Profiles in Mental Health Courage - Hardcover

Kennedy, Patrick J.; Fried, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593471768 ISBN 13: 9780593471760

Verlag: Dutton, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

One of Harvard Public Health Magazine's Best Public Health Books of the Year

Profiles in Mental Health Courage portrays the dramatic journeys of a diverse group of Americans who have struggled with their mental health. This book offers deeply compelling stories about the bravery and resilience of those living with a variety of mental illnesses and addictions.

Several years ago, Patrick J. Kennedy shared the story of his personal and family challenges with mental illness and addiction—and the nation’s—in his bestselling memoir, A Common Struggle. Now, he and his Common Struggle coauthor, award-winning healthcare journalist Stephen Fried, have crafted this powerful new book sharing the untold stories of others—a special group who agreed to talk about their illnesses, treatments, and struggles for the first time.

When Kennedy’s uncle, President John F. Kennedy, published his classic book Profiles in Courage, he hoped to inspire “political courage” by telling the stories of brave U.S. senators who changed America.

In Profiles in Mental Health Courage, former Congressman Kennedy adapts his uncle’s idea to inspire the “mental health courage” it takes for those with these conditions to treat their illnesses, and risk telling their stories to help America face its crisis in our families, our workplaces, our jails, and on our streets. The resounding silence surrounding these illnesses remains persistent, and this book takes an unflinching look at the experience of mental illness and addiction that inspires profound connection, empathy, and action.

In this book, you’ll meet people of all ages, backgrounds, and futures, across politics and government, Hollywood and the arts, tech and business, sports and science—some recovering, some relapsing, some just barely holding on, but all sharing experiences and insights we need to better understand. You’ll also meet those trying to help them through—parents, siblings, spouses, therapists, bosses, doctors, and friends who create the extended families needed to support care and wellness.

The personal stories they share with Kennedy and Fried are intimate, sometimes shocking, always revealing. And they are essential reading for caregivers, family members, policymakers, and the general public—just as they are for those who often feel alone in experiencing these challenges themselves.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick J. Kennedy is a former member of the U.S. Congress, the nation’s leading political voice on mental illness, addiction, and other brain diseases, and the New York Times bestselling coauthor of A Common Struggle. During his sixteen-year career representing Rhode Island, he fought a national battle to end medical and societal discrimination against mental illnesses, highlighted by his lead sponsorship of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008—and his brave openness about his own health challenges. Soon after his father, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, passed away, he left Congress to devote his career to advocacy for mental health. He has since founded The Kennedy Forum, which unites the community of mental health, and cofounded One Mind for Research, as well as other nonprofit organizations addressing these issues. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Amy, and their five children.

Stephen Fried is an award-winning journalist and New York Timesbestselling author who teaches at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Pennsylvania. He is, most recently, the author of the historical biography Appetite for America, and the coauthor, with Congressman Patrick Kennedy, of A Common Struggle. His earlier books include the biography Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia and the investigative books Bitter Pills and The New Rabbi. A two-time winner of the National Magazine Award, Fried has written frequently for Vanity Fair, GQ, The Washington Post Magazine, Rolling Stone, Glamour, and Philadelphia Magazine. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres.

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Chapter One

Philomena

Philomena Kebec is a crusading tribal rights, human rights, and public health attorney for the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians. The forty-five-year-old lawyer lives in a small town just outside the reservation on the northern tip of Wisconsin with her daughter, her son, and her son's father. But she grew up in a bigger city in nearby Minneapolis, Minnesota-and her advocacy and fierce legal acumen are internationally known.

She has done everything from arguing as a staff attorney at the Indian Law Resource Center in Washington for the UN declaration of rights for all Indigenous peoples in the world to creating an innovative, hyperlocal, all-volunteer harm reduction and needle exchange program serving tribal and nontribal communities in northern Wisconsin.

One podcaster nicknamed her "the bad-ass woman from Bad River."

I was introduced to Philomena by my friend Michael Botticelli, the former director of National Drug Control Policy for the Obama administration and an addiction medicine expert who is in long-term recovery himself. He told me I should meet her, but he didn't want to say why.

Within minutes of talking to her, we had moved past her work, and she started discussing what had really been going on in her life. I immediately recognized that while she had been keeping a lot of her experiences to herself in her professional life, she was actually quite accustomed to talking about them-but primarily in the safety of twelve-step recovery meetings. People who share in meetings quickly connect to one another, regardless of the differences in age or circumstance.

I have always gone to tiny, private twelve-step meetings, first in D.C., with fellow public officials who couldn't be open enough about their addictions to risk being seen by the larger recovery public at a meeting.

(Throughout the book I'm using "twelve-step" to refer to all types of regular peer support meetings for addictions. These originated in the 1930s when "Bill W." wrote out the twelve steps and created Alcoholics Anonymous, later followed by Narcotics Anonymous and groups for loved ones. There are now many twelve-step groups not affiliated with AA or NA, or strictly following their traditional insistence on secrecy and discouragement of psychiatric and addiction medications. So I'm using the general term.)

Philomena told me she had been in recovery since the age of seventeen, when she stopped binge drinking and smoking pot to such extremes that she once even stole her grandmother's sacred ceremonial pipe and used it to get high. But after college, when she was working in a bookstore and trying to figure out what to do with her life, she started attending a very large, long-standing meeting in Minneapolis called the Central Pacific. On Thursdays, that meeting would often attract three hundred people and be recorded. So sharing there was a uniquely private yet very public experience.

That big Central Pacific meeting changed Philomena's life in many ways beyond just helping her maintain her sobriety. It was through the meeting that she met the lawyer who hired her as a paralegal, then helped her get into law school and mentored her as an attorney.

She also refined her advocacy voice at the podium of the Thursday Central Pacific meeting. And nobody who was there that night ever forgot the story she told about the very last time she was abused by her stepfather at the age of twelve-a sharing that I heard about from someone else who was there.

She spoke for more than a half hour with searing, contagious passion, somehow managing to keep to the house rule of "no profanity from the podium." And then she tried to sum up by describing how she made sense of her feelings about her abuser.

"I've prayed a lot," she said, "and I've talked in recovery a lot about how to respond to that . . . to that . . ."

She stopped, total silence, mouth to the microphone, looking out at the audience into people's eyes, for more than a minute. It took forever.

And then she said, "To that . . . motherfucker!"

The whole room just exploded. "Yes," people were yelling, "yes!"

But having that kind of effect on people can come at a price. And while Philomena has been solid in her recovery for over twenty-five years, those closest to her know that the rest of her mental health has continued to be challenging. Part of the reason she's such an effective legal advocate may be that her emotions are so close to the surface; on controversial issues, she doesn't let go when others might, because she can't let go.

"Even today," she told me, "I go through periods where I get really emotionally spun out, really overwhelmed, and I can't stop crying. I would get cycles of obsessive thoughts, just creating this emotional whirlwind. At this time last year, I was suicidal. I was struggling with a diagnosis of major depression and PTSD. But a lot of that was brought on by workplace stress, too.

"Sometimes the only really effective way of getting out of one of these tailspins has been to engage in suicidal ideation or to cut myself-as I have since I was a teenager. It just ends up taking the wind out of it. And I think what happens, and I've talked to my therapist about this, is when I'm planning my death, my frontal lobe gets engaged in something else, and I'm able to get some relief from the emotional turmoil that's happening in other parts of my brain. I believe this is connected to my PTSD. And it's really terrifying. The whole thing is really terrifying."

Because of the nature of her work doing human rights law, she can actually view what is happening to her through different prisms, different worldviews for approaching trauma, mental illness, and addiction.

She learned early on about the traditional twelve-step prism, which would view the main way to address her challenges as simply abstaining from substance use and working the steps. She also came to understand there was a more psychiatric model of treating symptoms and illnesses with talk therapy, which she likes, and medication, which she would prefer not to take but has. Later in her career as a local advocate for health care during the opiate crisis, she got interested in the controversial model of harm reduction and needle exchange-creating safe places for addicts to use opiates, with naloxone (Narcan) on hand to reverse overdoses, and offering sterile injection equipment to lessen the chance of infection. (The harm reduction world is also more open to people taking medication to get off drugs or replace drugs.) And then there's the more recent idea of using "brain differences" or "neurodivergence" to recast mental illnesses and substance use disorders so they are seen not as diseases or medical conditions but as part of a spectrum of brain functionality.

These different worldviews are crucially important in fighting for human rights-disability rights, health insurance rights, LGBTQ+ rights, tribal rights. But appreciating them all can make the process of understanding what's wrong with you, and how it should be treated, fairly confusing. Especially when you add the pressures of the outside world to the pressures of your interior world.

"Here's how I see myself," she told me. "I'm an attorney who has been practicing for fifteen years. And I'm a person that has struggled with mental illness-and I still struggle with mental illness. Or, while I don't like that dichotomy, I do have mental differences."

She also brings the unique perspectives of tribal culture and medicine to the equation. It is not uncommon for people with mental health problems to wish for a more "natural" or "spiritual" way to address them. But they don't always know how to accomplish that: sometimes those who offer alternative help don't "believe" in traditional Western mental health...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593471768
• ISBN 13: 9780593471760
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland