The Bipolar Social Club | Paul English | TEDxBoston
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV1c_0IuC8w Video ID: AV1c_0IuC8w ============================================================ Transcriber: Divine Dabire Reviewer: Joana Lazzarotto I'm going to talk today about the power of community in alleviating suffering, specifically the Bipolar Social Club, which is an organization of people around the world that have bipolar illness and are helping each other on their journeys. Everyone in this crowd today has good days and bad days. We have days we’re incredibly, incredibly sad and days we’re just full of energy, where we wake up on the right side of the bed and we feel like Superman. However, to be a bipolar person and experience these mood swings is really a whole nother level. On the manic side, people will go days without sleep. They will speak rapidly, they will disconnect from people, and they'll make a bunch of reckless decisions about their life, their work, their friendship. On the depressive side, someone with bipolar illness will often be trapped in their bedroom for days or weeks at a time, and ultimately often lose the will to live. 4.4% of people in the United States are diagnosed with bipolar illness. That's about 11 million people. If you extend that to the people they touch in their families, it’s about anywhere from 20 to 30 million people in the US that are impacted by this disease. Between 30 to 40% of people with bipolar illness have attempted suicide at least once in their life. People with bipolar illness’ life expectancy is only 67 years old. I applied for life insurance last year and got denied because of this. There are many well known people with bipolar illness, everyone from Selena Gomez to Winston Churchill. This list, on the one hand, might inspire you to think that it’s possible to live a great life with bipolar illness, “Look at these famous people!” But there's also a lot of darkness on this screen. Many of the people on the screen died due to their bipolar illness or due to addictions associated with it. People have asked me how I've been successful with bipolar illness. These are some of the companies I've created. Kayak is a company that I don’t think I could’ve created if I didn’t have bipolar illness. The energy and the creativity and the hours that I put in were helped by that. This includes companies I’m working on today. Deets.com is a travel company, Lola.com is a dating company. And all these companies, I think benefited from that drive for creation. I've also created a number of nonprofits. One other familiar condition for people with bipolar illness is we’re often filled with grandiosity. You think you’re gonna cure cancer, somedays you wake up and you just feel like anything can happen. [Summits Education.] That was an organization created in Haiti. We now have 40 schools and 10,000 students and 350 educators that we help train on how to take care of those students. That was a crazy thing to take on to think that we could educate 10,000 students, [Embrace Boston] in the center. This is born by myself visiting the MLK Memorial in San Francisco, seeing the great waterfall and the words of MLK and thinking, I knew that MLK and Coretta had roots in Boston. Why don’t we have something like this in Boston? On the plane ride home from San Francisco, I wrote like a 20 page plan about things we could do to raise the money to make this happen. It did take me 5,5 years as an entrepreneur. I was very disappointed. I thought it’d take me a year, if not maybe a month or something. And then the Winter walk for homelessness is another organization that I created. I’ve spent time with Dr Jim O’Connell on the night Van leaving Pine Street Inn, and thought we’d need to have more people in the city know about this population. Last year was our seventh year. We had 4000 walkers. We've raised millions of dollars for homeless service organizations. And then lastly the Bipolar Social Club, which I’ll tell you a little bit more about. My own journey started in my 20s. Probably, in fact, in my teens and my 20s, I was troubled by mania: talking very, very rapidly, disconnecting from people, feeling grandiosity, often irritated, often angry, participating in some reckless behaviors. I want to thank my brother Dan English for bailing me out of jail a few times, and also for keeping a secret what I was in jail for. So thanks Dan to that. I will say that I suffered in silence for years. I tried to keep it a secret from my family. My grandmother was severely bipolar, as was one of my aunts, and I didn't want to be sick like them. I kept a yellow piece of paper on my medicine cabinet that I called my ADLs, or Activities of Daily Living, and on days and weeks when I was terribly depressed and trapped, I would look at that list and say, brush your teeth, take a shower, and had just the very basic things to do to help me get through the day. I'm a big believer in fake it till you make it. Try to fake a smile when you don't feel like smiling, and sometimes that’ll allow you to connect with people in a way that you couldn’t do if yo’reu just completely depressed. Eventually, I did seek help from professionals locally here at MGH, and it took me years to find the right medications and the right therapy that would help me. One of the biggest, worst parts of mental health is the stigma that comes along with it. The stigma with bipolar and with all types of mental health, the worst thing about it is it keeps people from seeking help. It keeps people keeping this as a secret. I've been talking about my bipolar illness now for about ten years. Several years ago, a top venture capitalist asked me to stop talking about it cause he thought it looked bad. That’s a VC I will not do business with again. Another, perhaps the worst for me are the panic attacks. These can be hours of terror, fear that something happened to someone in my family. And, the heart pounding, sweating, crying and getting worse and worse, especially in the early mornings for me. I used to lay on my bedroom floor, staring at the windowsill, praying that the sun would come up and not sure that it would. This is my therapist, Jack green. In this photo. He’s 85 years old. He’s passed away now. He was off in the other end of the line for me when I had a panic attack at four in the morning. One time after he calmed me down, it maybe was 4:30 at this point, I was feeling okay and like I could get to sleep. And then I realized that I woke this older gentleman in the middle of the night, and I started getting panicky again. And Jack, with his typical humor, said to me, “Don’t worry about it. You just give me the gift of falling asleep twice tonight.” Overall, with bipolar and any mental illness, secrecy and isolation are the enemy of healing. This is where you get stuck. This is the danger zone where people often end up killing themselves. So the one thing I would ask you as an audience is: Don’t let people get isolated and help them tell their story. The first thing you need to do in escaping or walking through bipolar or mental illness is building a community. I would start this very small, three people: pick one person in your family, pick one of your friends, pick one person you work with, then tell them your secret. You'll find they will lean in and they will help you get through it. I built my own community over the last ten years. This is my friend Jake from New Zealand. He was a top podcaster. He interviewed me for one of his shows several years ago, and we talked frequently about our diagnosis. A few years ago, Jake moved to Kenya. We talked bout creating a podcast together and maybe even a venture fund in Kenya. Jake is one of the ones who didn’t make it and he ended up killing himself in Kenya. As a result of Jake's death, I created the Bipolar Social Club to help people like Jake and like myself so that we are not isolated and so that we do have a community. Some people have asked me, how can you be bipolar and had success, success in the professional life, but also success in personal life. I have a fiance. I'll be getting married soon. I have great family, great friends. I think the, On the bipolar side, the two things that have helped me in my professional career has been the creativity fueled by hypomanic energy bursts. I just work for hours and hours. At Kayak, when my designer, Lincoln Jackson, will get an email at three in the morning, he’ll email me back and say, Is this the beginning or the end of your day? Sometimes it’s one, sometimes the other. Also the grandiosity, believing I could make something happen. This is great for fueling people, for doing invention. For me, it’s helped by being open that I don’t have a secret to hide anymore. having professionals help me through this illness, particularly some doctors at MGH and also the study of Buddhism has helped me quite a bit. There's a couple of things in particular that I learned from Buddhism, which helped me along my journey. Buddhism believes that suffering is universal and suffering is caused by an attachment to the world that’s not as it is. I'm a big fan of the Serenity Prayer. [God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.] This has made a world of difference to me. When something happens to me that’s just upsetting, I think, “can I fix this?” If I can’t fix it, I just let it go. If someone hurts me, I don’t hold a grudge, I just let it go. And this has helped me reduce things that otherwise would make me suffer, even in small ways. I used to have a lot of anger in my teenage years, and in my 20s. I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh, who’s a Vietnamese Buddhist that anger’s a choice. There’s a saying in Buddhism that anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. And so you can make a decision. When someone cuts you off in traffic, you could get mad at them. But if you just accept it, you don't get mad, and you don’t plague yourself with that anger and the harm that anger is going to bring upon your body. Over the last year, I’ve worked on this community, the bipolar social club.org. Right now we’re just about a 100 members. We have visions of this growing chapter by chapter, city by city. It's an email list. We have emails every day from people through wild mood swings telling what's happening in their life, what reckless decisions they might be making, or if they're trapped on their bedroom floors, like many of us have been. It's a judgment free zone. There's deep, deep empathy, and people are filled with love and support. One of the members of our community has told me that he has a great, great therapist, but she's not bipolar, and he has trusted this community more than his therapists and more than his friends and family. I think communities like this can be created for any type of mental illness or any type of suffering. It's really meant the world of difference to us. Last quote Steve Jobs. [“Here’s to the crazy ones, the ones who see things differently.“] My favorite word is neurodiversity. And I think people that think differently have really important role in the world, and that includes bipolar people. Thank you.