Lessons From Losing My Mind: Andy Dunn (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of mental health advocate Andy Dunn’s talk titled “Lessons From Losing My Mind” at TED 2023 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Messiah for a Week

When I was 20, I was the messiah. For about a week. And for those of you who haven’t had the privilege of being the messiah, I have to tell you something. It is awesome.

Imagine, you are the person that’s going to save the world, bring peace on Earth, and no one knows it yet but you. I arrived as the second coming my senior year of college. New Year’s Eve, 1999.

After a night of partying, I came to a stunning conclusion. I was Jesus 2.0. For the next 100 hours, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, but I did spend a fair amount of time preaching my gospel at the Burger King in Evanston.

Turns out, though — and this may be a disappointment to my supporters — that I was in fact not the messiah. I was just a 20-year-old Midwestern kid having a manic episode later diagnosed as a symptom of bipolar disorder type I. And it was very much not awesome for my family and my friends.

Symptoms of a Manic Episode

And so what exactly is a manic episode? Typical symptoms include a lack of sleep, grandiosity, relentless optimism, high-risk behaviors, racing speech, and ideas that are seen as delusional. Does that remind you of anyone?

Because it sounds to me like an entrepreneur having a good day. And in fact, it is estimated that three percent of all of us have bipolar. A staggering number in its own right. For entrepreneurs, that number is 11 percent. And at the intersection … Hi, mom, that’s me. The best of both worlds.

And it’s not just bipolar.

According to a study from the University of California at San Francisco, entrepreneurs also over-index in ADHD, in depression and in substance use. And maybe this correlation between neurodiversity and innovation shouldn’t surprise us.

The Entrepreneur’s Vision

After all, to be an entrepreneur is to conjure things that aren’t real yet. That sort of invention, that sort of vision requires more than a little bit of magical thinking. A vision that might seem fantastical to others at first is later deemed to be obvious, like, say, flying through the air in a huge metallic capsule at 30,000 feet and 575 miles an hour.

For me, that vision — get ready for it — was pants. It’s always been pants. OK, well, not exactly. My vision was one for a world where brands would be built internet-first. And so in 2007, I cofounded a menswear e-commerce company called Bonobos.

Now I know what you might be thinking. Selling pants online is not that remarkable of a vision. But in 2007, it was improbable.

Building an Internet-First Brand

Think about it. Amazon was barely focused on fashion, Apple had only just launched the iPhone. Mobile commerce and the App Store were just a twinkle in the eye.

Facebook didn’t have an ad platform. That’s, by the way, where you acquire customers for a digital brand. And essential tools for digital storytelling, like Instagram and TikTok, didn’t even exist.

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Instagram was three years away from being created, and TikTok was nine years away. Maybe that was a good thing at the time. Every venture capitalist we pitched said the same thing: “You guys are crazy.”

Which is an interesting word choice, if you think about it in this context. Against these odds, over the next decade we went on to raise 100 million in venture capital, to sell over a million pairs of pants, to invent an inventory-free retail store and open 60 of those, creating ultimately over 500 jobs. The company was acquired a decade after founding by the world’s largest retailer by revenues, itself in its own process of digital transformation, for over 300 million.

The Dark Side of Success

Building any brand now in internet-first is commonplace. It’s table stakes. It’s obvious. Maybe it wasn’t so crazy after all. But there was a dark side to this success. Friends and mentors and other business leaders warned me that the entrepreneurial journey was filled with dramatic mood swings, highs and lows.

They even call startups what? A roller coaster. And so my bipolar disorder was cloaked, not as symptoms of an illness or a condition, but symptoms of a job.

I cycled through a couple of mood states. Dizzyingly productive periods of hypomania, a misunderstood [mood] state that is a diluted form of mania without the telltale psychosis that leads to a diagnosis of bipolar I, but all of the increased energy and creativity and ideation and joie de vivre and burning the candle at both ends. You can get a lot done when you’re hypomanic.

Depression and Mania

Alternating with devastating periods of depression. For me, both mild and severe, often 50 or 100 days at a time, catatonic, can’t get out of bed, disappearing on the team, unable to go to work. Sometimes undesiraous of living.

And all of it was amplified by what was happening at work. A gutting co-founder divorce, a rotating door of executive turnover, maddening and expensive flights into shiny new objects and distracting ideas, often driven by hypomania, and a whopping cash flow burn rate that at times reached five million dollars a month. It’s hard to do, actually, but but we did it.

And all of it boiled over in 2016. I was leading a team of 400 people when the mania that I hadn’t experienced since I was preaching the gospel at Burger King when I was 20 came raging back. In a manic episode at my New York apartment, I rose from my bed, literally howling at the moon, convinced I was the president and Batman, which is actually a high-potential combination, if you think about it.

And then the darkness really set in. I smashed my fist into a glass window pane. And worst of all, I struck my now-wife, Manuela, and pushed and kicked her mother, Leni, to the ground as they tried to protect me, to prevent me from running naked into the streets of Greenwich Village.

Unconditional Love and Accountability

When I saw … When I saw Leni two weeks later, I thought it would be for the last time. And instead, she put her hand on my hand and she said something I’ll never forget, and something I hope all of you never forget. She said, “Andy, this is just like any chronic physical illness. All you have to do is see your doctor and take your medication. And if you do, and if Manuela wants to stay with you, then you have my blessing.”

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And I started crying, as you might imagine. And Manuela did stay with me. But her love and commitment came with conditions.

It was our rabbi who told us on our wedding day that the only unconditional love on the planet is that between parent and child, which was a disappointing thing to hear on my wedding day. I thought, you know, I was headed for the unconditional love thing. He said all other forms of love are conditioned.

They are conditioned upon each of us treating each other well, which requires accountability and boundaries, conditioned upon an honest and transparent exchange of information and feelings, which requires disclosure and feedback, and conditioned upon each of us, individually, doing all in our power to be well, which requires initiative and self care. And this is not just in our personal lives. It’s also at work.

Mental Hygiene and Fitness

Now, Manuela and I are married with a two-year-old. He’s not two in that photo. That would be a very small two-year-old.

And look, some days that feels like a miracle. From where I was to now, it feels like a miracle. And while Manuela’s love is a miracle and Isaiah’s existence, his very existence, is a miracle, my getting well was not a miracle.

It was very hard work and it still is. So I have got, and I’m proud to say, an Olympic regimen of mental hygiene and mental fitness. Let me play it to you.

I see a psychiatrist two to three times a week for a 45-minute therapy session. Now, you would think therapy once a week is enough. But for me, I want my doctor to lay eyes on me every 72 hours so he can assess my mood.

Medication and Sleep

I’ve got five different medications that I take. One every day and the other four we titrate up and down depending on where I am. And then I’ve got a relentless focus on sleep, because sleep is for me, certainly, with bipolar, a leading or a lagging indicator of mood.

And by the way, that might be all of us. And so every morning, the first thing I do is I send a Fitbit sleep report to a WhatsApp group that includes my doctor, my wife and the three people who have endured this with me the longest: My mom, Usha, my dad, Charlie, and my sister Monica. Here it is.

Every morning, this is my statement of life. And what is it? It is a daily reminder to never forget what’s possible.

For all of our strengths have shadows, don’t they? It doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to bring to mind other entrepreneurs, leaders and visionaries who have caused great harm to themselves and others. Even society at large.

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Confronting Our Shadows

And so what do we do? We admire their strengths. We even lionize them as individuals.

But their shadows we ignore. And we do so at our individual and collective peril. I would know because for 16 years I ignored mine at great cost to myself and others.

Why did I do that? Because I didn’t want to “be bipolar.” That’s what we say of people who have bipolar. We don’t say someone “is cancer.”

We say they have it. That’s a first step to helping our friends and our loved ones and our colleagues, not by conflating their illness or condition with their identity, but by acknowledging it as just a part of their life story and then helping them confront it.

Accountability in the Workplace

At work, I think therapy should be more or less mandatory for people who lead teams. Second chances for unethical leaders should require great consideration. Assholes should just straight up no longer be accommodated.

Boards need to step up. And all of us, we need to raise our hands when we’re not well and then seek and secure the help we need. I have been unbelievably lucky.

My family, old and new, stuck by me. My board stuck by me, my executive team stuck by me. And I have access to wildly good health care.

I love my psychiatrist. I call him my most expensive friend. And I have — and how many people have you heard this from — I have medication that actually works.

Making Mental Health Care Accessible

Because of all that, all that support and all that scaffolding, I am able to live and love and work with bipolar I. This shouldn’t be a matter of luck.

And so I’ve got one more crazy idea. Maybe my craziest idea of all. We need to make mental health care fundamentally acceptable.

Actually affordable and universally accessible. Look, I want us to be delusional sometimes. I want to be delusional sometimes.

I want people whose brains work differently, like mine does and like yours might, to be able to dream crazy dreams, to share crazy thoughts, and God willing or universe willing, bring those dreams to life. But we have to keep ourselves in check, don’t we?

Entrepreneurs Are Not Gods

After all, only messiahs are all-knowing. And entrepreneurs are not gods. Even when we think we are.

We will be better humans, building a better future together, when we take stock not just of how we change the world, but how we treated each other and ourselves along the way. And the president and Batman both agree.

Thank you.