Here’s the thing though, mental health doesn’t belong to professionals, it belongs to all of us. And I believe with the right tools, we can start to tell our own mental health stories. And once we do that, we can start helping each other. So let’s actually talk about what this means. This is mental health. Mental health is about feelings, stuff that’s happening inside your body, like right now, the gigantic pit stains I am hiding under this jacket. It’s about the thoughts, like “I hope that person in the front row is really enjoying this talk and doesn’t actually think I’m an idiot.” It’s about actions, like how I want to just run off this stage right now, but I’m not gonna do that. It’s about stress, like “How the heck am I going to get this talk under 15 minutes? I’m an academic, I talk for hours and people listen.” It’s about resilience. Applause for academics, yes, only [Applause], only at the country’s best university, we’re gonna do that. It’s about resilience, the ways in which we learn to face those challenges, like talking to my best friend backstage before this talk and him telling me, “You got this, Ali.” It’s about the important people in our lives, our family members, our community, our neighbors, everyone that we cherish.
Now, I want to dive into anxiety because I’m anxious, guy. I’m an anxiety guy, this is what I treat, and there’s a good chance many of you here struggle with this as well. 20% of you have experienced an anxiety disorder in the past year. And when you look up anxiety online, you see images like this. The thing is though, I’ve treated anxiety throughout my entire career, I have never seen anyone like this. Most of the time, anxiety actually looks like this, it’s invisible. You have no idea if someone might be struggling with this. In fact, someone who might have an anxiety disorder might not realize they have an anxiety disorder. So the first thing we have to do is we have to find the words. We have to find the words that describe those intense experiences we’re having inside of us. When you find the words to describe difficult emotions, it makes those emotions less intense, it makes them less scary, and you realize you’re not alone.
Finding the words is something I quite literally could not do when I was a kid. When I was in new situations around people I did not know, I’d freeze. I’d feel this intense panic inside and I’d run to my dad, “Pick me up, make me feel safe.” Makes for really cute photos, right? But this kid is struggling, this kid is terrified. It was so bad that in kindergarten I wouldn’t speak, and so my teachers put me in ESL because if you’re the only brown kid in class I guess you can’t speak English, let’s put him in ESL. They kept me in ESL until they realized I picked up on the teacher making fun of the kids for not learning English fast enough, then sent me back to kindergarten. I never told my parents about this, I never told anyone about this, that’s how I operated. It wasn’t until grad school when I was getting my PhD that I realized there was a name for the thing I had. Until I found the words to describe it, it’s called selective mutism, sounds like an X-Men superpower but all it means is in certain situations, someone’s pressed the mute button on you. Now fortunately, it’s a lot easier now to find the words to describe your experience, there are a wealth of mental health stories out there in podcasts, YouTube videos, TikToks. So what I challenge you all to do is find that piece of media where you say, “This is me, that experience, that is what I’ve gone through.” And then what we want to do is start to explore the impact. What has the impact been of experiencing this mental health thing that you have gone through? How has it changed you? How has it created new values? How has it fundamentally shifted your beliefs?
When I look at this picture of me from middle school, my first reaction is, “Who the hell took this picture? It’s so sad, there’s no one in there.” How did this person find this picture of me at school and no one else is on the playground? I hate this picture and it also so perfectly captures how I felt in that moment, alone, terrified, trying desperately to look cool with that hat backwards which is totally not working for me. And at the same time, when they explore the impact, I became someone who became very sensitive to the experience of anxiety. I befriended those who also were anxious, I became a good listener, and it’s probably because of these things that I went on to the mental health field. You can do this as simply by journaling for 20 minutes a day for four days in a row. That’s enough time to start to explore the impact that a mental health experience has had on your life. But you need the conditions to be right. And what I mean by that is you have to be able to stay present in the situation you’re in, stay present in your mind despite the thoughts you’re having, and stay present in your body despite the emotional experiences you’re having. To help you understand that, I need to tell you about the worst day of my life.
This is the day I lost my brother to suicide. After he died, everything changed. I took down every photo I had of him, I would avoid talking about him, if I met new people I would pretend to be an only child. One day, working at the hospital shortly after my brother died, I had to see a patient who had a bipolar depression diagnosis, the same illness my brother died from, and I panicked, I froze, I felt like that little kindergarten kid, I couldn’t go in the room and I started avoiding seeing patients. So of course, I took out a template of an email that I share with my patients when I help them get help from their professors, from their bosses, where I find the words to describe my emotional experience, I list the ways I’ve been impacted by it, and I ask for help. Just kidding, I didn’t do that, I avoided, I somehow pretended like everything’s gonna be totally okay and it wasn’t. My supervisor figured it out, it’s kind of obvious, “Hey Ali, you’re not seeing patients anymore, what gives?” We had to have a big intervention about it, I got in trouble, I was ashamed, I was embarrassed, and my supervisor said, “Had I known you were struggling, I would have helped you, we would have found a way through this.” And it took me five years, five years before I could be present and look at those pictures of my brother, I could be present in front of other people and have these conversations, and I’ve had a lot of them, with therapists, with friends, with family, with random strangers like you. And what I’ve learned helps me the most in these moments is to ground myself, like quite literally, I focus on the feeling of the earth beneath me, of the ground supporting me, and it just helps me to be present and get through. You can do this too using five, four, three, two, one. Looking at five things in the environment when you start to feel overwhelmed, touching four different textures to feel more grounded, listening to three different sounds, noticing two different smells, observing the taste in your mouth. Those five years were not just spent avoiding, those were the five years where I was healing the wound of my brother’s death. And what I’ve learned is this is very common when you’ve gone through complicated grief.
I’ve learned that we tell stories about our scars, not our wounds. We tell stories about our scars, not our wounds. And it’s almost impossible to know what is a wound and what is a scar until you try, until you find one person you trust, you share one part of your story, and if you get overwhelmed, that’s okay, you back off and you try again another day. The person I’ve started sharing my stories with the most is my dad, and he has started to do the same. In fact, he started to share stories that he’s never told me in his life, like the story of my great-grandmother. Her husband died unexpectedly, tragically, when they were very young. They had two children, one newborn, two sons, and after her husband died, she no longer felt safe in the village where they lived. So one night, my great-grandmother took her two young sons, disguised herself as a man, and fled via horseback for miles and miles and miles. She went until she got to her family. My dad told me the story and I was like, “Abuji, you’re telling me this now after 35 years? You’re telling me this story?” This kid who felt so alone, so scared, could have really used this story because when I heard this story, I felt connected and strong. I also really love the Mulan vibes in this story, it’s pretty cool. My dad said, “I was too tired from work when I came home, I just wanted to be with family, talking about the past just wasn’t something I did.” I could relate to that, not wanting to talk about things, feeling frozen, feeling stuck. And what I’ve learned is that was a wound for my father. My great-grandmother’s story represents resilience to me and courage, but to him, it represents loss and the trauma that became the partition of India. He needed that time to heal and he was coping in the best way he could. You know, our mental health is not this individual thing, our stories go back generations, and the experiences we’re having today will continue to live long into the future. I thought my story was one of fear and now I understand that my family story is one of courage, the courage to do the right thing even when you’re afraid of what might happen. And this is what I promised to do with my daughter, continue telling our story in the way my father has shared with me because when we find the courage to be vulnerable with one another, we unlock that thing that can heal generations. When we’re authentic with one another, we build the bridge that helps deepen our relationships with the people we love. And it is never too late to share that story.