Episode 7:

About

In today’s groundbreaking episode, listeners will hear Soren’s very personal and powerful experiences as they share their own mental health journey and the challenges of finding effective and affirming mental health treatment for queer youth. Our country’s mental health crisis system is broken, and we must do better. Today’s episode contains conversation about self-injury, substance use, and suicide. Viewers are encouraged to seek support if needed. This is a must-listen for ALL healthcare providers!

*Please note that this episode contains sensitive behavioral health topics such as suicide and substance use. If you are experiencing a behavioral health crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling 988 or visiting www.988lifeline.org.

**This podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered health advice. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice.

Transcript

Chris: The episode you’re about to listen to contains conversations about suicide and self-harm. If you’re experiencing a crisis, please dial 988 or connect with The Trevor Project at text 678-678 or toll free at 1-866-488-7386.

Chris: Soren, we are officially in the second half of season one of the Inspired Insights podcast.

Soren: Hooray.

Chris: I have to say, 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.

Soren: Yeah, yeah. And we’re really, we’re starting to hit our stride now.

Chris: 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 of mental health services.

Soren: Yeah, I think that this will be a super interesting parallel because I think that providers and patients are like frustrated right now with the system that we have to address mental health crises. And I think by only through a cooperation of like 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?

Chris: 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.

Soren: Yeah, I totally agree. My mother and I have talked a lot about like what we wish would have happened and what we think was really helpful when interacting with the mental health industry. And obviously like by the time I was going to the ER and like going to inpatient and stuff like that, I was already like in the weeds of it.

Yeah. And I like, I don’t feel like the treatment that I received was tailored or effective.

Chris: Yeah, right.

Soren: You’ve been very open about that.

Chris: 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 then 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.

Soren: 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.

Chris: Literally.

Soren: And I sat there doing nothing with no active therapy while 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 if 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.

Chris: Yeah.

Soren: It felt punitive.

Chris: Yeah. 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.

Soren: 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 from me in the hallway, to like elderly patients, just sitting in an emergency room for days.

Chris: 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. Yeah.

So when you say you were there for three days, 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.

Soren: 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. I was finally 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.

And they had given me antipsychotics. So I was feeling brain dead and nothing was happening. And then by day two, I was like, I just want to leave here.

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 evaluated me said I had to go to inpatient. But I was like, Jesus Christ, no. And it got to the point where I was threatened with a pink slip.

Which would mean going to the hospital against your will. Yeah. Going to inpatient against my will.

Because I had been sitting in a glass chamber watching other people in a mental health crisis around me. 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.

Chris: Yeah. Well, we often use the term behavioral health crisis, 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.

Soren: Yeah. Well, I think something specific to mental illness is, or rather mental health crisis is, is that it is so tailored to the individual. In order to help someone, you need a very niche situation specific to them, and it needs to be a community connection thing.

Whereas the clinical setting, at least that I engage with right now, there was no connection, there was no engagement.

Chris: And it didn’t feel individualized.

Soren: 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 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.

Chris: Yeah, it breaks my heart. And I know it’s so common. 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 any part of that experience.

Soren: I would love to see the day that someone is like, oh my goodness, my experience in the emergency department.

Chris: 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, 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’re 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, all right, I’ll take it. In the absence of anything else, it could be worse.

Soren: I agree. I agree. And I know people, and I’ve met other youth that have been in such a high, 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 two to three days.

Chris: That’s so insightful of you, though, to be able to say that now.

Soren: Yeah. Well, I understand the value of that, and I understand that yes, sometimes we just need to put people in a stasis chamber, but you can be productive with it, right?

Chris: Humane. Yeah, yeah. I think what 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. Your humanity was removed, and you were literally the patient bracelet number you were wearing. I was.

Soren: Yeah, yeah. It’s just my day to day.

Chris: Yeah. For folks that have not been in that experience, I don’t wish it on anyone. And as you were referencing, in the absence of another thing, if that is the best and only solution we have today, oh, I’m cautious to not get too much.

Soren: Yeah, well, there’s a fine line between burning a system down and changing and rebuilding a system, right? And I feel like our entire health field right now has gotten so necessarily corrupted, but bloated and inefficient, and it is not serving patients. But also, if we attempt to augment that, then it might disrupt the system, and people will die if the system is disrupted.

And it creates even more inefficiencies. So 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. You cannot have a maintenance break for a hospital.

You just can’t. Because there is no pause button.

Chris: Yeah, that’s super insightful. And as a provider, I, for decades, 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 pain.

And I’ve then heard, for some, the ability to say, but my kid is still here. So I agree with you. I love how you said that, that some systems might need to 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.

Soren: Well, 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 the experience of my friends.

Chris: 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? 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.

Soren: Yeah.

Chris: 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.

Soren: Yeah.

Chris: Well, we need to create like a roundtable of patient and providers so that we can cooperate to create a better system. 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, but I don’t feel like I was seen as a human while I was there. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, like I remember thinking like I was to some extent traumatized and reinvigorated in my like self-destructive ways through that experience, through that experience. Oh, wow. Because like, especially in my inpatient stay, the, 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.

Like she was like, oh, doesn’t this sound familiar? Oh yeah. Sorry.

I just did 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 that make people uncomfortable. 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. Because I was given a model to behave like, and like through my entire inpatient stay, I was hiding 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 because I was accumulating them. I had screws.

I had like backs of pens, like a metal bit. But 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 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, 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 for my last inpatient stay?

And they didn’t send me back because it was so unproductive. And then later that month, another like 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.

Soren: Yeah.

Chris: 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, which is, that’s crazy. I feel like, because 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.

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.

Tailor 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. Because 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. 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, yeah. Therapy 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.

And so how you’re talking about it now, it comes from a lot of conversations. Yeah, yeah. Like 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. Like 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.

Soren: Yeah, that’s right.

Chris: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah, you’re certainly wired in a way that makes this more comfortable.

Soren: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: 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. And 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, yeah. And I think before I developed emotionally and got out of that space, I didn’t know that I could change.

Soren: Yeah.

Chris: 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. Well, and you had this part of your internal narrative was that you weren’t deserving of a different life. You weren’t worthy of being any other way.

Well, like, 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 a evil person. And then I’d behave like that so that I could hate myself more.

And then other people would hate me around, hate other people around me would have distaste for me. And then it would be an excuse to crawl more into myself.

Soren: Yeah.

Chris: And socially isolate more.

Soren: Yeah.

Chris: It’s the classic self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, yeah. And I really, like, 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. Yeah. Instead of like, as we were talking about fear of the unknown earlier, like feeling like the future was an uncertainty.

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Right, right, right, right. Yeah, you know, I, it takes incredible courage 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, yeah. 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, like 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. Yeah.

Except that, you know, take this journey that we’re 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 it, I laughed at it.

Soren: I love it. Yeah.

Chris: It’s 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.

Yeah. Other people have experienced similar things to what I’ve 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. Yeah. 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. Well, 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. 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. 988 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.

Chris: I am Chris McGlellan.

Soren: I’m Soren Peterson.

Chris: Thank you so much and we’ll see you next time. See ya.

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The Inspired Insights podcast has been brought to you by Inspired Consulting Group, LLC. Edited and produced by Amanda Seidel. Music by Derek Herter.