness
to move in a different direction, recognition that the way that you, the path you were on
was not going to end well.
Yeah.
So other people might have different motivations for moving in a different direction or change,
however you want to talk about it.
The key though is persistence and patience.
And from my provider viewpoint, when I'm working with an individual, it's hanging in there
for as long as is needed for that individual to get to a place where they're ready to make
a difference.
Yeah.
And I think before I developed emotionally and got out of that space, I didn't know that
I could change.
Yeah.
I had no... I thought that that would be a constant because for my entire conscious
life I had been essentially in active crisis or suppressing active crisis.
Yeah.
And you had this part of your internal narrative was that you weren't deserving of a different
life.
You weren't worthy of it being any other way.
Well, I did this thing where I would hate my personality and then instead of attempting
to A, understand my personality better or do something, I would come up with an image
of an evil person and then I'd behave like that so that I could hate myself more.
And then other people around me would have this taste for me.
And then it would be an excuse to crawl more into myself and socially isolate more.
Yeah.
It's the classic self-fulfilling process.
Yeah.
And I was resigned to that.
I was like, it felt almost liberating to know that my set path was to die young and have
a miserable life.
Instead of like, as we were talking about fear of the unknown earlier, feeling like
the future was an uncertainty.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Right.
So I think it's a great privilege to have done the things that have been done to you
and the things that you've done and be at this place where you're able and willing to
talk about it in hopes that it might inspire somebody else who's gone through some tough
times.
And I know you are quite passionate about working to inform the system.
Yeah.
And not just around your identity as a queer youth, but your identity as a young person,
your identity as a young person from rural Maine, all the identities that you bring to
this, you are so motivated to try to make it better for somebody else.
I think like I'm a reformist at heart and like by seeing the, my like immense change
against in my mind, insurmountable odds has showed me that there is a positive on the
other side of everything.
And just by putting in effort and trying, we can change everything around us and ourselves
for the better.
We just need to make a concerted effort, make intelligent commentary and go for it.
Nothing is forever and we will always be in a state of flux and we need to leverage that
flux to make a positive change.
Yeah.
Except that, you know, take this journey that we are all on as humans, recognizing that
the paths aren't always as clearly laid out or as smooth sailing as we'd like for them
to be.
And so how do we as humans, as resilient humans, how do we adjust to the different paths ahead
of us?
How do we bring support?
How do we ask for help checking in with one another when needed?
And just what I love when you say we're all in this together.
Yeah.
Like that is so true.
We're all in this together.
And yet it's so cliche.
Like when I said that I laughed at it.
I love it.
Yeah.
And so it resonates with me in it though too, because again, as we've talked about in the
past, the idea of community.
Yeah.
And when we can move outside of ourselves for just long enough to recognize that I'm
not the only one struggling.
Other people have experienced similar things to what I'm experienced or what I did experience.
And if I can build community with some of those other shared experiences, I'm building
strength and I'm building resiliency.
Yeah.
Humans are social animals and our experiences are universal.
And we like, I feel like modern culture encourages isolation and we need to resist that and change
the things around us to start working together and being together.
We need to become one.
And on that note, I just want to say thank you.
I want to say, truly, I appreciate your willingness and your openness to have some of these tough
conversations and say, share some pretty painful and tough things from your past in hopes that
it's creating a clearer path for somebody else who might be listening.
So thank you.
Yeah.
And I would love to thank you because I really, really want to make a positive change in the
world around me.
And by you allowing me to use your platform to some extent to attempt to spread my message
and have a voice, you have created something that's been super productive for me.
And you've given me hope that maybe I can positively impact others.
Yeah.
Well, and what you don't realize is this is your platform, my friend.
This is your platform.
You'll get there.
So this brings us to the end of episode six of the Inspired Insights podcast.
Thank you, Sorin.
Thank you, listeners, for hanging in with us.
I want to remind folks that there are a lot of resources out there.
If you are feeling like you are struggling, please get help.
9-8-8 is a wonderful national resource for both crisis support as well as just talking
to somebody else.
Find your community, get help.
There are better days ahead and we're here for you.
So thank you.
Reach outwards rather than crawling inwards.
Yeah, perfect.
I am Chris McGlallen.
I'm Sorin Peterson.
Thank you so much and we'll see you next time.
See ya.
The Inspired Insights podcast has been brought to you by Inspired Consulting Group, LLC.
Edited and produced by Amanda Seidel.
Music by Derek Herter.
Copyright 2020.
All rights reserved.
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