Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Dan Mathews: Prostitutes, PETA, and A Schizophrenic Success Story

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

Dan Mathews, Writer and long-time activist with the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), openly celebrates his late mother, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Dan regales the audience with tales about his mother’s ability to form lasting and meaningful relationships, in spite of her challenges. Through their discussion of Dan’s mom, Mayim & Dan reexamine the modern conception of psychotic disorders, unpacking the artistic, religious, and social contexts of illness. BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's interesting you say that it's hard to believe that she was schizophrenic, but I wanted to portray her as this 20 person. I mean, I was dating a guy who was actually a prostitute. My mom really loved him, and I told her how he supported himself, and she said, Danny, never, ever refer to him as a hustler. Just say that he's in real estate and manages a very large rental property. Hi, I am I.M. Biallek, and welcome to my breakdown. This is the place where we break things down, so you don't have to. It's my and biolics breakdown She's going to break it down for you

Because you know she knows a thing or two And now she's going to break down It's a breakdown She's going to break it down We have a really neat episode today We're going to be talking to author Dan Matthews Who's Dan Matthews?

Well, he's the senior vice president of PETA But we're not going to be talking to him About people for the Ethical Treatment of Animals We're going to be talking about his book Like Crazy Life with My Mother and her invisible friends. It's like the kind of book, I wish you would just trust me

and please buy it because it's like I want to say things about it. I don't want to say things about it, but we're going to talk to him about what it was like growing up with a mother who was schizophrenic and undiagnosed until she was in her 80s

and what that was like. He moved his mother in with him when he was 40 and it's an unbelievable story. But first, I'd like to introduce everybody's favorite ray of sunshine, Jonathan Cohen. Hi, Ma'am. Hi, Jonathan.

You're the voice in my head. We will be talking about voices in people's heads, and Jonathan keeps finding different ways today to tell me that he hears my voice in his head. Sometimes I think it means because he's wearing AirPods, or just he hears my voice echoing in his head. Just like when I'm going around my daily life. What does my voice say, Jonathan?

Are you going to eat that? Is that what you're going to have for lunch? are you taking care of yourself? You're going to sleep now? It's a little early you go to sleep. What does your mom's voice sound like? Also that? I had to tune her out.

Just kidding, Mom. Just slid right in there. Although I did try to start calling my mother by her first name as Dan talks about calling his mother by her first name. And my mother did not like that at all. Well, secrets out of the bag. You still call her by her first name. When I call her, she and I have made an agreement that I will call her mom or mother.

When you talk about her, you call her your mom. I don't call her ma. John and I are wearing purple today. He's also wearing a hoodie over the purple. We're wearing different shades of purple because we're different people. I know a lot of you listening might think they're the same person. Someone yesterday asked if we're siblings. And you said yes.

Except I'm the brother and he's the sister. But, um, word of the day. Maim, let's do a word of the day, which no one's going to expect. It's called schizoaffective disorder. Schizoaffective disorder has symptoms or features of schizophrenia, like hallucinations or delusions. But it also has mood disorder symptoms, like depression or mania. So there's two kinds of schizoaffective disorder. There's the bipolar type, meaning you're bipolar and also you have symptoms of schizophrenia,

or you just experience depression and then you have features of schizophrenia. So those are kind of your two choices. This is kind of one of those diagnoses that reminds us we're all just on a spectrum here. It's just chemicals. They're floating around because of your genetics. They're floating around because of your environment. If you've experienced trauma, you're going to get a whole different set that people who don't experience trauma get. The features of schizoaffective disorder that often do occur in schizophrenia

are things like delusions. Do you know what a delusion is, Jonathan? I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but it's like a word that we use, but do you know what delusions means? I mean, isn't it like a perception of something that is not real or the distortion of something that is real? You're so smart. Have that voice in your head later today. You're so smart, Jonathan Cohen. I'm going to plus that up. Delusions are false, fixed beliefs that you hold despite evidence to the contrary. People talk about delusions of grandeur, which often occurs in mania or manic episodes of bipolar disorder. Many artists have delusions of grandeur. Another feature of schizophrenia would be hallucinations.

Being incoherent. That's something that also happens in schizophrenia. This is a weird catch-all, bizarre or unusual behavior. Have you ever participated in bizarre or unusual behavior, Jonathan? I'm looking at your face and it's about to lie. Of course. I mean, everybody has. Well, I was going to say, I don't want to make light of the situation, but like, yeah, of course.

Right. Well, no, but the point is, yeah, of course. I mean, a lot of my life, I'm just like, really, this is happening? You are an exceptionally bizarre and unusual person. In isolation, that does not mean you are schizophrenic. You know, the notion of, like, impaired occupational functioning, like not being able to keep a job, not having good social functioning. Okay, but hold on. The terminology bizarre and unusual is.

very subjective. What is bizarre and unusual to one is is totally normal to another. Says someone who has a bizarre and unusual pattern of behavior. In and of itself, bizarre and unusual behavior is not diagnostic criteria, but with these other things, delusions, hallucinations, having trouble keeping jobs and having social interactions, problems managing personal care, like when you combine all these things with then a combination of mania and depression or a depressive episode, that's when you start hearing this diagnosis of schizoaffective. Suicidal thoughts will sometimes also happen in schizoaffective disorder, especially if it's of the depressed type or, you know, in manic depression as well.

Also, certain mind-altering drugs can increase these symptoms. That happens in schizophrenia as well, and Dan Matthews will talk about how his mother avoided that. And in addition, people who have schizoaffective disorder or live with schizoaffective disorder are also at increased risk of a lot of the same challenges that people who are schizophrenic are at risk of, you know, interpersonal conflicts, isolating suicide, suicidal attempts or thoughts, also like substance abuse problem, you know, all the things that you do to try and make those things go away. Yeah. So that's the word of the day. I'd like to talk about Dan Matthews, who's going to be joining us in a minute. The New York Times called him such a nice zealot for his work

with PETA. He started as a volunteer, and he'll talk a little bit about that. He started as a volunteer for PETA as a young fella and then became a receptionist. And some of the amazing things he's done, he launched Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur campaign, which really put PETA on the board in 1992. I remember that I was still in high school and not even yet a vegetarian. And I remember hearing about that. He's dressed up as a carrot in Kansas, a cow in Denver. He crashed a furrier's fashion show in Milan dressed as a priest. He has convinced Calvin Klein to stop designing with fur. He He has pressured GM to stop using animals in crash tests. He has lobbied Gillette to halt tests on animals, and he does this all in very, very elaborate

and interesting ways. He leads a raid. He storms places. Like, he's a big, big PETA personality. But what he's here to talk about today is his second book. He wrote a memoir called Committed, which has been published in a ton of different countries. But he decided to write a memoir because the most interesting person in his first memoir was his mother, who went by the name Perry, among other names. And he wrote this really, really beautiful

book, which is a very different perspective on schizophrenia. If you've got any heartstrings left, he's going to tug at them. So if you're a Scrooge, grab a tissue. It's a really, really beautiful story. It is really an honor to welcome Dan Matthews. Break it down. Dan, Dan, Dan, thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. The first thing I like, everyone, to remember is that I'm a vegan too. Yes. We're not going to talk about veganism the whole time, but I do want to acknowledge what a tremendous force you are in the vegan world, and you were instrumental in the I'd rather go naked

than wear fur campaign, which for many people was the first time that they heard of PETA. I actually, it might have been the first time that I heard of PETA. Wow. What year was that? The first one was 1992. Wow, I was in high school. Yeah, I was still in high school. We did it out of desperation.

It didn't start as a celebrity ad campaign. It started in the streets of Tokyo when there was this huge international fur convention in Tokyo. They were trying to put fur into the Japanese economy. And so we tried to get the Japanese group to do a protest, but they said people frown on protesters in Japan. It's considered rude. And they would just say a Buddhist prayer and pass out leaflets. And we thought, well, that's great, but there needs to be a compliment. complimentary action. And my friend Julia and I, she quit her job and came with me and we decided to

pretend that we were an American stripper couple and that we flew to Tokyo to do our striptees outside the fur fair with a banner that said we'd rather go naked than wear fur in Japanese in the front and English in the back. And the Japanese groups begged us to not do it. But the troubled teen volunteers of the Japanese group said it was the best thing they ever heard. And on the slide, they translated the news release, painted the banner, came down to the site with us, and it was a mob scene. And that's how it started. Just desperation in the streets. American strippers. That's how Miami and I travel. That's how we do all of our protests. It's really, it's such an honor to speak to you just as a vegan and as an activist for your role in that.

I also love that you started as a receptionist there at Peter. That's right. Volunteer, volunteer. And then receptionists, I started when I was fresh out of college from A.U. in 1985, I was 20 years old. I was not even of drinking age. And now it's been almost 38 years later, and I'm still there. Incredible. And I really is like, and I hope it comes through in my new book. My mom was the person who really championed me doing this when it was completely counterculture. She loved it when I would get arrested and protest. Yeah, I mean, this was a long time ago. And like I said, that campaign came out. I was a junior in high school. I was not even a vegetarian yet.

I wanted to be. You're here today, not just to make this vegan heart so happy, but you have written this book, and it's called Like Crazy, Life with My Mother and Her Invisible Friends. This is an unbelievable book. It's an unbelievable book in that you write so eloquently and so beautifully, and it's such a, I hesitate to say it's a fun read, but it is really, it is so much fun. just to learn about your life and what you were like, ultimately your decision to take in your mother to live with you, which that in and of itself, if we know nothing else about you. What's funny is I wrote a memoir more about how I became,

you know, I went from a gay-bashed kid in high school to a big animal rights global advocate. That was my first book committed. And my mother was everybody's favorite character in that book, even though there was, you know, sex symbols and fashion designers and rock stars and all that. My mom was everyone's favorite character. And after I wrote that book, came out in 2007 and came out in like a dozen other countries, I started thinking about how really she made everything possible for me because of her intimate,

intuitive bond with animals, ever since I can remember, we would move all the time. We would move in shopping carts, often didn't have a phone or whatever. She was a, it was a very odd upbringing of my, you know, single mother and me and my two brothers. But the bond with animals, she had us bring in animals that were being, cats that were being abused in the streets, kids throwing rocks at pregnant cats was our first one. And she always took, even though we lived in an apartment that didn't allow any animals, she said we've got to look out for the animals. And we lived in an apartment that allowed none.

And we had litter, strays in every closet, you know, got them spayed, neutered, all that stuff. And it wasn't until later, you know, that was when I first at an early age became really attuned to animals and how they need protecting. But then my mother was always a bit out of her mind. She was brilliant and she was hilarious and she was witty. But there would be this disconnect some time where she would have this gloom that would descend on her. And when I was growing up, my brothers and I just thought it was damaged from her having grown up in the orphanages during the Depression. And she would never really talk about her early years very much. And after I released my first book, I thought, you know what?

I really owe so much to her. And she was kind of going off the skids. You know, she was just between apartments all the time. My brothers and I would always take turns helping her get apartments. And I thought, you know, now when I was, you know, in the AIDS era of the 80s and 90s, she would look after all of my friends whose own parents turned out because they were kids. Okay. So hold on that. There's so many things.

There's so many things. So, you know, I mean, I'm sure you heard every adjective. I'm sure you used every adjective. She was eccentric. She was, you know, cookie. She was out there. She was an unusual woman. And I believe you described the first time that you knew something was definitely off.

And I just may cry and not stop as I talked to you. I think you were nine, you said. Correct? Yep. And you had this experience where she greeted, you were, you were away. and you came back, and she picked up in the airport. Yep, L-A-X. Right.

And the way you described it also was that she had like a mascara-stained face. And there wasn't really a sense of composure about her. Like she looked okay, but she wasn't okay. And it was kind of the first time that you realized that the story that she had in her head, it's not that it just wasn't true. It's that she had an entirely different reality inside of her. but you were a child. And as children, we kind of like, whatever is around us is kind of what's normal.

But it was at that point that you knew like, hmm, but it's many years from nine until we see this story unfold. It was not until your mother was, as you say, in her ninth decade of life that she was formally diagnosed as a schizophrenic. and many people think about schizophrenia, and it was one of the first mental illness categories that I ever explained to my children because here in Los Angeles, you know, there are a lot of people experiencing homelessness. And one of the things they would ask me is why do people, like, why are they yelling and why are they talking to themselves and what's going on? And one of the things with schizophrenia that often happens is hallucinations and delusions. And what I explained to my children is that they're completely real to the person having.

them. They're not seeing things. They're not hearing things. Like even the language that we use around schizophrenia, their brains are producing things that to them are real because the brain is producing them in ways that are completely consistent with everything else that we experience as reality. So your mother, your mother was not that person, right? She was like she didn't live in the street. She just coasted it. Right. Right. I mean, like literally when I was a kid, we moved in shopping carts because we didn't have a car. We would have candlelight dinners because the electricity was cut off. The thing that's confusing thing about schizophrenia to most people, I think, is that there's 40 versions of it. You can have visual hallucinations, you can have audio hallucinations.

You can have paranoia or not paranoia. Right. Right. Or it can be a creative, I mean, there's, like, there's a thing I write in the book where some people hear sounds in their head and write top ten pop songs or award-winning symphonies, other people can't put all those sounds together, but they still hear them. And there's a fine line between creativity and insanity. And my mom straddled that line so well. She was always a little bit crackers, and I actually moved away from home after high school immediately to get away from it so that I could get my own life going and not have to feel like there was constant drama. But then when I was 40, and I decided to move her in, because she, I really owed so much of my life being a lifelong animal activist to her.

So I moved to her, I bought this house here, 1870 house in Portsmouth, Virginia, just a few blocks from the harbor, and moved her in, never had owned a home before, you know, didn't know how to fix things. My mother was the same to us, a screwdriver, was a cocktail, not a tool. And we just were these two kind of helpless people just trying to make it work out in this dilapidated fix her up her house. But there was, you know, I just made the decision that I had to do it. And it was, it was an adventure. Luckily, within a year of moving her in, I met my future husband, Jack. And like my mom was an orphan. She grew up an orphanages. Jack also, he was adopted three times,

actually. And so he and my mom bonded instantly. There was an orphan bond that I never had witnessed before. But they bonded so, so firmly over that. Plus, you know, Jack grew up in a Catholic military family where he didn't feel comfortable coming out, had four kids. And so they bonded. She helped nurture him into coming out and being openly gay. So he ended up moving in after a year or so. And then we just had this phenomenal nucleus. It was this modern family, the three of us, Jack's ex-wife, who's a wonderful Latina. They're four kids. Now we've got grandkids. It became this bizarre life. But as soon as my mom went from her 70s into her 80s. Hold on one second, because I want to finish kind of like this portion of

Dan's life before we kind of go into sort of this next phase. You know, when people come out now, it's so different, still challenging, still complicated. We still live in a homophobic, transphobic, you know, patriarchal structure of insanity. But the time when you grew up and the time when you came out and your friend, it was a very, very different climate. And also, so the notion that your mother you know, was able to connect that way. Tell us a little bit about that because it's such a beautiful story. Well, I grew up in Orange County in Costa Mesa and I was in junior high at age 13 when the Briggs initiative was introduced in California. And that was a bill sponsored by Orange County Republicans, where I was from, to make it illegal for gays to not only teach in school, but to be supportive

of gay rights. And when you're 13 and everyone, I'm already getting gay bashed, it's like a green light and its stamp of approval for everybody to be anti-gay. And so it was really surreal. And of course, at 13, I remember thinking, I wonder if it's illegal for me as a gay to even attend school. Wouldn't that be awesome? I wouldn't have to go to school. I could just move some, move to Italy or something. It was just a strange time. That was right when Harvey Milk made his entrance into the national stage. But my mom would champion me when I would get beat up at school. She would come in and wipe the floor with these kids' parents and with the vice principals and at the school. But anyways, just a few years later, when AIDS hit, my best childhood friend Michael Georgia

contracted it. And his own parents, they told him he was gay and that he had AIDS at the same time. That was the double whammy in the 80s. A lot of people hadn't come out when they got AIDS. His mother told him, I'd rather you told me you were a serial killer. And disowned him. And so my mom moved in with him to care for him as he was going down. and would call and put him on the phone,

even when he was going into a coma and just kept his spirits up. The best thing about my mom is that no matter what was happening, she had a laugh. She was one of these gallows humor people. She trained me early on to appreciate good black humor. It's just nothing helps you get through a rough time

like a good, sick joke. You know, dark, dark humor is just, it's something that's always been in my life. And I don't think I probably could have survived some of the things, unless I was able to laugh at them. My MBialx breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful.

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And people have this idea that they're violent, drug-abusing, alcoholic batterers. It's just the opposite. Schizophrenics actually have less tendency to be violent. And when my mom was, you know, after a spectacular breakdown, which I write about in the book, which took place right in this room, actually, and I had to lure out of the house. She refused to see any doctors. I had to lure her out of the house to pretend we were going to Krispy Cream. And instead, we were going to the senior psych ward where I was able to get her admitted.

And as soon as she was diagnosed, it just was like. like five decades, you know, 45 years just made clear for me. This was the explanation for all of this. But she was smart enough to know that if she ever copped being skits in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, she would have lost her job, lost her kids, been in a lobotomized. And so she very carefully stayed away from any psychologist, psychiatrist. Jonathan and I talk a lot on this podcast about sort of, you know, comorbidity, the things that occur together, you know, often with mental illness. And one of the things you said is that, you know, for whatever reason,

the fact that she did not become, you know, someone who relied on alcohol or street drugs, you know, that actually kind of in some ways protected her because it's sort of there was, I don't want to say less interference, but there was less added complexity to what was already a very, very delicate, you know, I mean, that's what struck me. She was a sort of, strong woman, but there was also a real, there was a real fragility to her. And, you know, I mean, I was telling Jonathan the, when you tried to figure out which medications might be causing her extra. Okay. So hold on. So, okay. Oh, the drug sample. Yeah, yeah. That was like, I mean, this blew my mind. So, so when she hit her 70s, right? So you had been living with her, how old was she

when, I'm trying to do the math? You were 40. How old was she when she moved in with? She was 77 when she moved in. Okay, so she was 77. After you moved her in, what started happening is what happens, honestly, with many people of that age and beyond, which is what can look like some aspects of dementia. And that can be, you know, generally confusion, you know, trouble with cognitive tasks. There can be some agitation, sometimes not really knowing exactly where you are. So you started seeing things, though, that began progressing. into more the complexity.

It was almost as if some of her inhibition went away, you know, in that anything that was inhibiting all of those thoughts, those fears, those stories, it's kind of like they all came out at you. And one of the things that you noticed is she had a lot of medications that she took.

And you had said she would kind of like collect them, you know, over the years, like, oh, here's this, here's this. But what you did is you did a very brave experiment, which I do not recommend. But what you did is you tried, you were still. It was the opioids. This was at the very beginning of the opioid epidemic.

Exactly. And so what you did is you still, I mean, also weren't like, oh, she must be schizophrenic. Let's get her to a doctor. You were like. No idea. Had no idea. Right. And that's what's amazing. So you said, let's take all these pills in a very controlled.

safe environment. And let's see what happened. And you went through them. Was it with Jack? No, it was with my good friend, my good friend David Cohen from DC who was also really, really close with my mom. Okay. So you and David, that's right, it wasn't Jack. So you and David, again, did a very, very controlled, I approve as a scientist, very controlled experiment. It's the only thing I can approve of publicly. But what you did is you tried to figure out like, oh, maybe one of these pills is doing it. And what you discovered is that indeed, some of these medications were incredibly confusing. They caused a deep, which is, you know, why they are abused in many situations. But this was like, I think one of my favorite endings to a chapter. And you're a very good writer. But this ending to

the chapter was like, after this whole experiment of taking all these different drugs and like literally charting, you know, well, this one did this. Got to throw that out. Well, this one did, oh, we can't keep Oh, Vicodin works, but not as much as she's taking. And you literally ended the chapter by saying, we figured it out. We thought we had figured it out. Like we've got her on the right pills, not the wrong ones. Everything's going to be fine. Yeah, there was one pill that we sampled.

And one of my best friends is a doctor, Jeff Holliday, because his last name is Holiday, of course we all call him Doc Holliday. But he said she's on too many, and he was very good when I first moved her back, getting her acclimated. And he said she's on way too many painkillers. You've got to tell her to pick one. So as you said, yes, David came down and we did a little control group sample over a long weekend. It was one.

I think it was the big dose of gabapentin. We couldn't even follow the plot on Green Acres. And we thought, we're like big guys and she's this frail woman. And, you know, this just so we, it was an interesting thing. But we did think we had solved it. We thought we had solved it. It's an exceptionally difficult part of the book when that kind of final unraveling, you know, that leads you to have to fool her to get her help.

But I remember when I got to that section, the thing that was really beautiful about this book is like, it was almost over. And I don't mean that I wanted the book to end. I meant that the beauty of your story and your storytelling was in telling what Perry was like. And you called her Perry. She changed her name every time she moved.

I love that. And she, Perry Lawrence, she wanted a unisex name. And so she was living in Palm Springs at the time. She was Eleanor Berg, was I think her birth name and all these other different things. Names we didn't even know, but she actually called me from Palm Springs and said, I think I want to change my name to Perry Lawrence. And they'll give you an ID here if you're an old lady and you come in with a piece of mail that has that name on it. So send me a postcard address to Perry Lawrence. And if I like the feel of it, I'll take it to the DMV. She loved it. And that's how she got her

driver's license. I'm not kidding. When you get to this part of the story, The bulk of the story is really about your love for her, your care for her, the adventures, really, that being in her life brought you. Tell us a little bit about that kind of unraveling how you made that decision to kind of get her help and what that was like. Well, and it's the reason I wrote the whole book is that, you know, I care for old people in this country is pretty shoddy. And as we saw with the tragedy of COVID, so many people are just parked in nursing homes. And they just, people write them off. And I studied in Italy. I lived in Italy for a while.

And then they have a totally different outlook on seniors. They value them and appreciate them. And it's, I do too. I've always loved old people. Even when I was young, I didn't like my peers. I preferred older people. She had so much to offer, but she was just not getting this treatment. And so it was dragging her kicking and screaming to get some.

treatment. But as soon as she was diagnosed, schizophrenic, and while she was still in the psych ward for a few weeks, I read every memoir there was on schizophrenia. And I can tell you, 90% of them are really dismal. It's about how this family's entire lives were ruined. These sisters had to change their name so their mother couldn't find them. They were all really, really dramatic. And I thought, you know what? there has never been a book about a highly functioning, witty, intelligent schizophrenic who somehow struggled by. Schizophrenc is always portrayed as these sad victims of circumstance and of their own biochemistry. But when as soon as I read that, and I read one of the most recent schizophrenia memoirs in which a neurologist said, all of the written material, all of the published

scientific reports, all of the books are about schizophrenics who received care early. on and were studied in a controlled environment, whether in a facility or their, you know, parent went to visit them every three months. And I thought, oh my God, the bitch lived with me for five years. I can really relay the details of what it's like for someone who's never been treated into their 80s. And I felt it was my obligation, in addition to my animal rights work during the daytime at PETA, I felt it was my obligation to really tell her story because I feel like she's such an enjoyable character. She has such a great twisted sense. sense of humor. She has such compassion, such in the vanguard of animal rights, gay rights,

you know, all these things, that I wanted to portray a character, a real life character, who was kind of like a beleaguered survivor who just crawled through rather than a victim, a sad victim. And that's why I wrote the book. And I also felt it was important to write a funny book, even funny situations in the senior psych word, because I think there's a funny side to everything. And let's face it, we can get through the life right now is full of so much negativity and drama everywhere you turn. And I thought this pill needs to be sugarcoded a little bit so that people will read it if they didn't otherwise want to read a book about mental health or schizophrenia because it's a vivid portrayal of someone who actually made it into her 80s

without being treated. But then got treated and all the voices, most of the voices, dissipated by the last year of her life. And so it was a, it was a story that I think, needed to be told. Yeah, and I think also that's sort of what was so, you know, enjoyable about the way you tell this story, because it's almost like, I don't want to say that, you know, that you forget that she's schizophrenic as you're reading this book, you know, because if you read, you know, if you read the flap or you read the back, you know, you know. But what really struck me was that it's, you know, it's such a mother's son, loving, loving, beautiful journey that you take together. just also how much you included her in your life, how much she was a part of your and Jack's growth.

And, you know, I just, I love that as a persona, you know, and I love that as her persona. And, you know, there's a, there's pictures, you know, every chapter. And I think one of my favorite ones is when she's dressed as Amy Winehouse. And I was like, Halloween is a major event. Correct. And so like, and I just loved that, um, it's just such an awesome picture. And, you know, she was a lot of fun. You know, the details leading up to her being hospitalized and sort of what that was like, you know, it's heartbreaking and it's also really, really beautiful because she got to then be home, you know, in her space.

And I've been through hospice with my father. And so also just, you know, anytime I read about someone's experience with that transition, you know, it's obviously very emotional, but it's so particular, you know, to the person. And, you know, people say like, you know, we die the way we live. And there was so much joy and kind of creative spirit to how you lived your life with her, you know, and how she was able to live her life. It's interesting you say that you, it's hard to believe that she was schizophrenic. And I actually wrote it in a way where I had to keep that secret.

Obviously, anyone listening to this knows now. But I wanted to portray her as this funny person. I mean, you know, I think also people think you move in your parents, your life is going to zero social life. They're going to not approve. I knew my mom better than that. So I moved her in and I was dating a guy for a few years who was actually a prostitute. He was an escort. And my mom really loved him and I told her how he supported himself and she said, Danny, never ever referred to him as a hustler. Just say that he's in real estate and manages a very large rental property. And so, of course, he loved that, and my friends love that.

And, you know, here in Portsmouth, it's a big Navy town and a big shipyard town. And we've got some great honky tonks just around the corner here. And she was a little bit too deaf to go to them much at night, but she would always urge me to bring people home. So last call was usually at our place. And sometimes it was our bartender friends, an ex-con friend who gave her a laptop when he saw how crappy hers was, just people that became really good. friends with both of ours. And I never asked these people for help. Will you help me look after my, you know, decrepit mother who's rounding the bend? No, they all loved her. And, you know, she would hold court in her bedroom at two in the morning and, and was interested in what anyone had to

say, there was, you know, she was very, very hard of hearing. And I think a lot of that was self-imposed hearing problems because she was trying to tune out the voices. Yep. But these really sweet, these two guys, these deaf-mute hillbillies came over with their dog one night after the bar closed, and they sat up writing jokes to each other and laughing and laughing. I went to bed and I could hear them laughing downstairs still. So there's, because I live in Portsmouth, Virginia, and there's so many great colorful characters of every persuasion here, you know, red, blue, straight, gay, black, white, just, we are a true melting pot here in Portsmouth. And it just, it just, It really showed, I think, America at its best.

All these people who really didn't care, no matter how much of an anarchist or of a firebrand, she was, you know, people with guns on their belt loops coming over to help look after her. Yeah, she was very, she was very feisty of, like, the progressive variety. She was, you know, like, she was want to say things like, well, that's why I'm a communist. You know, like, she was like that lady. Exactly, exactly. She was such a brilliant, smart, smart character.

She, you know, always kept her wits about her. Read every history book, read newspapers from around the world, was really new what was going on in the world, despite her schizophrenia. But as things started winding down and it was clear when she was diagnosed, it was because she was reaching an age where her body was starting to shut down. And she could no longer pretend not to hear the voices. And so they came barreling through.

I came home from work after a really rough day. And she just lashed out and said, I heard you got fired today. It's because you need to get a haircut. You really look like a homeless person. And this is why, of course, people can't live with that. It's not nonlinear is actually the clinical term. It's that kind of nonlinear thinking. And yeah. And I, I, Jack had such patience. And, you know, I don't know how I could have gotten to it without him walking me down. And she was always very even keel to him. But to me, you know, I think schizophrenics will often lash out at the people who they're closest with because it's just they there's these weird. Trust. issues, I think as soon as that started happening and she was diagnosed, I felt like this is the reason I bought the house. This is the reason I moved her in. It's almost like I knew somehow deep inside of me, because how I ran to the other side of the world after high school to get away from her, I knew that there was unfinished business and that this had to be settled. I didn't really know what it was. But as soon as she was diagnosed, I thought, okay, now I know what I'm doing. I learned

a lot of lessons. You don't argue with schizophrenia. You don't say there's nobody under the taking notes on their mental thoughts, that's real to them. You know, all schizophrenia is is an excess of dopamine in your system. And it muddies messages going from one part of your brain to the other. And so you can't tell them that these things aren't happening. And so I learned some really valuable lessons, not only for people with schizophrenia, but for people dealing with other types of dementia, is you just acknowledge it and move on. Oh, really? There's people under your bed? How awful. Do you want a martini? Most people can't even do that with parents who are not schizophrenic.

And this is like a really important point that you drive home in the book, which also there was a radical form of therapy for schizophrenics in the 1960s that was done, where they would essentially allow people to live in those delusions. And obviously that was a very specific time in history and it was done in a very specific clinical setting. But exactly what you said, that lesson that you learned, is something that, like, I have trouble just, like, doing with my ex-husband or, like, or, you know, or with my parents, you know, that, like, there's that need, especially with our parents, like, but I have to be right. But it's so important that everything be right. And it makes me crazy that they think they're right and they're wrong. And that notion of, like, what if you take your hands off the wheel of control, especially with your parents, right?

and just say, okay, you might be right. Let's move on. Like, that's a lesson that is so important that you talk about. It really was the biggest lesson for me to learn because everything became much more peaceful as soon as you didn't have to insist that, you know, Jack and I were here watching TV one night, laying on the couch, and she came in and she said,

you guys, there's people standing on the street staring in at you guys. And, of course, we live half a floor up. There was nobody in the streets. but she was just paranoid that there were people in the streets staring at us. We were like, no, okay, okay, well, we'll close the curtains. Just like there's always, you just learn to circumvent it. We walked in one time, and she was on the phone with my nephew talking about Russian cinema.

And we stood in the hallway, and I thought, oh, my God, she's talking to Grant about Russian cinema in such a lucid way. because my family are Russian Jews that fled at the turn of the 20th century. And they were talking about all that. And then I thought, wait a second. She hasn't spoken on a phone in years. She can't hear well enough to speak on a phone. And so we crept a little closer and looked in the kitchen. She was standing there having a complete, such a complete dialogue, not a monologue,

that Jack and I were convinced we could hear a little buzz of Grant's voice come through the other end of the phone. And then we just walked in and she said, oh, hi. And I said, oh, hi, what's going on? She said, no, no, nothing much. I was just catching up with someone. And I thought, how sweet. This is before I knew about the schizophrenia.

I thought, maybe this is just dementia, and it was a very pleasant conversation. And she seems happy about it. I'm not going to question anything about it. So throughout the book, there's all these signs that it's not like I ignored them. They didn't add up to much of what I thought was anything. What a blessing also. So, I mean, you're, like, you're unbelievable because what a blessing to her that you were able to, I mean, like, that you were able to give her that gift of just the dignity of her experience. And you think about the generations and generations of people who did not have that dignity either from their children or from the medical establishment.

I mean, that is like, that's unbelievable. Where did you get that strength? I don't know. I just, you know, she is so special and got me through the 70s and, you know, the gay bashing era and the AIDS era and everything else in a way that I, you know, a lot of people, especially gay men from my era, they have to reinvent themselves when they get out of college or out of high school because they were a completely different closeted person to them. I never had that. I never had to be closeted. I got to start as being me. when I was nine or whatever. I never had to pretend to be something else. And as I grew older, I saw so many people that didn't get to even start their life, really, until they were in their 20s. And I thought, I owed that all to her, 100%.

And so she got me into this world with such incredible strength and power, and I'm going to get her out in the same dedication. But also, you know, Jack was a big influence as well. And Jack is a production designer for indie films. and he would do sets that had to be from the 1920s or the 1940s. And my mother would spend her days finding architecture and interior designs from that era for him. And then we'd all go thrift shopping on the weekends. And she would pull something that was art nouveau.

I would go to the record section. So we all worked in concert. It's too freaking cute. So I just... Well, the cutest thing, the cutest thing is right before, you know, after she was diagnosed and it was really rough. And we had... My brothers were back for her last thing. and an old friend of hers.

And Jack had done the sets for the men who built America on the History Channel about the late 1800s, all like Carnegie, Rockefeller Ford. And my mom said to him, she had a picture of her foster mother. Dan, I can't. Go ahead. She gave Jack when he was going up to West Virginia, Harper's Ferry, to do the sets and for the filming. She came to him and said, this is the only person who ever cared about me when I was a child.

my wonderful godmother, foster mother, will you please put her photo on Carnegie's desk because she loved all the Carnegie libraries that he built and she was a big book person? And it would just be wonderful for her to go into eternity as a Carnegie on his desk. So he said, you know, I'll put it on his desk. I'll give it my best shot. You don't know how they're going to edit where they're going to pan, what they're going to zoom on, but I'll try. You can count on me to give it my best shot. So we didn't know. We were all watching it when it aired. And Campbell Scott does an narration. And they cut to Carnegie's office. And there is my mother's godmother's picture on the desk. And we all gasped. I mean, we all, we couldn't believe it. She just was standing at the

TV and she didn't gasp. She just nodded and she said, now I can die a happy old lady. Thank you, Jackie. And it was really something. And so it was, it was, it was, As the book shows, it was a real group effort. And, you know, we're all acting out of desperation. Jack was going through a divorce after 19 years coming out to his kids. My mom helped him do that. And I helped him do that. He helped him with my mom. I, you know, ended up becoming close with his ex-wife. It's just, I think, you know, we all are at such odds with our family and with ex-lovers. And there's just a lot of bitterness. I think the big message from this book is if we just let it all go and remember the things that we love about somebody and keep those front and center to get through the rough times, it will all just

be a lot better off. And I think the people that were total acquaintances who became really close friends who bonded with my mom or Jack's kids and the grandkids, she met the first of the grandkids before she died. Now we have seven. Jack's like one of the nation's top breeders. But it just ended up being a wonderful, strange, you know, we were desperate in the ways that a lot of people are, you know, struggling financially. I bought this dilapidated house right before the stock market crash of 2008. You know, Jack had all these things. But, you know, we had love and we had affection and determination to make each other's lives turn out comfortably and nice, regardless of whatever we had upstairs or in the bank. And I think it's just a good message because I think it shows that if you

give people a chance, everybody really wants to kind of pitch in and help when people have good attitudes and have a sense of fun and a sense of adventure and compassion. I did have one other question. One of the things that kind of came up throughout your time with her was really a series of, I don't want to say secrets, but, you know, elements of her past and, you know, things that you learned about her almost indirectly. You know, it was almost like solving a mystery that was Perry, you know? You had all of like the edge pieces, but a lot of the middle ones were kind of like still missing.

Things like other children, you know, her experience in the orphanage. I mean, just like she was assaulted in her 60, like, just like all of these things that like, you can't imagine also that she experienced, like that's who made Perry, you know, was, I mean, just like the brother, like so many twists and turns. I'm so glad you brought that up because I have a very heartwarming update that you won't even believe it. I still am coming to terms with it. So the book came out last August. And in the book, I write about how, you know, my mom confesses about how she had these two kids out of wedlock.

Yes. She was in the 1940s, you know, fresh out of the orphanage, you know, working the U.S.O clubs during World War II and Washington, D.C. And one of them was Patty, her daughter Patty, who she gave up, and it was the shame of her life. She gave Patty up to the doctors. and they, you know, signed papers that she was never to know. Patty was never to know who her real mother was. And my mom, I was writing the book, and she begged me not to put that in the book because she still felt such shame about it.

And I said, I have to. I have to. We have to tell the real story. And boy am I glad I did. What happened? Because the story about Patty is basically on one page halfway through the book. This woman named Marcy, who lives in Rochester, New York, who loves memoirs and happened to buy my book the day it came out.

I don't know or I'd never met her. She was not a pita person or whatever. She read it and she got to the part on Patty and she started researching online. And a week to the day after the book was out, I get a message on Instagram. Do you accept the message from this stranger or whatever? And I looked and it looked like my mom. It was odd. Stop it.

So I pressed accept the message. And the message said, thank you for writing this book. Stop it. I finally saw a picture of my mother. Oh, God. It's Patty. And Jack and I were watching the Democratic National Convention. I literally, I've never fallen off the couch.

I actually fell off the couch. And I messaged her right back. She lives in Maryland outside of Annapolis on the Maryland shore. And we, of course, Jack having been, Jack was adopted three times. And, you know, my mom had been through all of that. So this total stranger connected me to my long-lost sister Patty, who we went up to see. and she is just a spitting, not only the spitting image of my mom, but the same mannerisms, the same chatiness, the same sense of humor.

Amazing. And so now this book, I mean, if nothing else, it brought me to my sister. And she is just a delight. She has a wonderful husband and has two kids of her own, now my niece and nephew. And it just brought the whole thing together. And it's just from some wonderful woman, Marcy and Rochester, who's now a part of our family. we had this giant Zoom with my brothers and my sister-in-laws and they were, my sister-in-law, Bita was hiding behind my brother Pat when the Zoom started because she thought it was my mom

back from the grave. That's how close it was. And so it's just wonderful. It's been a wonderful, wonderful experience. And it's lowered the stigma on schizophrenia. It shows how people can get, you know, in every case, it's different. So I'm not making a blanket statement. But just knowing what it is is half-futable.

the battle. If I had known what this was earlier in my life, I would have slept a lot better. And I think, you know, that's why, you know, a lot of people that have written skits memoirs and skits books who I reached out to, who they wrote it, they got it out of their system, and they're done with it. They don't want to talk about it. I want to talk about it. This is something that was a shadow over my entire first 45 years of my life. And I want to get it out there so that people can recognize this and their friends or their loved ones or maybe even themselves and figure out a way to talk about it. And I got a wonderful message on Facebook from a woman who lives in Yorktown, Virginia. And she messaged me and said that she just picked it up at Barnes & Noble

and she bought it right away because her mother was schizophrenic. She was from North Carolina. And the book articulated in a way that she was able to give the book to her daughter so that her could understand what it was like for her growing up with a schizophrenic, even though the situation was not identical. It was a lot of the similarities. And after she got her vaccine just a few weeks ago, we met her for a little socially distant beer in Yorktown, her and her husband. And it just made her, it made the veil of shame and secrecy. Nobody wants to cop to this thing or talk about it or say that a relative has it. I want to just be out there about it in a very conversational, casual way because it's just a fact of life. And if we ignore it, it's only going to make our

stress worse and the conditions worse for the person suffering from it. One final question. You know, schizophrenia will typically present young. And often one of, you know, one of the largest fears of those of us who grow up with mental illness in our family is that we too will have it. And it's almost like you were saved some of that specific anxiety, you know, in your teens, in your 20s, which is when a lot of us start kind of like ruminating about it. And with schizophrenia, there's, there's a lot of genetic studies and, you know, there's a lot to schizophrenia.

But have you, you know, have you had any experience with that or thinking about it or wondering? I mean, you have, you know, there's many siblings. Absolutely. Yeah. There's a whole chapter in the book, which takes place in my bathtub when she was in the senior psych ward and I'm devouring every memoir on skits and thinking back of my own in my own childhood and about my nieces and nephews. and my mom's mother was a much more violent. My mom wasn't violent at all, but she was a very, very tempestuous schizophrenic

who it was clear. And it was clear that my mom got a watered-down version of whatever her mother had before she ended up in the foster care and in the orphanages. And I had the frank conversation with my niece and nephews about it because they were all late teens when this book came out last year when I was writing it.

And so I think it is a frank discussion that we have to have. And I think that there are shades, you know, because schizophrenia, it's not like having the flu or not. You can have five symptoms or you can have 20 symptoms and you can have five different ones than somebody else. And so this chapter, which, by the way, I think I can make available as a free read on your site. Oh, great. Because it's, I think it gives it's a short chapter, but it gives a good sense of the voice of the book and an explanation of schizophrenia. And I think a kind of, if it can be in a funny way.

But it does. And I did reflect on, you know, my own self because I've always been a little bit out there. And, you know, then I kind of had to come to my senses. And, you know, some of the hallmarks of schizophrenia are not being able to maintain friendships. And as I write, I am blessed with more friends than an ecstasy dealer at Burning Man. You have a hard time maintaining a job. I've been working at PETA since Reagan was president. And you hear voices.

and I think of my drag queen friend Lady Bunny, who has this great joke, I went to the psychiatrist and he said, Bunny, do you ever hear voices in your head? And I said, well, yes, doctor. And one of them just asked if I ever hear voices in my head. Now, we all hear voices in our head. We all hear, you know, different things. But it's a little bit different when it's schizophrenic and you can't turn it off.

But I think it's good because we can reflect on our own situation. I think some people are. are flavored with a few schizophrenic traits, schizoid effective is on the way to schizophrenia, but not quite there. And this is all a spectrum, which we talk about here. It really is a spectrum of chemicals. It's not like, you know, we can literally look at you and be like,

yes, schizophrenic, or no schizophrenic. It's about a diagnostic set of criteria and intensity and severity. And, yeah, it's very complicated. Exactly. And I think the big impact on me personally from writing this book and from experiencing the whole thing was, and I always was pretty easy going about people suffering from mental health issues. They never freaked me out.

I never recoiled or wanted to go to the other end of the bar. Here in Portsmouth, four blocks that away is the Portsmouth Naval Hospital. A lot of people coming back from the Middle East who are suffering PTSD, recovered there before they're shipped back home to Wisconsin or Rhode Island or whatever. And some of them come out to the bars here. And Jack and I have become very attuned to who is having PTSD, and they're often sitting on their own. They don't want to talk about it, but they do want to talk about other things.

So we include them in our dinner parties, not since COVID, but we include them at our, we have a vinyl record room over here. We have a lot of dance parties, dinner parties. And we include them in our circle of friends, as we would, any cool person that is in Portsmouth. And it's been a real pleasure. And when their girlfriends or their families come down to pick them up, they come over here as well. And it's just kind of nice to be a welcome wagon for people. and I've never once been afraid.

I know people are afraid of people are going to snap or people are going to do this. You've got to get out of your head. You know, I think you just got to not be afraid of people. And you've got to be open-minded and open-hearted to other people. And it's just there's so much stigma. And my mission with this book is to really destigmatize mental health and schizophrenia in particular.

And because she died right before Christmas, there's that wonderful ending where it's a very cinematic ending that takes place during the holidays. I won't get into it, but it's cinematic enough that that kid Ed productions at Netflix came a call in

and has already got this book in development for a film. Who knows that these things will ever happen because there's so many obstacles for production to get made. But I do think it has a wonderful uplifting message and the ending which actually

I actually opened the book with that scene and then flashed back to the five years and then go back up to that. And the only edit Simon and Schuster made on this book was they said, you can't start with the ending and flashback because there's nowhere to go after that. You have to really have that be the grand finale. There's some expression about how it was like a gay.

Yeah, it all came together like a big gay conspiracy. That's my favorite part. Yeah, we'll leave it for people to read this book. Your mother, may her memory only be for a blessing, made her farewell as a grand dame among, gaze and it's just a beautiful, beautiful ending. In the theater, no less. Dan Matthews, the book is Like Crazy, Life with My Mother and Her Invisible Friends. What a delightful, special, beautiful approach to articulating the complexity of mental illness. And you are just,

you're a man among men for not only your writing and sharing this, but for the gift that you gave your mother. It's absolutely astounding. And you and Jack, it's just, I mean, I'm just nuts about you. I am crazy for like crazy. And also just the fact that it comes from like a Pita hero and also like a Russian Jew, like we're also related. It's so great. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. And when I get back to L.A., we're going to have a vegan Rubin together. Oh my gosh. We'll do a whole vegan Rubin sampling. I don't know how some people are made with that resolve to be like, like, I'm going to do this, I'm going to handle this part of life. He's like a saint. Like, he sounds like he, and I know that he wasn't always perfect with her.

I'm sure he had his moments and he did. But the notion of like, oh, well, if I just kind of like stop fighting with her about everything, like everybody's reality is better. That's what I'm going to start doing. That's going to be my modern life. It's pretty much just a yes and game. Try. Try to throw me off.

Go. Jonathan, I really don't like that this person did that. I'd be like, yeah, that's really hard. Thank you. What's for dinner tonight? Just acknowledge and redirect. My grandfather suffered from dementia and I was quite young when it happened and my mother would bring us to visit him.

And my older brother was phenomenal because he would go into the room and whatever my grandfather said, he was yes. And like I, you know, as a 12 year old really struggled with that like lack of. predictability or reality and like I didn't know how to play the game and my brother just like nothing faced him and he made my grandfather so happy um and even when my grandfather was quite agitated my brother could just sit with him talk it out with him they ended up playing cards and my grandfather just he got such a joy from my brother visiting uh and i recognized a little bit of that in in dan's story but i think it's applicable even beyond that you know people have their realities you

you're not going to convince people that something they really believe is true. And we're constantly fighting and arguing to have our points met. But sometimes it's just like, yes, okay. And also what else can we connect on? He's right. There are a lot of memoirs written about schizophrenia and about growing up in a schizophrenic home and things like that. And he really does put such a different spin on schizophrenia in particular, but on mental illness in general. Obviously, it's about the time that she grew up in the time period.

I mean that she grew up. But don't you think a lot of people, if not schizophrenic, are like undiagnosed depression, undiagnosed ADD, undiagnosed anxiety? So great question. It's a great question, Jonathan. And the answer is absolutely. Happens all the time. How many stories do we hear about people who are like, I listen to this episode of a podcast,

or I listen to this person's story, or I read this article, and then like, oh, my gosh, my experience that I've been struggling with makes so much more sense. 100%, as you like to say. However. schizophrenia is a whole other ballgame. Schizophrenia is one of those things that when people are diagnosed, which happens a lot of times in your 20s,

you know, your 20s or 30s, it's like, welcome to the rest of your life. These pills, this regimen, like, blah, blah, blah. It is a very, very, it's very difficult, it's very complicated. Her variation of schizophrenia, you know, is also. needs to be taken into account. She knew, kind of almost instinctively, to avoid the opinions of

others that way. I mean, she had a completely independent world. And also, I think it's so interesting that he described her as high functioning. But she was high functioning when someone was managing her life, you know, on her own and left to her own devices. Life was very difficult for that woman. I mean, it's unbelievable. It is unbelievable, like, the way that she managed to manage with that level of, again, like, people would say eccentricity. But what she described when she started taking the right medication, you know, when they finally diagnosed her, is it's not that the voices went away. It was less intrusive. It was less difficult to manage.

And just like think of the mental energy that it takes if you're depressed to try and show up for someone, right? Or to try and like go to your job. If you're anxious, if you've ever experienced mania or hypomania, you can't just bring that shit down. Like that's a chemical experience. So schizophrenia is operating at this level of dopamine like flooding your system. And it's going to do different things depending on a lot of other aspects of your brain chemistry, experience. And what he does talk a little bit about the history of schizophrenia and diagnostic schizophrenia. You know, it happened in a time in history when there was a tremendous amount of confusion in the late 19th century, meaning we had immigrants and people with different languages and different cultures and everything was coming together in like industrial revolution, like all these things. And the fact is some brains said, no thanks. Like this does not compute. So, To operate with that level of dopamine, I don't want to say dysfunction, you know, difference, it is a constant effort to keep it together.

So all the pills also that she was taking and all these different things, like that's some heavy stuff she was taking. It probably gave her a break, which is in a lot of cases what alcohol and street drugs can do for really anyone with a mental illness. Just give me a break. And if you're someone out there who is suffering, who's living and trying to live and trying not to suffer, keep in mind all those other things that we do, those are things that we do just to keep it together so that we can, you know, fill in the blank, get to work, take care of the kids, you know, whatever it is. The line between some form of mental illness or some forms of mental illness and accessing altered realms of consciousness through spiritual exploration is very thin. I mean, he brought up also the line between, you know, insanity and creativity. The book opens with, hold please, a beautiful picture of Perry, Edgar Allan Poe, you know, who was found dead in the

street, drunk, have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? That's the Edgar Allan Poe quote that this book opens with. A lot of people get really prickly when you talk about, you know, religious experience, spiritual experience, shamans, and insanity. And people often get really, really prickly when you talk about creativity and madness. If we sedate everyone and we make all of those sparks not sparky, that's not a world that any of us would want to engage in. The reason that people get very prickly when you say that is because they have a loved one who was so out of control that they needed to be medicated. They had to be hospitalized. And don't you tell me that they shouldn't have been. And that's actually not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is, welcome to the human experience. There's a full range of perception. There's a full range of spiritual experience. Some people have access to things that other people don't. And yes, I'm a scientist. It's because of chemistry. I remember when I took psychological anthropology in college at UCLA with Professor Doug Holland, and we studied a man.

It was a book about a man. I believe it was a, I think he was North African. I want to say Algerian. and he was likely by Western diagnostic criteria, a schizophrenic. But in the culture that he lived in, and I'm not speaking for all of Algeria, I'm saying the time that it was written, I think it was written like in the 1950s, the 1960s, at that time, in the place that he lived, he was a shaman. Psychosis or spiritual awakening, the TED Talk by Phil, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, very, very, very, very popular. tons of views and he explores this very thing that in all other societies people who are differently minded are not cast aside and necessarily they have a role that they're sort of

brought into now look i'm not saying that that can happen in western culture but well we could do a better job than we do now we have a much more narrow acceptable parameter for how you can function successfully in our society than in many other places. As I read this book, I thought of, and I will not name names, but I thought of two people that I know who definitely need psychiatric intervention. And I don't just mean like, I wish they wouldn't act the way they did, you know, that's you. Kidding. No, these are people who, I think if you put them in front of, you know, any psychiatrist, even any therapist, they'd be like, oh, oh, okay.

and those people function in their own way and in their own world. They do get a lot of help from other people. One of these people is a brilliant, brilliant artist, and the other is a very, very mystically inclined, spiritually connected person. And it's very painful because I want everyone to experience like the fullest, I mean, just as a human. I want everyone to experience the fullest appreciation of their specialness. You know, I want people to appreciate my specialness.

And Lord knows, you've had enough conversations with me. Like, I feel everything so deeply that there's not another way. Like, I don't know another way to be. And you could give me pills. You could. You could give me mood stabilizers. And I wouldn't have those kind of experiences. But you're the person who brings the excitement to the podcast.

If it was just, if we stabilized you and we had me, It would just be this flat line all the time. I would like to say that does not mean that I'm unstable or that people who don't take medication are not stable. It means that there is a negotiation we all have to do with our mental illness. There's a negotiation we all have to do. What allows me to live my life? What allows me to live my best life?

What allows me to take care of my kids like this? And look, I'll be honest. When I went to get my vaccine shot, I went to say goodbye to my kids. I started weeping because I was nervous. I was just nervous. I get nervous. And when I get nervous, I cry. And I remember looking at my 15-year-old and I was like, what is he thinking?

Like, does he wish I wasn't like this? Like, it makes me emotional because I don't want to burden him. I make clear, you know, like I get help. I have people that I speak to. I have parenting experts in my life. You know, people I know who are educators and we have a family therapist. that helped us through our divorce, who I still speak to. I don't want to burden my children.

But like what I said to him is, I'm okay, I'm scared, I'm going to be okay, and I'll be back, and I'll feed you lunch. You know, what I think is that my child will grow up and he will tell that story, and he may tell that on a couch, you know, of some therapist. And what I hope is that, you know, he will be given also the amount of insight necessary that we all have to have to say, like, she did the best. she could and she took care of me the best she could. And it may not be right. It may not be perfect for him. But this is like, this is where I am and this is how the rest of my life functions, you know? And I think a lot of

people are like, oh, but you're, you're so successful and you're on a TV show. I'm a human. I'm a human with a lot of challenges. And also all those fun times he has where you guys are laughing hysterically. Oh, totally. Like all of those highs are, you know, they come packaged with some crying. True story. I'm not going to do a typical you might need help if for schizophrenia. Tell people to have a nice afternoon. I see you later. I think it's important to say that if you have images in your head that are persistent and pervasive and disturbing, you might need help. If you find yourself talking to yourself,

like for real, if you find yourself talking to yourself because it feels, feels like there's a conversation happening and not just that like you need to talk something out, you might need help. If your perception of the world is such that people have started distancing themselves from you because your version of reality doesn't align with theirs, you might need help. If someone that you love is experiencing features of this, it's important for you also to get help so that you can know how best to be supportive. And honestly, reading this book is a really really great place to start. So, so grateful to Dan Matthews for writing like crazy. And while it's a very funny scene of him trying his mother's medication, don't take other people's

medication. Do not take other people's medication. And also, as he mentioned, he had a, you know, a close friend who was a, you know, who was a physician. And everyone's body reacts differently to those kind of medications. And so the fact is, what works for some people, it works for some people may not work for others. I'm sure, you know, there are some people who are like, when I smoke pot, I feel free. And other people are like, when I smoke pot, I want to kill myself. So it's not that different with really a lot of medications. And sure, things like gabapentin and Xanax and kind of the Atavans of the world, you know, those have a depressive effect, you know, and that's generally true. You know, alcohol is a depressant, even though you feel good for a little while, then you don't. But also,

you know, people like me, I can't even take like antihistamine things. Like, what is it, Sudafed and things like that. I go cuckoo pants. I get really, really not. normal. So everybody's body reacts differently. I have a really funny story about the first time I took, I think it was Sudafed, and I didn't know the reaction I would have. I was a good time in an airport in the middle of this country. Anyway, we'll save that for another time. Everyone, thank you so much for all of your support. Please give the podcast a five-star review and recommend it to a friend. It helps us make more. And if you haven't already checked out the YouTube channel, go to Miami-Bialx YouTube channel, press the little bell icon for updates.

and notifications for new episodes that we drop. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's My Ambiolyx Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break down.