Here is the full transcript and summary of Christine Burych’s talk titled “How 3 Women With Mental Illness Impacted My Life” at TEDxWilmington conference.
In this TEDx talk, frontline mental health worker Christine Burych reflects on the profound influence three women had on her personal and professional journey, particularly in her understanding of mental health and leadership. Through her experiences with these women, Burych learned about the nuances of mental illness, the importance of asking questions instead of assuming solutions, and the significant role of effective leadership in any organization.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
At the age of 46, I finally became a child. For 46 years, I took on the role of caregiver to my mother. You see, shortly after I was born, she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which later became a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. And as a child, I was convinced that my birth had caused her illness.
If she hadn’t had me, she never would have gotten sick. But because she did, and it was my fault, it was my responsibility to take care of her. Things were volatile with my mom’s illness. She’d be good for a while, and then something would trigger periods of mania where she would frantically clean.
I mean, literally, you could eat off of our kitchen floors, they were so clean. Now, that’s not been so bad, considering that my parents owned an office cleaning company, and I’m sure her clients did not complain about the cleanliness of their offices. On the days that she was unwell, she would be in bed until 3 in the afternoon. She would get up, she’d make dinner, she’d feed us, and off to work she’d go.
She never missed a day of work unless she was hospitalized. She’d leave at 5 p.m. with my dad, they’d come home at 1 in the morning, and I never fully appreciated the amount of strength that must have taken for her to get out of bed on those days. After the frantic periods of mania would come the crash of depression.
And honestly, I don’t know what I hated more, the mania or the depression. Because with the depression, it ultimately would result in a call to 911 and her being hospitalized against her will. I watched my dad struggle as he made those calls. I could see he didn’t have the heart, the strength, nor the confidence in his English language to make them.
And I recall the very first time I called 911, I was only 7 years old. About a month before my 13th birthday, my mom was hospitalized yet again. When I went to see her, she invited me into her room. She desperately wanted to show me something.
When I walked in, I saw that she had taken her blue spring coat and she had laid it on top of a yellow hospital blanket, kind of in a square pattern on her bed. She leaned in and she whispered in my ear, “You see this? This is the Ukrainian flag. Blue for the sky above, the yellow wheat fields below where so many died for your freedom.”
Huh? I was really confused. I was like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I was born in Canada, not in Ukraine.” Then she continued to mutter about Nazi spies and that my father had planted bugs in the wall so that he could listen and watch her and try to poison her food. As a kid, I was terrified. I didn’t understand. How could she possibly think this about her husband?
My father said he would do those things to her. The next day, I came back to the hospital to see her again. When I walked into her room, there was a doctor and a couple of nurses in there and they had asked me to leave because they were trying to prep her for her treatment. Her treatment consisted of ECG or shock therapy.
I watched as my mom struggled and resisted against this and they strapped her down to the gurney and they began wheeling her down the hallway. Frightened, I ran after them, begging them to stop but my dad held me back. The entire time that she was being wheeled down that hallway towards the elevator, I could hear her screaming, “I’m not crazy! I’m not crazy! I’m not crazy!”
When she came back from those treatments, she certainly wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t anything. She was mindless for days. That particular treatment happened two weeks before my brother’s wedding. She had been in the hospital for a month. They had let her go home for the weekend to attend the event. When she got home, nobody knew what she had endured.
How could they? We didn’t talk about it. We were shamed and embarrassed. And that’s what stigma does. It silences us. And so when she showed up at my brother’s wedding, she looked every inch the mother of the groom. But inside, she was suffering silently. And on Monday, she returned back to the hospital.
As a kid, I didn’t understand why couldn’t somebody help her? Why couldn’t somebody fix her? And I thought, “Okay, fine. Nobody’s going to do it. It’s up to me.” And hence, the birth of my identity as the fixer. This identity served me well in my teen years and became solidified as my mother tried to take her life numerous times. And each time resulted in a call to 911 and my dad and I being in the hospital trying to deal with it.
The more unwell she became, the more frightened I became. And unfortunately, when I become frightened, I pull away. I withdraw. I want to move into logic and I want to squash all of my emotion. I just want to deal with the problem. Now, unfortunately, when you start to view people as the problem, your relationships become really challenging and difficult. And her and I, we had a difficult relationship.
We fought like cats and dogs.
I became rebellious and angry as a teen. But underneath that rebellion and anger was fear. I feared I was going to lose her. I feared I couldn’t help her. And I thought, “Okay, if I can’t save her, then maybe I could save others and then I wouldn’t be a failure.” And that fear propelled me into a career in mental health. When I began working in mental health, I began working with individuals who were living with diagnoses with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder. And I felt responsible and accountable for every single one of my clients’ lives.
My first epiphany happened on a typical housing visit with the second woman who had influenced me. And her name… Oh, this is Henrietta. And Henrietta, oh, she was small but mighty. Ah, there she is, small and mighty. And she was living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and she was in jeopardy of losing her housing because of her declining mental health.
So when I went over to the visit, I walked into her apartment, I looked around, and I was like, “Oh, Henrietta, we have got to do something about this. You’re going to lose it all. We’ve got to get you back on your medication. You need to see your psychiatrist, and you need to keep your appointments with me, or really, you’re going to be out on the streets.” And she looked at me and she asked, “Have you ever had schizophrenia?” I said, “No, of course not.”
And she said, “Then why are you telling me what to do? Why are you telling me how to live my life?” I responded with, “I think that’s my job. I’m supposed to help you, and I’m supposed to help you stay better.”
And she said, “No, no. Your job is not to tell me what to do. Your job is to ask me how I’ve managed to survive for 30 years with schizophrenia.” My entire world tilted on its axis. Wow. Ask instead of tell. Could this possibly be effective? I didn’t have to have all the answers.
I was willing to give this a try. “Okay, let’s ask questions.” And so I began to ask questions, lots of them. Great ones, crappy ones, all sorts of questions.
And here’s what I discovered. As I started to ask questions, I could journey alongside others instead of feeling like I needed to carry them. The third woman in my life wasn’t someone I had spent a lot of time with. In fact, I didn’t know her very well.
And her name was Philomena. And Philomena also was living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Unfortunately, most of the time that her and I were working together, she was quite unwell. She was seeing and hearing things that I didn’t.
And it made our conversations really hard because she wasn’t present. But my gosh, when she smiled, she could light up an entire room. So one day, I’m on my way and I’m going to a meeting and she stops me in the hallway and she grabs me by the shoulders and she looks me square in the face and she says, “Christine, an organization is like a fish. It stinks from head on down.”
With that, she stopped, turned, and walked away. I was like, “Wow. How could she have possibly known that I was struggling with the leadership in this organization? What did she see that nobody else did?” And in that moment of clarity, she gave me a piece of wisdom that I carry to this day.
While working Frontline Mental Health, all I wanted to do was fix people. Not just their problems. I wanted to fix them. I kept thinking if I could somehow figure out what happened to people, that I would magically come up with some solution to fix them. And over time, I began to realize my need to fix wasn’t about others. My need to fix was about me. People didn’t want it or need it or hell even ask for it, but I did it because it made me feel better.
And I noticed I carried that tendency with me when I moved out of Frontline and into leadership positions. An employee would come to me with a problem and I would have the solution. I would feel so fantastic. I would tell them what to do and off they would go, ah, so good. And then I’d hear Henry’s comments in my ears. “Why are you telling me what to do? You should be asking me how I’ve survived so long.” Ah, I’m doing it again.
Okay, so the next time an employee came to me with a problem, I began asking questions. “When in the past have you experienced something like this? What did you do? What was helpful?” “What, what, what questions was what I started asking?” And here’s what I discovered. People have way better solutions to their problems than I could ever give them. And not only that, but people became a lot more accountable and responsible for fixing their problems.
I didn’t have to. It was just another reminder to me. I didn’t need to fix people. Along my leadership tenure, I discovered the world of executive coaching. Oh, it was bliss. It was an entire world of just asking questions and not telling people the answers. And here was a place that I could practice again, journeying alongside of others versus having to carry them. Curiosity, questions, all became a superpower thanks to Henrietta.
And with Philomena’s comments, it reminded me of the importance of not only working with individuals, but working within systems to make work better for everybody. And so leadership development became my passion. I just wanted to help leaders be the best that they could be so that they can create environments of success for their teams. Because it is true, a fish does stink from the head on down and so do organizations.
And I just want to help you as leaders to have less stinky organizations. And so I began to teach leaders how to coach, how to ask great open-ended questions, be curious, and listen intently to the answers being shared. And the leaders who applied this skill discovered some remarkable improvements in a couple of areas. Communication, psychological safety, and when those two were in place, they noticed an improvement in overall productivity.
Our histories shape us. They become the M.O. in the course of our lives. And sometimes our insights and ahas come from some unlikely places and unlikely sources. I thank Henrietta for teaching me about curiosity and asking questions from a personal lived experience. I thank Philomena for highlighting the importance of leadership and how leaders make or break our workplaces. Both of these insights profoundly impacted and shaped the work that I do to this day.
These lessons, however, they were easily, well, maybe not so easily applied in my professional life, but I could because they made sense to me, because they were cognitive, intellectual, rational. I could see the results of this. Whereas the lessons from my mom, much more complex and riddled with emotion. She showed me that people living with adversity and mental health disorders live full, meaningful, and productive lives. She and my dad were married for more than 55 years until his death.
She raised three successful kids. She helped support us and she helped our children. She had friends. She and my dad managed a business and she did all of this despite having a mental health disorder. And yet, over the years, I just kept trying to get to the root of her illness. I just wanted to discover the why. What happened? Why did she get sick?
And underneath it all, I think I just really wanted to prove to myself that it wasn’t my fault. As long as I kept my mom in the energy of her illness over her wellness, I could never truly see her. I could never truly see her. Despite her successes, all I could see were the problems. Because when there are problems, there is a role for me as her fixer.
It wasn’t until I was finally able to accept the fact that I couldn’t fix my mom. I was going to love her for who she was. That’s when our relationship changed. And in letting go of my need to be her fixer, my siblings and I made the really difficult decision to move my mom into a nursing home. And much to my surprise, she absolutely flourished there. I mean, she joined groups. She played games.
She did arts and crafts. She sang. She danced. She won a hip-hop competition at the age of 92. She had done things I had never seen her do in her entire life and my entire life. My final lesson from my mom wasn’t just in the ability to love and accept her for who she was way beyond the diagnosis. More so, it was for me to be able to let go of my need to be her fixer. At the age of 46, I proudly became a child.
And she became my mother. Thanks, Mom.
SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:
Christine Burych’s talk “How 3 Women With Mental Illness Impacted My Life” provides deep insights into how personal experiences with mental illness can profoundly shape one’s understanding of empathy, leadership, and problem-solving. Here are the key takeaway points from her talk:
Impact of Early Caregiving Responsibilities: Burych’s journey begins with her mother, diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and later bipolar disorder. This experience, where she assumed the role of a caregiver from a young age, ingrained in her a sense of responsibility and a belief that she needed to fix her mother’s problems. It highlights the deep emotional impact of caregiving on young caregivers, shaping their worldviews and sense of self.
Understanding Mental Illness Beyond Stereotypes: Burych’s experiences with her mother offer an intimate look into the complexities of living with mental illness. Her mother, despite her challenges, managed a business and raised a family, demonstrating that individuals with mental health issues can lead productive and fulfilling lives. This challenges common stereotypes and stigmas associated with mental illness.
Transition from Fixing to Understanding: Burych’s interaction with Henrietta, a client with schizophrenia, was a turning point. Henrietta’s question, “Why are you telling me what to do?” prompted Burych to shift her approach from trying to fix her clients’ issues to understanding and supporting them. This highlights the importance of empathy and listening in mental health care and beyond.
Leadership Insights from Unexpected Sources: Philomena, another woman with schizophrenia, offered Burych an unexpected insight into leadership. Her analogy that “an organization is like a fish, it stinks from the head down” helped Burych realize the impact of leadership on organizational health. This underscores the value of wisdom that can come from unexpected sources and the importance of leadership in creating healthy work environments.
The Power of Asking Questions: Burych learned that asking questions rather than offering solutions empowers individuals to find their own answers. This approach fosters accountability and enables people to take charge of their situations. It’s a valuable lesson in both mental health care and leadership, emphasizing the power of inquiry over directives.
Evolution in Professional Practice: These experiences led Burych to focus on leadership development and executive coaching, where she emphasizes the importance of asking open-ended questions and active listening. This evolution from a frontline mental health worker to a leadership coach underscores the importance of continuous learning and adaptation in professional life.
Personal Growth Through Acceptance: A crucial part of Burych’s journey was accepting her mother as she was, which transformed their relationship. This acceptance parallels her professional growth, where she learned the importance of understanding and supporting rather than fixing. It illustrates the broader theme of acceptance and letting go in both personal and professional contexts.
Combating Stigma and Embracing Empathy: Burych’s experiences underscore the need to combat stigma around mental illness and embrace empathy. By sharing her story, she highlights the importance of understanding mental health challenges and treating individuals with compassion and dignity.
In summary, Christine Burych’s talk is a powerful testament to how personal experiences can lead to profound professional and personal growth. Her journey with these three women demonstrates the importance of empathy, the power of asking questions, and the critical role of effective leadership, offering valuable lessons for anyone dealing with mental health issues or working in caregiving and leadership roles.