Latest / Brain Stories / Episode 15 - Feed Swap | Look Again Podcast - LEAP, Schizophrenia & Anosognosia w/Dr. Xavier Amador

Transcript

Episode 15 - Feed Swap | Look Again Podcast - LEAP, Schizophrenia & Anosognosia w/Dr. Xavier Amador · Brain Stories

0:00
SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Brainstories Connections, uncommon conversation about how we can all do so much better around mental health and serious mental illness.
0:08
SPEAKER_03: Today we're sharing a wonderful episode of a podcast that comes from a neighbor to the north, British Columbia Schizophrenia Society.
0:16
SPEAKER_03: Known as BCSS, they've delivered sophisticated services, support, and education for years.
0:22
SPEAKER_03: We're putting up an episode of their podcast, Look Again, exactly as they released it.
0:27
SPEAKER_03: And if you like being enriched, go to their website for much, much more.
0:32
SPEAKER_03: This episode is an interview with Dr.
0:34
SPEAKER_03: Javier Amador.
0:35
SPEAKER_03: You might recognize that name because we profiled him in episode one of Brain Stories.
0:40
SPEAKER_03: This is the perfect companion piece.
0:43
SPEAKER_03: You'll hear more about his method and get data-driven insight into insight.
0:47
SPEAKER_03: The final segment of the show delivers further insight on why it's so important to tell stories about serious mental illness.org.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: That moment when somebody does not believe they're ill can change absolutely everything.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: When a family member or a caregiver is trying to support those that they love, what do you do and how can you best support them when they don't recognize they are ill?
1:56
SPEAKER_01: And there's a name for this.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: It's called anasognosia.
2:00
SPEAKER_01: Anosugnosia is a very common symptom of those living with schizophrenia and bipolar.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: It's not resistance, it's not denial, and it's not refusal.
2:13
SPEAKER_01: It's a neurological change in the brain.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm Phaedr Aldridge.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm the CEO of the BC Schizophrenia Society, otherwise known as BCSS, and the host of Look Again Mental Illness Reexamined.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: And today we're talking about anasognosia, what it is, how common it is, and why should we all care about this very difficult word that's hard to say.
2:38
SPEAKER_01: To kick things off, we are going to hear from Dr.
2:41
SPEAKER_01: Amador.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: Dr.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: Amador is a clinical psychologist, he's a researcher, and he's an author of the book called I'm Not Sick, I Don't Need Help.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: He's also the creator of the LEAP method, which is a communication framework that is used to better support individuals living with anasognosia.
3:01
SPEAKER_01: LEAP stands for Listen, Empathize, Agree, and Partner.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: Dr.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: Amador's work has reshaped clinical practice, family education, and mental health training internationally.
3:14
SPEAKER_01: LEAP is a more humane and more effective way of supporting individuals living with anasognosia.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: Here's Dr.
3:22
SPEAKER_01: Amador and Miles Constable, also with BCSS, talking about anasognosia.
3:35
SPEAKER_05: Thanks for being here on our uh Look Again podcast.
3:38
SPEAKER_05: Your relationship with your brother Henry is central to how you came to understand anasygnosia.
3:43
SPEAKER_05: Looking back, what do you wish you had understood earlier about what was happening inside his mind?
3:48
SPEAKER_02: I wish I understood that he wasn't being difficult, that he wasn't being selfish, that he wasn't in denial.
3:55
SPEAKER_02: I wish that early on I understood that this was another symptom, just like the hallucinations he was having that was leading him to say, there's nothing wrong with me.
4:05
SPEAKER_02: I'm not sick, leave me alone.
4:07
SPEAKER_02: You're the crazy one, not me.
4:09
SPEAKER_02: I got upset by all those statements when I should have been empathic.
4:13
SPEAKER_02: Like this is just another manifestation of the illness.
4:17
SPEAKER_02: So I wish I understood it was an illness.
4:19
SPEAKER_02: It was a symptom, not denial early on.
4:22
SPEAKER_02: It would have saved us both a lot of pain.
4:25
SPEAKER_05: Many families feel uh intense fear when a loved one insists that they're not sick.
4:30
SPEAKER_05: Um, so how does anasygnosia shape fear on both sides, both the person experiencing psychosis and the people trying to help them?
4:37
SPEAKER_02: I've worked with countless people who have anasygnosia for their psychotic disorder.
4:43
SPEAKER_02: And they feel very alone and they feel very attacked, like everybody's telling them that their reality is false, that their truth is not true, that they need help when they know they don't need help.
4:54
SPEAKER_02: So they end up feeling very angry, frustrated, and lonely.
4:58
SPEAKER_02: These are some of the most lonely people I've ever met in my life, somebody with anasygnosia for psychotic illness.
5:05
SPEAKER_02: How it affects loved ones is we get we get really frustrated with the person.
5:11
SPEAKER_02: We think somehow this is more under their control than it actually is.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: And so our relationships suffer.
5:18
SPEAKER_02: Uh there tends to be tension, there tends to be friction, there's um uh disappointment that our mentally ill loved one is not doing what they could easily do.
5:28
SPEAKER_02: Well, they can't easily do it because they don't see what we see.
5:32
SPEAKER_05: Aaron Powell You've said that anasygnosia is not denial, uh, but a neurocognitive impairment.
5:37
SPEAKER_05: Why is that distinction so important?
5:39
SPEAKER_05: And what goes wrong when families, clinicians, or systems mistake it for denial or stubbornness?
5:44
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell This is a great question.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the way to approach a problem is to first understand the root of the problem, what it actually is.
5:50
SPEAKER_02: So if I think someone's in denial, I'm gonna take a very different approach than if I think their position is a symptom, a neurocognitive symptom.
5:59
SPEAKER_02: If I think they're in denial, I'm gonna do interventions, I'm gonna do education, I'm gonna do confrontation.
6:05
SPEAKER_02: If I understand this is a neurocognitive symptom, like a hallucination or a delusion, I'm gonna be patient, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be empathic, I'm going to look for ways to persuade the person to get help without direct confrontation and psychoeducation and interventions.
6:25
SPEAKER_02: Interventions with people with anasygnosia are just a huge mistake.
6:30
SPEAKER_02: They they not only don't work, but it leaves the person very angry and feeling betrayed.
6:35
SPEAKER_02: Dr.
6:35
SPEAKER_05: Amador, how do we know whether it's denial or anasygnosia?
6:41
SPEAKER_02: It's a great question, and people ask me this question often.
6:45
SPEAKER_02: You know, people with mental illness are people, and people get defensive.
6:49
SPEAKER_02: So of course you can you can have anasygnosia and denial, by the way.
6:54
SPEAKER_02: But you know, when it's anasygnosia, it's it's it's just very simply something that is not changing with time and education.
7:05
SPEAKER_02: So the rough rule of thumb is if three months have gone by and the person has either had a hospitalization or feedback from family or and or professionals and don't seem to have understood at all that they have a mental health condition, you're almost certainly dealing with anasygnosia if this has gone on for three months or longer.
7:26
SPEAKER_02: Uh denial tends to get better, especially after interaction with professionals, uh hospitalization, uh, et cetera.
7:36
SPEAKER_05: Right.
7:36
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I'm sure the families will find that useful to understand.
7:39
SPEAKER_05: Considering that about half of people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder experience endosygnosia, why do you think this reality is still so poorly understood, even within mental health systems?
7:50
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Because, you know, old old habits die hard.
7:54
SPEAKER_02: And uh it's this is something that really grew out of psychoanalysis.
7:59
SPEAKER_02: So for the last nearly 100 years, there was a rush to judgment that this was denial, this was psychotic denial.
8:06
SPEAKER_02: The other reason is it's sort of intuitive.
8:09
SPEAKER_02: It feels like denial when you're talking to the person.
8:12
SPEAKER_02: They say, I'm not sick, there's nothing wrong with me.
8:14
SPEAKER_02: It sort of feels like denial.
8:16
SPEAKER_02: And so we rush to judgment and think it is denial.
8:19
SPEAKER_02: Uh understanding anasygnosia takes a bit of education, a bit of exposure to the concept and to the nature of that problem.
8:29
SPEAKER_02: So um it's not intuitive that it's a neurocognitive deficit.
8:34
SPEAKER_02: And the third reason is that uh there's no multi-billion dollar industry educating us about the research.
8:42
SPEAKER_02: There's abundant research to show that roughly half of all people with psychotic disorders have anasygnosia.
8:49
SPEAKER_02: And yet we don't have uh, you know, forums and conferences and special issues.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: It's not a criticism, it's just a fact.
8:58
SPEAKER_05: Right.
8:58
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, you describe a moment with a stroke patient who could not see his paralysis as a turning point.
9:04
SPEAKER_05: How did that experience change the way you interpreted your brother's refusal of treatment?
9:08
SPEAKER_02: As I was talking with him and asking him, could he move his paralyzed arm?
9:13
SPEAKER_02: I knew it was paralyzed.
9:15
SPEAKER_02: And he just inexplicably to me, he said, Yes, I can move it.
9:20
SPEAKER_02: He'd been paralyzed for five days already.
9:22
SPEAKER_02: And I asked him to move it, and I asked him why he didn't move it, and his response was, I did move it.
9:31
SPEAKER_02: So he wasn't looking at his arm.
9:33
SPEAKER_02: I asked him to look, move it, asked him to move it again.
9:36
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't move.
9:37
SPEAKER_02: And rather than him learning, like, I guess there's something wrong with my arm, he got paranoid and confabulated and thought that I had somehow put something in his IV to paralyze his arm.
9:48
SPEAKER_02: And as I'm going through this whole experience I've just described, just in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, this is like my brother Henry.
9:57
SPEAKER_02: This is like countless patients, people I've worked with with lived experience, who you you try to show them, you try to say, Well, you know, you had that job, but you stopped taking the medication and you lost the job.
10:08
SPEAKER_02: You were hearing voices.
10:09
SPEAKER_02: Don't you think you have schizoaffective disorder?
10:12
SPEAKER_02: You know, and it doesn't work.
10:14
SPEAKER_02: Um it just, it's just like a light bulb went off.
10:17
SPEAKER_02: It was an epiphany.
10:18
SPEAKER_02: It was like this anasygnosia in this stroke patient feels just like what I see with my brother and with countless people that I had worked with.
10:27
SPEAKER_02: So it was, it was really life-changing and career-changing for me that that moment.
10:33
SPEAKER_05: The leap uh method asks caregivers to stop arguing about diagnosis and instead focus on listening and partnership.
10:40
SPEAKER_05: For families who worry this feels like giving in or enabling illness, what do you say to them?
10:45
SPEAKER_02: Would you ever tell your loved one to stop hallucinating?
10:48
SPEAKER_02: Just cut it out, stop hallucinating.
10:51
SPEAKER_02: No.
10:52
SPEAKER_02: Because you know it's not under their control.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: So telling them they've got a diagnosis when they are cognitively incapable of believing it, is just like telling somebody to stop hallucinating.
11:05
SPEAKER_02: You're asking them to do something that's just not possible.
11:08
SPEAKER_02: Uh so, you know, it's recognizing our powerlessness over the brain disorder.
11:13
SPEAKER_02: When you talk with your loved one about their diagnosis, let's say it's schizophrenia, how do they react?
11:19
SPEAKER_02: They get angry, they or they get frightened, mostly they get angry with us.
11:23
SPEAKER_02: So why keep doing that?
11:25
SPEAKER_02: If it's not helping, why keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result?
11:31
SPEAKER_02: So you don't, you're never going to get to partnering until you let go of the argument, let go of the debate about whether the person has a diagnosis.
11:40
SPEAKER_02: So I counsel people all the time: stop talking about the diagnosis.
11:44
SPEAKER_02: It's only hurting your relationship and moving you further away from helping your loved one.
11:50
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, of course.
11:51
SPEAKER_05: Um, fear often drives coercive approaches like forced treatment, confrontations, and ultimatums.
11:58
SPEAKER_05: What have you learned about how fear interferes with care and how leap helps move people out of that fear-based cycle?
12:04
SPEAKER_02: Well, leap helps people to feel less afraid and more trusting.
12:08
SPEAKER_02: And so they're not uh knee-jerk reacting to what we're asking them to do, uh, whether it's accept treatment, whether it's to go to a hospital.
12:18
SPEAKER_02: So really paying attention to the fear that your loved one has and talking with them about it and being re being reassuring in the way you're talking with them.
12:29
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the words you have nothing to fear are are great.
12:32
SPEAKER_02: It's all well and good, but act as if they have nothing to fear by listening to them, being curious about their experience.
12:41
SPEAKER_02: If they're talking about delusions, don't be afraid to talk with them about, you know, what what may be the most important thing going on in their life.
12:52
SPEAKER_05: Here at BCSS, many of our educators have studied the LEAP method and found it instrumental in helping families.
12:57
SPEAKER_05: My colleague Julia has a question for you about partnering with caregivers.
13:01
SPEAKER_05: She joins us now via video.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: Hi, Dr.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: Amador.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm a BC Schizophrenia Society educator for the South Vancouver Island area of British Columbia.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: I first want to start off by thanking you so much for the work that you do.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: It has had a massive impact for the families who experience a left moment anosotnosia with their mental illness.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: I've personally been able to witness the incredible benefits and changes that occur in families when your leap communication is used.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: I have a question pertaining to the partnership section specifically of your method.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: Many families still find themselves discouraged or frustrated when they can't connect their discussions to medication compliance as an outcome of their discussions.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: I know from your material, it's about building that trusting bond to have medication adherence potentially based on the relationship rather than trying to have your loved one with mental illness agree that they're sick.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: But over the many years of your practicing, do you have any new insights or updated techniques to be able to add to this more difficult section of the communication method?
14:03
SPEAKER_00: Just finding that families feel a little lost when they're looking at the partnership piece, and if there's maybe some more insight or encouragement that you could offer families.
14:13
SPEAKER_02: Thanks for the question, Julia.
14:14
SPEAKER_02: And I recognize having worked with her uh and and being trained in LEAP.
14:19
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, partnering is takes on very many different forms.
14:25
SPEAKER_02: And and the form that that in recent years that has surprised me that it most often takes on is our the loved one does accept treatment simply because they're being asked by their loved one who's been using LEAP with them.
14:44
SPEAKER_02: So would you do me the favor of doing this?
14:46
SPEAKER_02: I know you don't uh have schizophrenia.
14:49
SPEAKER_02: You've told me that you don't have it.
14:50
SPEAKER_02: I understand that.
14:51
SPEAKER_02: I know you don't like the medicine, you don't need it, right?
14:55
SPEAKER_02: That's what you've told me.
14:56
SPEAKER_02: I would like you to take it.
14:57
SPEAKER_02: Would you be willing to do it for me?
14:59
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that question, believe it or not, uh will often result in the person accepting treatment.
15:05
SPEAKER_02: It but it doesn't come out, it can't come out of nowhere.
15:07
SPEAKER_02: It has to come from weeks and months of having conversations with the person where they feel heard, they feel empathized with, they feel validated.
15:15
SPEAKER_02: And then there's other ways to partner.
15:17
SPEAKER_02: If your loved one wants something like, my brother wanted pocket money, he wanted$5 a day.
15:23
SPEAKER_02: And I said, I'll be happy to give that to you if you'll accept these injections.
15:28
SPEAKER_02: Um, and he got really angry and um accused me of being selfish and I could afford$5 a day, and he was right.
15:37
SPEAKER_02: And I I I used leap.
15:40
SPEAKER_02: I listened.
15:40
SPEAKER_02: I said, I you have every right to feel angry with me, I'd be angry too.
15:44
SPEAKER_02: I I totally understand.
15:47
SPEAKER_02: And then he would say, Well, then why are you insisting on me taking these injections?
15:51
SPEAKER_02: And I said, I'm really sorry, and I could be wrong, but I think this will be helpful to you.
15:56
SPEAKER_02: I don't think I'm wrong, but it's possible.
15:58
SPEAKER_02: I was humble.
15:59
SPEAKER_02: I used one of the techniques that we teach with LEAP.
16:02
SPEAKER_02: And it took six months, but he eventually agreed to it and stayed on on those injections for nearly 20 years for the rest of his life, never believing he had schizophrenia.
16:12
SPEAKER_02: And when I asked him why are you on the meds, he said, Well, I do it for you, you know, for the relationship.
16:18
SPEAKER_02: He didn't believe he had schizophrenia ever.
16:20
SPEAKER_02: So don't underestimate the power of the strength of your relationship being enough of a motivator to get to partnering.
16:31
SPEAKER_02: Um, but then don't be afraid to use other things, like things like money, the different kinds of help that your loved one wants, bartering.
16:38
SPEAKER_02: I'll do this if you'll do that.
16:39
SPEAKER_02: Let's negotiate.
16:40
SPEAKER_05: That's great.
16:41
SPEAKER_05: Thanks for elaborating on that.
16:42
SPEAKER_05: And speaking of your brother Henry, in your story, once the conflict with Henry eased, his life began to expand.
16:48
SPEAKER_05: What does recovery really mean in the context of henasygnosia if insight may never fully come?
16:54
SPEAKER_02: Well, as I talked about in the in the story uh that I told uh on the podcast Brain Stories, his life became a life of recovery because he was involved in meaningful relationships and activities.
17:10
SPEAKER_02: Uh he had two volunteer jobs.
17:12
SPEAKER_02: He went to a clubhouse where he had friends.
17:15
SPEAKER_02: He uh he had a girlfriend, her name is Mary.
17:18
SPEAKER_02: He had a great relationship with me and the rest of our family and our mother.
17:23
SPEAKER_02: So meaningful relationships, meaningful activity, uh, you know, love and work.
17:28
SPEAKER_02: So I think that to me, that is recovery.
17:32
SPEAKER_02: Uh recovery can take different forms.
17:34
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, absolutely.
17:35
SPEAKER_05: Um we know there's no cure currently for schizophrenia, but there there certainly is uh degrees of recovery and having a fulfilling life.
17:45
SPEAKER_05: And you know, that can bring a lot of happiness and contentment to to families.
17:50
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell And you know, joy and meaning to the person's life who's living with the illness, not just feeling okay, but actually feeling joy and uh enjoying life.
18:04
SPEAKER_02: Uh I think that's a big part of recovery.
18:06
SPEAKER_05: Aaron Powell Yeah, certainly.
18:07
SPEAKER_05: If there's one thing that you wish families, clinicians, and policymakers truly understood about anasycnosia, what is the most harmful myth you would want to dismantle?
18:16
SPEAKER_05: And what would you replace it with instead?
18:18
SPEAKER_02: I think the most harmful myth is that this is under the person's control.
18:22
SPEAKER_02: And if I push hard enough and educate enough, they will come to see the light.
18:28
SPEAKER_02: Just stop trying to educate.
18:32
SPEAKER_02: Start listening, start being empathic and validate.
18:35
SPEAKER_02: And if that experience is there's nothing wrong with me, validate that.
18:39
SPEAKER_05: Simple enough.
18:40
SPEAKER_05: I've really enjoyed chatting with you.
18:42
SPEAKER_05: Thanks so much, Dr.
18:42
SPEAKER_05: Amador.
18:43
SPEAKER_05: Appreciate you being on the show.
18:44
SPEAKER_05: You're very welcome.
18:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, after that conversation, you can tell that Dr.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: Amador is a very well-respected expert.
18:53
SPEAKER_01: BCSS regularly refers to us books, and of course, we use his leap method.
18:58
SPEAKER_01: One thing we also know is that understanding anasognosia requires speaking and connecting to those living with that condition.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: So up next is Frank Kosa.
19:10
SPEAKER_01: Frank Kosa is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, he's also a journalist, and the co-creator of the podcast called Brain Stories.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: He focuses on telling deeply human stories about mental illness, family, and identity.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: They're stories that challenge stigma and expand all of our understanding.
19:29
SPEAKER_01: In one episode, Frank explores what it means to live without insight and what happens when families, clinicians, and entire communities learn to think about mental illness differently.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: In this conversation with Miles Constable, Frank reflects on the power of storytelling and reshapes how we think about serious mental illness.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: Here's their conversation.
19:57
SPEAKER_05: Thank you so much for having me.
19:59
SPEAKER_05: Many people will be familiar with your work as an award-winning documentary producer, writer, director, journalist.
20:05
SPEAKER_05: But how did you get into the podcast world?
20:07
SPEAKER_03: I was looking into, you know, stories about serious mental illness because a friend of mine had led me into a meeting and just I heard one jaw-dropping story after another.
20:18
SPEAKER_03: And eventually met uh my producing partner in this, Janet Yang.
20:23
SPEAKER_03: We both had the same reaction.
20:24
SPEAKER_03: I'm like, these stories are incredible, and they need to be told.
20:27
SPEAKER_03: And I said, let's start with a podcast.
20:29
SPEAKER_03: There were other there were two other really compelling reasons to do it as a podcast.
20:34
SPEAKER_03: And um one of them is that we're covering huge spans of time in the story that we stories that we tell.
20:40
SPEAKER_03: And film doesn't do that well.
20:44
SPEAKER_03: But audio does it.
20:45
SPEAKER_03: And the other reason is that people open up a little bit more easily in front of a microphone than they do a camera.
20:52
SPEAKER_03: And we needed to, you know, really take the time.
20:55
SPEAKER_03: We really wanted to spend the time with the participants in the show to have extended conversations and to really get to a point where they felt really comfortable and build the relationship and trust that's necessary to tell a story like this.
21:06
SPEAKER_03: And so all of those reasons made it an excellent candidate for a podcast, more so than I ever expected or thought.
21:14
SPEAKER_05: You mentioned the need for these stories to be told and getting them out into the public consciousness.
21:20
SPEAKER_05: Could you talk to me about how people with mental illness are portrayed in the in the media?
21:25
SPEAKER_03: Wait, um yes, uh this is one of my favorite topics.
21:29
SPEAKER_03: And yeah, so I would say in mainstream media, people with serious mental illness are portrayed in sensational terms as people who are mostly violent.
21:40
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
21:41
SPEAKER_05: There's uh certainly a lot of sensationalism that comes both with you know fictional tellings of of of stories, uh, but then you know the media does have a responsibility to you know be more accurate with its reporting and try to give people a greater understanding of what's really going on.
22:01
SPEAKER_03: And there's, you know, I think that's something that I very much wanted to stake out some ground on with brain stories.
22:07
SPEAKER_03: I think the media - what the what mainstream media fails to do most of the time is talk to people who live with a serious mental illness.
22:14
SPEAKER_03: Media does not include people with serious mental illness in stories.
22:17
SPEAKER_03: They talk to clinicians, they talk to prosecutors, they talk to sometimes family members, but they don't talk to the people who live with serious mental illness.
22:25
SPEAKER_03: That has to be a part of reporting and it should be central.
22:27
SPEAKER_03: And in brain stories, that became front and center for us.
22:30
SPEAKER_03: We just felt like the most underreported and unheard voices are those of us who live with a mental illness.
22:35
SPEAKER_03: We need to make that front and center.
22:37
SPEAKER_05: I noticed on the Brain Stories website, you asked a philosophical question: what do we do with those we fear and have an illness we don't understand?
22:45
SPEAKER_03: Could you unpack that a little bit for us?
22:46
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell We asked that question because when we started hearing stories about people who live with mental illness, it became apparent so quickly that a lot of times the response was as much of a problem as the illness itself was presenting.
23:04
SPEAKER_03: People were facing discrimination, people were facing horrible kinds of treatment, treatment that was delivered in the worst possible ways with behind glass and really cold and inhumane ways.
23:12
SPEAKER_03: But mostly, I think, as a culture and as a society, we don't understand mental illness, so we're afraid of it.
23:21
SPEAKER_03: And when we're afraid of something, we isolate it, we ostracize it.
23:26
SPEAKER_03: We we want to put it in institutions and move it out of our sight and kind of lock it up and compartmentalize.
23:34
SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately, that's exactly the wrong thing to do for someone who lives with mental illness.
23:40
SPEAKER_03: The right thing to do is to reach out and talk and have a conversation and make a connection because relationships are what create health.
23:51
SPEAKER_03: Whether you live with a serious mental illness or not, that's true.
23:54
SPEAKER_03: But we do the exact wrong thing with serious mental illness.
23:58
SPEAKER_03: It's doing harm.
23:59
SPEAKER_03: We need to change that.
24:00
SPEAKER_05: Aaron Ross Powell So does the key to improving the lives of the mentally ill lie in fostering a greater understanding of their conditions and their struggles?
24:07
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell 100% it does.
24:08
SPEAKER_03: That's absolutely the place to start.
24:09
SPEAKER_03: There's a study that I like to cite that was done by uh uh Dr.
24:14
SPEAKER_03: Ann Hollward.
24:15
SPEAKER_03: She's a psychiatrist in Maine.
24:17
SPEAKER_03: She took some of the podcasts she was doing that were narrative stories, and she had her third-year medical students listen to them to see how would listening to these podcasts actually change their views on people who live with serious mental illness.
24:30
SPEAKER_03: And the results were spectacular.
24:32
SPEAKER_03: When they listened to a few podcasts, 96% of the students reported agreeing strongly or a lot that they could identify with the struggles of someone living with a mental illness.
24:46
SPEAKER_03: 94% were felt better prepared to have a conversation with them.
24:52
SPEAKER_03: And so it completely changed the response.
24:54
SPEAKER_03: And they heard these podcasts and it began changing them radically, just improved making them so much more empathetic and understanding.
25:03
SPEAKER_03: These numbers are incredible.
25:05
SPEAKER_03: So the power of storytelling is real.
25:07
SPEAKER_03: And we've got to just keep telling these stories.
25:11
SPEAKER_03: Now, I say that firmly believing that that's really critical.
25:17
SPEAKER_03: But we also live in this really harsh environment where if you tell your story, the reaction can be really negative.
25:25
SPEAKER_03: And so I say it's so important to tell the stories and also, you know, be ready.
25:31
SPEAKER_03: Um, and only do it if you really feel that you can, that you're comfortable.
25:37
SPEAKER_03: It's it's it's an act of courage.
25:39
SPEAKER_03: There can be a lot of serious implications, and so please consider them before you decide to tell your story.
25:44
SPEAKER_03: But telling these stories is so important, and it's why I think your podcast is so important.
25:51
SPEAKER_05: Certainly I couldn't agree more about the bravery that that comes with telling a story.
25:55
SPEAKER_05: Frank, thanks so much for being on the show.
25:57
SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for having me.
25:58
SPEAKER_03: It's a real pleasure, and thank you for doing all the work that you do.
26:03
SPEAKER_01: Well, Frank certainly has a way with words.
26:06
SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for being on our podcast.
26:08
SPEAKER_01: Join us next time on Look Again, Mental Illness Re-examined as we continue exploring what it's like to live and support someone living with a severe and persistent mental illness.
26:19
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for being here.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: And remember, together we can help each other.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: Together, we can make an impact.
26:28
SPEAKER_01: Together, we are stronger than stigma.
26:31
SPEAKER_01: I'm Phaedra Aldridge, thanks for being here.
26:36
SPEAKER_04: Look Again is produced by Paula Baker, Jar Podcast Solutions, and executive produced by Phaedra Aldridge and Miles Constable for BCSS.
26:43
SPEAKER_04: It's brought to you by the BC Partners for Mental Health and Substance Use Information, a group of nonprofit organizations providing high quality mental health resources to help individuals or families maintain or improve their mental well being.
26:55
SPEAKER_04: For more information you can trust, please visit hearetohelp.bc.ca.
27:00
SPEAKER_04: This podcast is funded and stewarded by BC Mental Health and Substance Use Services, an agency of the Provincial Health Services Authority.