Here is the full transcript of Elizabeth Medina’s talk titled “What They Don’t Tell You About Mental Illness” at TEDxSpeedwayPlaza conference.
Elizabeth Medina’s talk, “What They Don’t Tell You About Mental Illness,” delves into the often-taboo subject of mental health, emphasizing the importance of open discussion and understanding. She shares her personal journey, highlighting the challenges she faced during her freshman year at university, including family issues and her own battles with depression.
Medina’s experience in an intensive outpatient program reveals the power of group therapy in her healing process, showcasing that mental illness affects people from all walks of life, including high-functioning individuals. She stresses that mental illness is a normal part of human experience, with one in four adults suffering from some form of it. Through her story, Medina encourages honesty and openness as tools for support, urging people to truly be there for each other.
Her talk aims to break the stigma surrounding mental health discussions, advocating for a human approach to understanding and support. Ultimately, Medina’s message is one of empathy, solidarity, and the importance of honest conversations about mental health.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
So, I want to start off my talk with a quick disclaimer. I am very excited to be here, but I’m also incredibly terrified. I’m speaking about mental health and mental illness, so that means I’ll be talking about a subject that you all know is taboo and something that society doesn’t really like mentioning. And while I’m not afraid of people’s judgment anymore because of what I have been through, I am afraid of the consequences that come out of that judgment.
I’m afraid of being isolated. I am terrified of feeling like something’s my fault when it wasn’t. And I’m also afraid of being ousted for going through something that’s completely normal. It’s so normal that one in four adults actually suffer from some sort of mental illness. So I want you to take that and count yourself, the person to the left, the person to the right of you, and the person behind or in front of you, that’s four. One of you is suffering from mental illness, but we’re all high-functioning adults. People don’t know that.
The College Experience
So take me, for example. I got into UT as a freshman. I was very excited. You know, hook ’em horns. I’ve had school pride since I was 12, mostly because the boy I had a crush on wore a lot of Longhorn gear, but that’s beside the point. I got into UT and my first semester included fighting with my parents because they didn’t want me to leave home, getting cut off financially, taking out loans, having my dad get diagnosed with leukemia, the same type of leukemia that took his father before him, by the way, so that wasn’t a fun talk to have.
It also included getting phone calls from my siblings saying, you know, it’s not your fault that our dad has cancer, but oh my goodness, if you had just stayed home, he would be healing so much faster. If you would have stayed home, my relationship with my father wouldn’t have gone south because they supported my decision to come to UT.
UT is a great school. But that meant them fighting and disagreeing with my father, which, if any of you have grown up in any sort of Dominican household, you know that what father says is like the law. And so I was getting a lot of blame put onto me, and it was a lot of other people’s baggage, but I carried it with me because I believed them.
So that’s the end of my freshman year, and I was pretty isolated. That summer, I stayed with my parents and I got a job, and I think two, maybe three events happened that caused a total shutdown of my brain because it wanted to defend itself. And that was one, the resurfacing of a high school classmate who assaulted me my senior year came back up.
The second one was finding out that a loved one was suicidal, and I didn’t really know how to digest that information. And the third one was that I was feeling so lonely because I was isolated my freshman year that I decided to do sorority rush because nothing says “I’m not lonely” like buying 200 dollars.
However, you know, things didn’t really go quite as planned. I ended up not getting into the sorority I wanted. I wasn’t going to pay thousands of dollars to be in the one I didn’t want to be in. Long story short, I ended up alone again and I just shut off. I grew numb. I started lashing out at people I cared about, blaming them. I had one friend at this university, that was the young man that I was dating at that time. I blamed everything on him, and it was a really toxic situation to just really be around me.
The Journey Through Depression
And you know, I could go through all of the boring part of depression where you basically want to sleep all day, not shower, not eat, not do anything really. And I’ll just skip forward to the part where I was nearly hospitalized. And that was pretty hard because, I mean, I was almost hospitalized, but what ended up happening was through talking to my therapist, she was telling me, okay, well, we have a couple of options because we want you to change what you’ve been doing. I got to do this thing called an intensive outpatient program, which is basically group therapy four times a week for an hour and a half each time, so it was definitely intensive.
But group therapy is actually what I attribute most of my healing to. And the reason was is because I walked into this IOP expecting a lot of individuals to be sort of clouded, put off, and basically to look like this.
“Thank you, I drew it myself.” And instead, I was actually greeted with a group of maybe 10 to 15 people who were all high-functioning adults, by the way. There was one young lady, she was a computer science major. She had like a 3.9, I think, because I ended up talking to her. She was so passionate about her career. There was another young lady who was in a spirit group, who was basically a non-Greek sorority. There was a young man who talked too much.
Finding Normalcy in Shared Experiences
Oh, there was a UT football player. And there was me, a pageant queen, who’s pre-med and does science. And so I looked around this room and everyone was so normal. We have breaks because an hour and a half is way too long to sit in one room. And we all joked, we all had the same TV shows, we all had homework. A lot of us were, again, high-functioning adults. We paid the bills. But we all still suffered from mental illness, that’s why we were there. And I didn’t see people with a big sweatshirt that just kind of hid to themselves, like, “I’m sad, don’t look at me.” But instead, I saw very normal people and I was highly surprised.
So I say I was a pageant queen, right? And here’s my Miss America crown, pretty, sparkles. And the thing is, is that no one knew that I was suffering. The same way how anyone would look around that room and say, “I would have never thought any of these people are suffering from mental illness,” is the same way you would have looked at me. Because the night before I won this, before I won scholarships that I could help pay for school, was the day before, or no, I’m sorry, it was the day after, just one day after my dad decided to announce to the entire Applebee’s restaurant in a very drunk fashion that he has leukemia. I was devastated.
But I competed and I won, and I’m so thankful. But that also meant I got to go compete at Miss Texas that summer. It also means that I volunteered a lot and that I continued to stay in school and did the whole nine yards, and nobody knew I was suffering from depression. Nobody knew that the entire year that I was experiencing was basically turbulent and I was going through turmoil up until the point that I didn’t quite want to die, but I definitely didn’t want to live anymore, until IOP.
And so I always ask myself, I thought about it for quite some time, what was it about group that made me heal? It was the fact that maybe it was we were all Longhorns, you know, we’re all cool people, right? No. Oh, no, no, no. It was the fact that we met four times a week for an hour and a half each time. That wasn’t it either. It was actually just a very simple idea that 10 to 15 people could sit in a room and talk about very human experiences and not be judged. Because the bottom line is, I’m sure I could go to any single one of you and say, “Have you ever experienced grief, have you ever lost a loved one, or have you ever felt lonely?” And you’re going to answer yes to probably all three of those. And if not, at least one of them.
The Importance of Openness and Honesty
And so that’s where mental health has an issue today. Because depression, at least, is one of the most well-documented diseases that we’ve had over the past few, I don’t know, millennia. But we don’t like talking about it, because it’s sad. Any sort of mental illness creates this great breeding ground and great foundation for more to fester, which is why they come in packaged deals, you know? That’s why you get depression and anxiety. Or maybe anxiety and bipolar disorder, or maybe ADHD and ADD. Or maybe, you know, you go through some sort of traumatic experience, you get PTSD and depression. You know, two-for-one deal is great. You know what else comes with a free side of shame and guilt?
And so when you’re already hearing these voices in your head in a near-constant loop of, “It’s your fault. You’re suffering because it’s your fault. You can do better. You should be happy.” And you have someone else tell you, “Well, have you tried being more positive?” I’m like, “No, you know what, I didn’t think about that, actually. Thanks for bringing that up. Have you tried going outside?” “Oh, I’ve just been confined to my bed all day. I didn’t realize that I didn’t have the energy to, you know, go take care of my basic hygienic needs. I didn’t realize I could go outside, I’m sorry.”
Tools for Support and Understanding
Instead of trying to tell someone, you know, like, “Have you tried these things,” I’ll give you a few tools to help someone and maybe help yourself. And that’s to be openly honest. One of the biggest reasons I ended up healing was because I opened up to a TA, I was kind of emotionally unstable that day, and I ended up telling her, you know, “I’m going through a really, really hard time.”
And she said, “You know, I’ve gone through a really hard time before. In fact, I’m going through it right now. But every day I find a little something to push through and it sucks, but I keep going and then I have students like you who want to have a, like, real relationship with me and it keeps me going.”
And I said, “Wow, the only thing I heard really was ‘I’m also going through a rough time’ and it made me feel a little less alone.” I had another TA who was very funny that when I ended up telling him, you know, “I almost withdrew from the university,” he said, “I’m a graduate student, I know what that feels like.”
Because we all go through turmoil, we all go through some sort of time in our life where we’re going to feel alone. And isolation is one of the precursors to mental illness. Mental illness is a very, very human response because we all have different stories, but we also have gone through millions and billions of years to all react the same way. And so we all can relate.
Conclusion: A Call for Openness and Empathy
And so I want you all to be openly honest with someone. I also want you to quit lying. You all are so good at lying. You tell someone, “I’m going to be there for you,” but actually follow up. And do the second part. Be openly honest and say, “I will be there for you because I know what it’s like to lose a loved one. I know the grief, it’s just going to hit you. It hurts. And sometimes they say time heals, but it’s been, you know, three years since, you know, my best friend passed away and I still hurt. But I will be there for you because I know what that feels like.” That would mean so much more to me and it would make me remember that someone has gone through this and someone has hurt and I’m not alone.
We go to a school, a great school that has over 50,000 students. If my statistic is right, there might be over 15,000 students here who suffer from mental illness. And we want to sit here and pretend like we shouldn’t talk about it because talking about mental illness is weird, those people are crazy. Let me tell you, the one in four that have a mental illness versus the three in four. The three in four are the crazy ones. They’re the ones telling me what it’s like from my experience. I want you all to know that we can have a very human conversation about a very human experience and it won’t be hard. Just be human. Open your heart. Because, you know, if it’s not your friend, it could be you. Thank you.