Sep 9, 2019
I’m excited to share my conversation
with Mark Freeman. Mark is an author (Book: “You are Not a
Rock”), mental health coach, workshop facilitator and
someone that I follow closely as his frequent tweets and public commentary on mental health and
wellbeing are helpful for me as I live in recovery from addiction
and live with bipolar disorder.
In addition to talking about stigma,
mental health care and treatment for anxiety, Mark discusses his
own struggles with addiction, anxiety and OCD. We were able to relate quite
a bit about our past struggles and paths to recovery. We also dig into how the
mental health care system is designed to foster increasing
stigma. In the
same way, you don’t have to have a diagnosis to get a gym
membership, you shouldn’t have to have a diagnosis to get help with
mental health. The
solution to this broken way of thinking is an entirely new mental
health care system, which we talk about in this episode.
Mark currently lives in Toronto and
focuses his professional efforts on change management workshops for
Fortune 50 companies, peer support for people suffering from
anxiety disorders, and creating books and videos to fill the gaps
in our healthcare system.
More about Mark: Website,
Book, Brain
School
You can connect with Mark directly
via twitter @thepathtochange
Here are some of the things
we talked about:
- Stigma is a
Squirrel. Run at
it Shouting. Mark makes this analogy about
we fear stigma, and let it prevent us from getting help and how
similar that is to the squirrels in Toronto that will steal from
you, but if you are aggressive toward them, then they run
away. Stigma is
very similar.
- We talked about Mark’s
personal experiences with compulsion and OCD. He talks about how he didn’t
think he was struggling with any mental health issues. He started to feel separated
from reality and would start to do things like standing in front of
his stove for a long time just to make sure it was not
on. His
compulsions and OCD tendencies gradually took over his
life. Although he
viewed none of this behavior as strange, because he thought he had
perfectly good reasons for doing it.
- What led you to seek
help?
Depression, addiction and sexual compulsion issues led him to speak
with a counselor.
He thought everything else was fine and totally healthy, and that’s
when he learned that he needed to work on the compulsion and
OCD.
- We talked about the
intersection of mental illness and sex. If you are running into any
kind of mental health challenges, they are likely affecting your
sex life as well.
Sex is so much about out intimacy, being ourselves, uncertainty and
vulnerability. So,
if you’re struggling mentally, it’s going to be hard for you to
experience intimacy and be vulnerable.
- Mark talks a lot about
wholistic mental wellness. I asked him where people
should start to get help if I haven’t gotten help
before. Do you
start with cutting out social media, dealing with addiction,
therapy, or church, or some other place? Mark talks about this and
gives some examples based on his experience. He talks about how he
encourages people to start learning to interact with the thing in
our heads differently. For example, resisting urges
to check your phone or email. Learning to know that you
have an unread message, but not opening it and controlling that
urge for some time.
- How do we make changes in our
lives before we crash and burn from addiction or mental
illness?
Will we lose our edge if we go ask for help or seek
treatment? We talk about how we can be
more proactive and where to start if we have never sought help
before.
- Often with physical
health, we get proactive because we see somebody doing something we
want to do. In mental health, because
people keep it quiet, we don’t see those examples as often. So,
there isn’t as much of a sense that we can be doing something to
improve. We are
still in the early stages of people talking about mental health,
even though, we have had brains for a very long time.
- A lot of the things we call mental
illness could maybe have been considered great survival tools back
in the caveman days, but in today’s world, it’s hard to fit in when
you demonstrate those traits.
- Swimming is not about
“avoiding drowning” it’s about “learning to swim.” We
don’t label ourselves as having a drowning disorder because we want
to learn to swim.
It’s about the thing we want to learn and build. We need to approach
mental health this way. IF you think of anxiety as a
lake, you don’t have to “fix the anxiety lake,” rather you want to
figure out how to swim across it instead of stopping and seeing it
as a barrier. We
need to learn how to go where we want to go.
- Where do I start if I want
to deal with my anxiety? Start with smaller
uncertainties.
Things like not checking your phone. You notice a simple
uncertainty, and you don’t react to it. Then you can progressively
level up from there.
- How do we learn to sit
with uncomfortable feelings? Just like exercising the
first time. If you
went to the gym and tried to lift a weight, and failed, you
wouldn’t just never go back to the gym. If you go to therapy and have
a painful experience you must keep going back. You must push yourself just
like you would physically.
- We talk about where stigma
comes from and how we can address it. The mental health care system
was designed around stigma. Nobody would exercise if you
could only get a gym membership by admitting an illness or have a
diagnosis. The
mental health system works this way where we have to admit we are
ill or be diagnosed before we get help. We must change how the system
functions. We should view getting help for mental health the same
way we do a gym membership. We should view it as doing
something good for ourselves. It’s going to take consumer
led services led by people who are living in recovery to fill the
gaps. It will take
a new system all together. Then we can hope to see
stigma reduced.
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Podcast in the following ways:
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