Eric Walton – TRANSCRIPT
First of all, I would like to thank TEDx for giving me this opportunity. No doubt, at least one of you out there has asked yourself some variation of this question: what can a 16-year-old possibly have to teach me about the world? I don’t blame you, by the way.
You’re right for asking that question. But to answer that question, I would like you to turn to the person next to you. That person next to you knows something that you don’t. That person next to you knows what it is like to be themselves. They know what it is like to have lived their lives.
And now you might ask yourself, “Why is it important to know what it’s like to be this 16-year-old spouting philosophical nonsense?” Allow me to give you some background information.
My name is Eric Walton. At the age of 13, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, after my mom wrote a slightly unimportant blog post that went viral on the Internet. In this blog post, which she titled, “I Am Adam Lanza’s mother,” she said that she was the mother of a child with a mental illness.
A few days later, I got the diagnosis. And I’m here today to explain just what that journey has been like. It all started on a stormy night when I was five. Except it was actually a kindergarten classroom.
Most kindergartners go in, they have fun, they draw with crayons or whatever else they do in kindergarten. My kindergarten class was a little bit different. There was an evacuation plan in place.
Normally, you have those for things like hurricanes or earthquakes. Our class had it for Hurricane Eric, a very, very small but destructive force that every other week would go into a violent rage and tear through the classroom.
The rest of the kids would be forced to leave, because I was kind of irrational, and wouldn’t.
I’d been told that in kindergarten you’re supposed to make friends, but I was at kindergarten having everyone be afraid of me. So, they took me to see some doctors, and at first the doctors were just saying, “Oh, he’ll grow out of it, it’s just a phase.” “It won’t stay around.”
And for the next two years, there would be some variation of this kind of phrase. Then, I get to be the age of seven; and now, I haven’t grown out of it. Surprise, surprise.
So, now they take me to psychiatrists, you know, those doctors who were infamous for running inhumane experiments on hospital people in the 1950s. They don’t do that anymore, just FYI. These psychiatrists didn’t really know what was wrong with me either.
They threw different things around like oppositional defiant disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, ADHD, or maybe it’s the freaking autism spectrum. We don’t know.
So, we’re just going to diagnose you with something and stick you on some meds, and if it works, it works, if it doesn’t, we’ll stick you on other meds. The picture on your right is a picture of me at the age of seven, holding a butterfly.
My mom loves to use it. The picture on my right is a picture of me at the age of nine, holding a stuffed animal. The very first thing you might notice between these pictures is the weight difference. At nine, I’m fat. At seven, I’m not.
See, medications are great when they work, the rest of the time, they come with some horribly nasty side effects. Weight gain was the least of my problems. These glasses – nice souvenir from another such medication. I really look good in glasses, though, so I’m not complaining.
When they weren’t making me fat, or making me lose my eyesight, they were making me so tired. I could barely function. Some of you might say, “Well, that’s totally worth it if it gets rid of the rages, right?” I would agree with you, but the medications didn’t do that.
They might have reduced the frequency, but at the same time, they increased the number of triggers. I went from being the kid who threw temper tantrums on the playground, to the fat kid who threw temper tantrums on the playground. Twice as much ammunition for the bullies.
And this went on for two years; from seven to nine, I had to put up with this. Then, at about the age of nine, maybe a little bit after my tenth birthday, my parents realized that this new pattern still wasn’t fixing the problem.
So they took it a step up, and took me to the hospital. Everyone here knows hospitals. They’re those places that you go to get surgeries or help for really serious diseases. Acute psychiatric care hospitals are a bit different.
There, when I was first brought in, usually I’d be very, very violent so they would stick a needle into me, full of some kind of tranquilizer. That was fun. Not really.
Then, I would be locked in this sort of L-shaped corridor, maybe eight rooms, two beds in each, and most of the kids there were five or six years older than me. Most of them were there for a drug addiction of some kind, and I remember just being very, very afraid, because at the age of nine, children are still kind of dependent on their parents.
The one thing the hospital didn’t have was my mom. She was only allowed to see me for an hour or two a night. Yeah. Makes you think.
A few days later, I was let out of this hospital. And I was so glad to go home, back to the comforts of my room, with my special blankets and stuffed animals that I liked to collect.
But most of all, I was glad to go back to my mother. But this would become the new pattern. Over the course of the next two years, I would be back in that hospital three more times, separated from my mom.
And now, I get to the age of eleven, and hospitals aren’t enough. The psychiatrists still don’t know what’s wrong with me.
And now, there are rumors circulating the Internet that the only way to get help for your child is to charge them with a crime. So at the age of eleven, that’s exactly what my parents did. They charged me with battery, after I went into a rage and attacked my father.
And now, shortly after my eleventh birthday, the present that I got was handcuffs and a ride to a police station. They made me fill out this three-page survey, with questions like, “Have you drank alcohol in the past 24 hours?” or “Are you addicted to drugs?”, or “Do you want to kill yourself?”
I was eleven years old. I hadn’t really heard of alcohol yet. As for killing myself, I’ll pass. And then, they tried to find a prison outfit for me. Except, guess what? They don’t carry eleven-year-old prison clothes. So instead, I got an outfit that was two sizes too big.
The shirt, a short-sleeve shirt, went down to about my knees. The sleeves, half-way down my forearm, give or take I had to physically hold the pants up, because I wasn’t allowed to have a drawstring, something about it being a suicide risk, or a weapon, one of the two.
And then, I still didn’t get help. The only thing I got was a prison cell, with a stone slab against the back left corner from the entry.
A metallic toilet against the back right, one of those mattresses you practice sit-ups on in PE, as a bed. Two blankets that were as thin as paper. They couldn’t stop me from shivering. Because cold wasn’t the problem – pure utter fear; that was the only emotion that I felt.
Here I was, at eleven years old, trapped in a cold cell, caged like some kind of contaminated freak. That wasn’t me. I was released from this cell about two days later. But the pattern, once again, had changed.
And the next two years of my life, I would be back in one of those cells three more times. Sixteen days, four visits, no help.
And now, I’m 13. Kids on the playground still bully me. You’d think, at the age of 13, they’d have grown out of that. I’m still that fat kid on the playground. I’m still that kid who throws temper tantrums.
I’m still that kid who was so afraid of myself that I try to isolate from everyone. Afraid that one of these days, my rages will end up hurting someone, seriously and permanently. Scared that one of these days, I will follow through on those threats of suicide that I give in my rages.
Scared that I won’t be able to stop myself, because I haven’t in the past. Like being trapped inside your own head. You know, those scenes from horror films, where they show it from the killer’s point of view, or whatever, and you see the guy walking up with the weapon? That is what a rage feels like.
Except, instead of looking through someone else’s eyes, I’m looking through my own. I hear every word that comes out of my own mouth, and I am disgusted. Because it’s not me.
And now, I’m 13, and I am getting to the point where I am strong enough to hurt people. And I’m scared. And on one such rage, over the pair of pants I was supposed to wear to school – that was how ridiculous of things I got angry over – I was back in that acute psychiatric care hospital from when I was nine.
This time, it was different. A day or two after I was admitted, a man named Adam Lanza shot his mother, walked into a school, shot a great deal of first grade students and administrators, and then shot himself. My mother decided to write a blog post about it, because she had just recently witnessed another one of my rages, and feared that someday, it would be me.
So she wrote, “I am Adam Lanza’s mother.” Mom, I don’t know why you wrote that. My name is Eric Walton. But… So she wrote this blog post. It went viral on the Internet and the day after it went viral, my dad called me. He said, “Eric, your mom compared you to a serial killer.” I was kind of confused.
I was like, “What? My mom compared me to a serial killer?” So, I talked to her about it at visitation that night. I said, “Mom, did you compare me to a serial killer?” You can’t really say that with a straight face in many conversations.
She explained the blog post and what she had wrote. And she explained she had compared my hardships to the hardships of Adam Lanza. Rightly so.
He went through a lot of the same stuff I did. And then, she started advocating all across the country, telling her story.
But back to 13. A few days after that visit with my mom, one of the leading experts in bipolar disorder tracked my mother down and said, “I know what’s wrong with your son. I know how to help him.” I was completely skeptical.
I’d heard people say this before. People saying, “Oh, I know what’s wrong with you, it’s this, if we prescribe this medication, it will make him all better.” Hasn’t worked in the past. So, I chose not to be hopeful.
But it worked this time. And now, you might think, that’s end of it, the final chapter. After he got the right diagnosis and the right medication everything was over. But it’s not that simple. It took me two years to get to where I am now.
Two years of hard work, of nightly meditation, of remembering to take pills every day. I have to drink more water than the average human being, because if I don’t, my liver will fail, and I will die. Probably not, with modern-day medicine. The medication was only one piece. It was the capstone of the arch, I had to build the arch around it.
And now I’m here, at the age of 16, after having survived my struggle. And I’m sharing my story, even though it’s not quite over yet, because my fight won’t be over until the day I’m in a coffin. Died of, preferably, old age.
And the message I want you to take away from this story that is still going on, is this: yes, I have a mental illness. No, I’m not inferior to other human beings. No, I’m not crazy. No, I shouldn’t be feared.
When I was growing up, it would have made all the difference to have more people that just accepted me and treated me with kindness. I wouldn’t have to have gone through that fight of learning how to trust people again, I wouldn’t have to have lived in fear and isolation. Who knows?
Maybe that recovering process, after the right diagnosis, would have taken six months instead of two years. So that’s what you should take away from this.
Mental illness should be treated with respect and kindness not fear and stigma. Because I’m a human being. People with mental illness are all human beings. They deserve the same respect as anyone else.
Thank you.
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