Osbourne once said crazy but that’s how
it goes now for Ozzy this crazy train
was driven by the acceleration of
demands or the acceleration of culture
for me my own personal crazy train was
driven by my depression no mental
illness is hard to define because it
affects every individual so differently
so for me it could mean despite having
extreme stage fright that I sign up to
give a TED talk but there are a few
common characteristics that branch
across all of them the first one is that
your thoughts and your actions tend to
defy logic now for me this meant despite
everything in my life being exceptional
and wonderful for me I was miserable and
not the kind of miserable that’s trendy
that you tweet about to get a whole
bunch of retweets it was the kind of
miserable that I couldn’t get into my
car without immediately thinking of ways
that I could crash and only hurt myself
now with this illogical thinking comes
research has linked this to a spark in
creativity and there’s been lots of
research saying that artists are turning
to this sort of abstract means of
communication to convey what they’re
feeling or what they’re going through
and they list edward munch and vincent
van gogh as prime examples of this now I
have no Vincent van Gogh but I did
dabble in some art and some poetry
during my depressive episodes did I show
anyone no and not only because it was
just not very good at all but also
because I was overwhelmed with this
feeling of isolation I felt that no
matter what I did or what I said no one
would understand what I was going
through and the National Alliance on
Mental Illness states that warning sign
that someone is going through a mental
illness is an avoidance of social
activities or a or trouble relating to
and understand
others now you put this all together and
you’re left with this complete and
ability to function things that were
seemingly so simple before become
impossible and in one of my favorite
TEDTalks by Andrew Andrew Solomon he
compares the pouring of cereal and the
eating of cereal to the Stations of the
Cross these simple things become
complicated it was like taking a trip to
a DMV mental illness had become my own
personal bureaucracy now we all know
what bureaucracy is but my social my
sociology textbook defines it as a
formal organization with a hierarchy of
power and a distinct division of labor
and I say it’s more like a ladder you
each each rung has its own
responsibilities to fulfill and each
under ring or rung is accountable to the
one above it and they all have their
roles to fulfill the needs of this
ladder and keep the bureaucracy up now
to define what roles each things are
they emphasis ease in to emphasize a
strict set of written rules and these
written rules are also known as red tape
and the bureaucracies inability to cross
this red tape stops it from making sense
sometimes it defies logic now the most
common example of this is probably
whenever you’re really craving a
breakfast biscuit and they stop serving
breakfast at 11:00 and it’s now 1102 and
you can see the breakfast biscuit right
in front of you but they refuse to serve
it to you so you say I need to speak to
your manager now and they come back and
they say oh well we’re in the middle of
the shift change I’m sorry the manager
isn’t here like there’s nothing we can
do and you realize that this make
bureaucracy can’t even communicate
amongst themselves let alone with you
and so this going back to the ladder
also reflects in the ladder because
although each rung has its own
responsibility to fulfill and they all
work together to hold the ladder up they
don’t come and direct contact so you
hear a lot of I don’t know what’s going
on because that’s not my department
and so this isolation of each division
the authority figures
the workers underneath them and the
isolation of the people trying to
interact with the bureaucracy leads to
the bureaucracy not being able to work
like it was intended to it doesn’t
function it leaves a faulty broken
just realized something I think that
mental illness and bureaucracy seem
really similar in fact I think they’re
kind of the same so now the question
becomes what happens when a person
suffering from mental illness tries to
interact with a system that is also
mentally ill well this is what happened
to me during my last depressive episode
I knew something was just really wrong
and so I reached out for help I called a
psychiatric hospital that I ended up
checking myself into later and I asked
if they had any testing available and
they said no we only offer that service
to patients and unless I planned on
dropping out of school I couldn’t quite
become a patient so then I turned to my
school and I ended up being escorted off
a campus and an ambulance and whenever I
got to the hospital they told me that I
would have to undergo a series of tests
before I could be seen by a psychiatrist
whenever I asked how much these tests
would cost even with my insurance I
graciously said no thank you because it
was more too much for me to handle and
so then I called my mom and the hospital
referred me to a psychiatric center
behavioral health center nearby where
she lived so it worked out great and we
decided that the next morning we would
wake up super early and try to get help
from this Behavioral Health Center and
whenever we got there they refused
seemi they refused to see me because I
didn’t belong to the county that the
center served it didn’t matter that my
mom did it didn’t matter that I was in
the hospital the day before and it
didn’t matter that we were both crying
and begging for someone to help us so we
left very defeated but unwilling to give
up and we decided to try the private
sector so we drove over to a private
psychiatric office and my mom went
inside to try to make an appointment for
me and I stayed in the car and called
the Behavioral Health Centre in my
County and I remember yelling at the
woman on the other line because she was
telling me that it would be a waste of
my time to come in because I had
insurance because I had insurance she
told me that they would just refer me to
a private sector anyway so there was no
point in me coming in and so I ain’t
really hung up the phone with her and
waited for my mom to get back from the
office and she comes back and she says I
got you the soonest possible appointment
and I could sense the satire in her
voice and so I asked Wynn and she said
three months from now they can’t take
any new patients for three months so
because we had time I asked her to just
take me to class and in within 14 hours
all the resources known to me had been
exhausted mood disorders such as major
depressive disorder or just Dimmick just
disorder are the fifth leading cause of
hospitalization for people aged 18 to 44
suicide is the third leading cause of
death for individuals aged 12 to 24 and
the second leading cause of death for
people aged 15 to 24 and 90% of all of
those who commit suicide have an
underlying mental illness no mental
illness has been proven to be treatable
when the individual receives treatment
and so the problem that I was seeing is
that
I was trying to interact with a system
that was just as sick as I was and
unfortunately this isn’t just an easy
fix
you can’t just give the DMV a prozac and
call it a day you have to break down the
bureaucracy and rebuild it back up with
the patient in mind because that’s not
what it’s like today it’s like an
unstoppable locomotive no train no crazy
train it’s going off the rails like a
crazy train but it doesn’t have to thank
you [Applause]