Growing up with a brother who suffered from a severe mental illness, Steve learned how important it is to support those struggling with mental health issues. He shares how that has inspired and informed the work he does today.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Hello and welcome to The Hope Happens Here Podcast. This is Kate [Gosney-Hoffman 00:00:07], so glad you're here. Today we are joined by Steve Pitman. Steve is on the NAMI board of directors and a board member. NAMI is the National Institute of Mental Illness. I had an amazing conversation with Steve. He is such a humble person and when thinking about all the work that he does and has been doing for years and years and years, within his own family and in his community, he talked in depth about the story about his brother and how his brother suffered from mental illness from an early age and what that was like for him, for Steve, watching his brother go through that and his own experience of trying to help him and being an advocate for his brother and actually how hard it was and the pain that came from that and the inspiration that he got in what he does now and how important it is to support family members and to support those who are struggling with mental illness. It just ... There was a chain reaction that happened within his own family experience that has led him to do great things and I really appreciated hearing the depth of that and he had no problem getting real and raw with us and just ... I appreciate it so much.
Just so many amazing stories that brought us both to tears about the importance of human connection and compassion for one another and how it is wired within us to be connected and to not abandon that, even in the midst of what's going on in the world right now. So there's so much that I could say about what Steve had to share, but I'll let you listen for yourself.
Steve, thank you so much and I do want to officially welcome you to Hope Happens Here and what I'd love to do is just sort of start by handing it over to you and just having you share about your role at NAMI and with Mind OC and then we can go from there and just ... one of the things I love about your story is how you got into mental health as well, so I'd love to hear that.
Steve Pitman: So we have time.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah.
Steve Pitman: Well let's start with how I got into mental health. I went to college, Psych 101 I took because I had to take it in my freshman year. I had very little interest in it. I wasn't particularly curious about it and about the time, I guess I was a junior in high school maybe or a senior in high school, my older brother, two years older, started to have problems, and I, like I guess a lot of seniors in high school, didn't care too much what my brother did as long as he stayed out of my way because I was very self-interested as I suspect a lot of seniors in high school are.
So none of us ... I think it's fair to say none of us recognized my brother's problem as a mental illness. We just thought he was just being ornery for lack of a better word.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: What did it look like?
Steve Pitman: Well, we had moved to Virginia. My father was in the army. My brother had stayed in California and my parents started to get calls from members of our church that they had seen John out on the streets at 2:00 in the morning walking. Which he had never done before. John was always the responsible one and he was not calling in when he didn't make it to work. People didn't know where he was, he got into car accidents, this is in Marin County, and he'd come kind of walking out of the woods and he didn't really remember what had happened. Just behavior that he had never exhibited before. He was always the ... I can remember my mother reaching down and squeezing my cheeks saying, "Why can't you be more like your big brother?"
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Wow.
Steve Pitman: Because John got As and John did everything right. John never had to be reminded and I was just the reverse. I used to say that I was the son that my parents had to keep them humble. I'm not emotionally scarred from that, so that's not the reason for my telling this story. It's just that John was so good at so many things and I wasn't particularly good. I was social and I was athletic but all of the things that John was good at I wasn't and so suddenly he starts behaving differently so my parents decided he needed to come to Virginia.
They got one of the soldiers that my father knew to drive with him, and when he got to Virginia, he's telling stories about ... He was driving a VW Bug and he's drafting behind tractor-trailer rigs to save gas, and so he can go faster, faster, longer. It just seemed like there was just a lot of odd things. So I went to college, my parents went to Okinawa, my father as I said was in the army, and they took him to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist immediately, like 15 minutes in, turned to my mother and said, "Well you realize you've created all these problems," and then turned to my father and said that, "Anything she's not responsible for you are," and then turned to my siblings and they're all there, I wasn't, I was away in college, turned to them and said, "And clearly you have a dysfunctional family," so then went on to say, "You," my parents, my family, "Should never again be in my brother's personal space and he should never be in yours. Meet him in restaurants and parks. Don't have him in your home. Don't you go to his home."
The psychiatrist was Scott Peck, the man who wrote the book The Road Less Traveled.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Oh wow.
Steve Pitman: I tell this story to provider groups and they ... The first response is, "When did this happen?" I said, "Well, as nearly as I can recall, the mid to early ... About '65, '66, '67," and they say, "Well in those days, we believed that the mother was the source of a lot of these problems, but we don't believe that anymore." Then my question for them is, "So why do you have his book in your bookcase?"
Kate Gosney-Hof...: That was my question in my brain right now.
Steve Pitman: It's not in the history section. It's right there along with everything else. And I can remember when I was in college getting these letters from my mother, and I would just weep, and I wished I had saved them but I didn't but ... Because I could feel the pain that she was in, and it was ... It just made me feel terribly kind of alone with this. My family didn't talk about this with anyone. I mean no one. Not even amongst themselves. It just was not discussed.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right.
Steve Pitman: Then I found myself, after I graduated from college, living in Orange County, which is where John had gone and we both lived here in the country for about 55 years together and late, like the last 20 years or so of his life, I kind of became his primary contact and caregiver with the family and watched him go through 5150s and hospitalizations and watched police put a straitjacket on him and watched him walk through the soles of his shoes. He lived in Westminster. He would walk to Riverside and rent a hotel room.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Walked. Wow.
Steve Pitman: Then he would take out all of the smoke detectors in the room because obviously somebody was listening in.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: So it was schizophrenia.
Steve Pitman: Schizoaffective disorder.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Schizoaffective, okay.
Steve Pitman: After one of ... I'm probably taking more time to tell the story than I should but -
Kate Gosney-Hof...: No. Not at all.
Steve Pitman: After one of his many hospitalizations and there were about 100 of them, but after one, about 20 years ago, I as most people do when their family members are going through this crisis, you take out your yellow pad and a pen and you start writing down resources as quickly as you can and once the problem seems to have been addressed, you put all of that away and then you get back to the other things that you have to do and that's what I had done and I got this phone call from a woman about a class I had signed up for. I thought, "Lord, the last thing I need is a class about anything. I don't have time for this." Then I'm listening, she sounded very pleasant, I thought, "You know, what's one night out of the year? How bad can that be?" Then I realized she's telling me the class lasts 12 weeks and so I said to her, I said, "You know Sue, you sound like a very nice lady. I'll come one time but I'm not a big believer in this kind of thing so you may not ever see me again." She said, "We'll take a night."
I walked into her room and for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who understood exactly what I had been going through and no one was blaming me or shaming me [inaudible 00:09:55] ... I told you my wife and I raised four of our grandchildren and the oldest has had bipolar disorder, and I said, "Melissa," I said, "You have to go to this class." She said, "Well Pop," she said, "I don't think I can because I've got bipolar disorder." I said, "Well let me call a NAMI Orange County office and we'll see what they say." So I called the office, I said, "I'd really like to get my granddaughter into the class." She said, "Well as long as she's 18 and she has a family member with a diagnosable mental illness, she's welcome." I said, "But Donna, she has bipolar disorder." And Donna was very patient. She said, "Let me tell you again. The requirements are she has to have a family member with a diagnosable mental illness and she has to be 18."
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Nice.
Steve Pitman: So with that, Melissa joined the class and we took the class. She responded as positively as I did. We took the class again immediately and when I called to sign up for the second class, I told Donna, I said, "We've just got to take the class again." Donna said, "You know, we don't usually do that. There's a lot of people that want to take this class and so once is pretty much all we do." I said to Donna, I said, "You have to understand my granddaughter and I are very slow learners." So she said, "Okay, we'll make an exception."
Kate Gosney-Hof...: I need a booster class.
Steve Pitman: Exactly. Speaking of boosters. So we took the class again and then immediately signed up to take the training to teach the class, and we taught the class together about eight times.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: You did it together.
Steve Pitman: Indeed. So now instead of ... Our relationship was much more like father and daughter than it was grandfather and granddaughter, but now she's my partner in teaching. So I'm not the dad, I'm a co-teacher, which was really healthy for us to go through.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Oh sure.
Steve Pitman: Together and unlike the family of my birth that did not discuss this, with Melissa, her siblings and my wife and I discussed it whenever anyone wanted to, when her siblings wanted to, when she wanted to, when we wanted to, but it was just kind of a natural part. We didn't talk about it all the time, but it was certainly not a taboo subject.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right.
Steve Pitman: Melissa spoke to lots and lots of groups about her ... I say this, I don't want to minimize her bipolar disorder. The first eight years of her diagnosis, so from the time she was 15 and 1/2 till about 23 and 1/2, she was locked up in psych units an average of 40 days a year.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Oh my gosh.
Steve Pitman: So the suicidal ideations were really very prevalent in her case. But in telling people how well somebody could live, not withstanding bipolar disorder, it sent a powerful message of hope and it also did an awful lot to destigmatize the mental illness.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Would you say it empowered Melissa as well in hers?
Steve Pitman: Hugely. Hugely. I mean we're all given challenges that come at birth and mental illness is not something any of us would pray for for our children.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Of course not. Yeah.
Steve Pitman: Certainly. But the question is, so now that you've got it, what do you do? One choice is the choice that was made with my brother and at the time that it was made because I think that's an important consideration, and that was to speak about it to virtually no one and then no one is helped and my brother probably is stigmatized further because it's not a natural part of the conversation.
The other alternative is to take this thing that you never would have wished for and help other people on that journey and that's the choice that Melissa made, and had an enormously positive impact on lots and lots and lots of people.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: You both did that actually, because the family member is right along side the person who struggles with the mental illness. There's a parallel process there.
Steve Pitman: Yep.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: The worse the mental illness gets, the worse the experience of the family member becomes unless there's self-care, education, support. So the two of you in first of all going to these NAMI classes and then becoming involved in them and teaching them, you were rewriting the script and the narrative of your own family too. You were making things okay to talk about and destigmatizing and bringing it above board and thereby taking away the shame.
Steve Pitman: Yep. Sunlight has an incredibly cleansing effect and we forget that.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yes. Absolutely. So you were changing the course of your own family too which I think is beautiful as well.
Steve Pitman: Yeah, well I'll tell you something funny about family and stigma. When we put family to family classes together, the only consideration is can you make it on Wednesday at 6. That's it. There's no other criteria. And as I have already indicated, you have to have a family member with a diagnosable mental illness. Beyond that we don't ask any questions.
We taught a class at a church in Irvine probably 15 years ago and in one of the classes, people introduced themselves and tell us a little bit about their family member. There's about 24 people in the room and we're about halfway around the room, and it was astonishing how many people in the room, their family member was in jail or in prison. Which is not a consideration putting together the class, so it's just by happenstance.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right.
Steve Pitman: We talked about as we're going around the room, what became clear is that in the same way that someone with a mental illness has a tendency to self-isolate, so do their families, and the reason is because neither one of them wants to answer the question. So how are you doing, Johnny, or how is doing Johnny doing, because they knew him when he was playing soccer and everything seemed great. So you just want to catch up. It's a painful question for Johnny and it's a painful question for the family.
So as we're getting almost to the last person, this lady said, I really liked all of those people that I knew from soccer and baseball and Little League, all those things. I wanted to continue to be friends with them, but I didn't want to have to continue to answer the question either. So she said, "I just made up a story." So we said, "So tell us. What's the story." She said, "When they ask about Johnny, I said, "Johnny's doing great. He lives in a gated community and he spends his free time doing woodworking and playing baseball." We all looked at her and said, "And what do they say?" She said, "They're glad he's doing well and that's pretty much the end of it."
Kate Gosney-Hof...: I have to hand it to her.
Steve Pitman: That's what I thought at the time.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah totally.
Steve Pitman: That's what I thought at the time. I'm sure she knows some of those people well enough that they know the whole story but it's painful.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: But that just ... I mean right there, is a good example of how fragile the family members are and how hard this is and to your point at the beginning of this conversation, the family, they're there in the trenches and they're the ones having to speak about what's going on and having to face the world a lot of the time on behalf of the person struggling with mental illness or whatever that might have looked like.
Steve Pitman: Yeah.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: All the more reason for support for both, right? Collectively, together. So important.
Steve Pitman: You're absolutely right because the family will be there, as I've said before, long after everybody else has left the field.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right.
Steve Pitman: I get so ... I don't know that it's anger really, but it is so disturbing when they describe somebody with mental illness as someone who has no family. Because like most of us, I took ninth grade biology. I understand how it works, they all had family. Now the system I think does ... Now being facetious, does its best to get the family out of the picture because it's more efficient, and the family gets beaten by the system, but I think the best chances for real recovery come through an engagement of the family in the process.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: I'm wondering too what your opinion is about this because there is such a thing, right, as healthy boundaries within the family and it's really important to have good boundaries to help ... But it seems that one size doesn't fit all with that kind of thing because there's a range of what mental illness looks like and what drug and alcohol addiction looks like. One size does not fit all.
Steve Pitman: No that's right, and it's a complicated problem and one of the things that I was talking about with someone here in the Orange County community this morning is I said, "I think we have to manage our expectations a little bit." The North Campus is something which is through Mind OC and Be Well is something that we're all extremely excited about and we think it will allow us to bring real solutions to the problem. We also have to understand that serious mental illness is difficult and we're not going to put together a pop one two three here's the solution kind of a deal. It's not going to work like that. The people with serious mental illness are going to continue to live with serious mental illness, but if we do it right, they can live in recovery and live a relatively normal, happy life, which is what we want for all the people that we love. But again, there aren't going to be quick solutions. There will be better solutions, but not quick ones.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: It sounds to me there's a paradigm shift in sort of how the philosophy of treating mental illness that you are sort of talking about, where instead of kind of just more medical model come to the office, here's a script, take care of you, this is the solution and you'll be on your merry way, cut out the family members, let's just treat the patient, versus what? What would you think would be a better way of approaching mental illness?
Steve Pitman: Well, it's funny because ... I guess it's ironic. Because with my brother, I can remember when he was spiraling downward. I just wanted them to give him a shot.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Well sure. Absolutely.
Steve Pitman: Whether he wanted the shot or not, I wanted him to get the shot.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Just make it better.
Steve Pitman: That's exactly right, because I could see the pain that he was going through. I mean I can remember admitting him once to a hospital and he was asked to sign his name to a piece of paper. His signature was no more than three-eights of an inch across, round, tight little ball of ink, because it was all that he could muster, and I thought ... I asked many ... Many of the professionals involved I asked repeatedly, "How much damage does he have to do to himself before someone will help him? He's not hurting anybody else."
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Why is it so hard?
Steve Pitman: He's hurting himself.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right.
Steve Pitman: There's still a piece of me that is sensitive to that part of the problem but I heard a speaker, a retired psychiatrist speak a couple of years ago at a NAMI convention and she told a story about a man in his early thirties that would come into her office and he was on methadone and he drank alcohol in huge quantities and he was not on any medication and he did have a diagnosis and smoking marijuana, like ... I'm going to sound like I know what I'm talking about and I don't, four bongs a day. That's a lot of marijuana.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah.
Steve Pitman: That's all I guess we need to know. So at any rate, he came into her office and he'd been other places and nobody would accept him as a patient because he's got such a mess. Where do you start? Apparently they began a conversation and she turned to him and she said, "What are your goals?" he looked back at her like she was smoking something. Nobody had asked him what his goals were for more than 100 years and now you're going to ask me what my goals are? Obviously he hadn't spent a whole lot of time thinking about his goals and finally she said, "Well what could you do that would make you happy? I mean really happy." He thought about it for a while and he said, "You know, I'd like to make my brother proud." Who could quarrel with that?
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Wow. Yeah.
Steve Pitman: She said, "Well where's your brother?" He said, "Well he's in Tallahassee." She was in Arkansas, and she said, "Well you know, Arkansas and Tallahassee aren't that far apart." She said, "If you gave up one bong a day, I think you could save the money to get to Tallahassee pretty quickly."
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Nice.
Steve Pitman: So he comes waltzing into her office, it seems like a couple months later. Got a huge smile on his face. "What's going on?" "I just got back from seeing my brother." So the obvious question is, "So what would you like to do next?" He said he'd like to see his mother. Well his mother was on the East Coast, a little bit further, and they started talking about what he'd have to give up to put the money together to get to see his mother in I think it was Massachusetts. I think it was like two bongs a day, so if you're keeping track now he's down to one and 90 days or so later he'd been to see his mother.
She said now this went on for a long time. This was not a quick solution. But the time has passed, perhaps years have passed. The kid is not taking any street drugs. He's not smoking marijuana. He's seeing a talk therapist on a regular basis. He's taking medications for his mental illness, but he still drinks two cans of beer a week. He drinks one on Saturday, and one on Sunday, and so the question for us all is so which person helped him the most? Certainly not the people who turned him away, but the people, the person, the professional in this case, that embraced him in the conversation and tried to help him meet what he wanted to accomplish as opposed to what they thought he should do before of course he accomplished anything.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right.
Steve Pitman: It took some years but in my mind the alternative is clear. We'll do better with everyone if we help them accomplish the things they want to do which is no different incidentally from any of the rest of us. If you went to a life coach and the life coach started telling you what you should do with your life, you probably wouldn't hang around very long. But as soon as he or she hooked into what your interests were, that starts to make a lot of sense and the mentally ill have the same capacities and we should embrace them rather than reject them waiting for them to get on talk therapy and take their meds and cease doing street drugs. In my mind, it's the wrong order of things.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: I agree, and as you're talking about this, I'm thinking and feeling that what you're describing right now is human motivation.
Steve Pitman: Absolutely.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right? Human motivation to do better because while that felt good, that helped me feel good, I want more of that. I feel proud of myself, I want more of that and I see that this causes this, this cause and effect, and I want to keep doing that. It's not as if somebody who struggles with a mental illness is not human.
Steve Pitman: Exactly right.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: They're human.
Steve Pitman: Exactly right.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: So speak to their human-ness.
Steve Pitman: That's exactly right.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Their humanity.
Steve Pitman: It's no different ... I used to be in education, it's no different than we tell teachers what they should do. You have to make this math or this reading or this English relevant to them.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Exactly.
Steve Pitman: If there's no way they will ever use it in their daily lives, it's a tough one to pull off. And build on their successes. Don't continually throw in their faces all of their failures. Start with what they can do and build on that.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: It breaks down the resistance too, because the doctor in the white coat I know better than you do just ... They're either going to resist or they're just going to be unempowered in a lot of ways.
Steve Pitman: Yeah, the other element that we haven't touched on is ... I think it's really, and we talk about clinicians, and the point that I want to make is that I think sometimes clinicians get too clinical. The thing that moves you in addition to relevance is that you're working with somebody who cares, who reaches out, who you connect with on a human basis.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: A relationship.
Steve Pitman: That's exactly right, and with the white coat and the strictly clinical point of view, that caring if you will does not come through.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: No. Would you say ... I mean so to sort of shift here in terms of the state of mental health in our community and just in general, right? What's that looking like right now in terms of is that getting better? Do you think that that's shifting, that mentality of ... Because I know it has a lot to do with the payers and insurance companies and we have to see this many patients and so it's quick fixes, not a lot of continuity of care. I mean this is a big question but there's been a lot going on right now to say the least and so I know we've talked in the past about how there's just sort of this swell happening about mental ... We need to be prepared for what this last year has really caused in terms of mental illness and people struggling with maybe pre-existing things getting worse.
So in terms of the clinicians out there and the support that we have as a community, how prepared do you think we are? Do you think that we're in a good space or do you think that we're still ... We got a long way to go. Does that make sense?
Steve Pitman: Yeah. I'm going to try to have it both ways.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah. Oh good.
Steve Pitman: I think first we're not well-prepared. I think there's a real shortage of clinicians and psychiatrists and there's a whole host of reasons for that that I'd be happy to discuss another time but it's not a quick -
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Sure. It's a big conversation, yeah.
Steve Pitman: Conversation. But I think the pandemic has raised our consciousness about a lot of things and I think we're having conversations that two years ago we just simply wouldn't have had.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: I agree.
Steve Pitman: I think so much of living a valuable life has to do with connection or connectedness, and it's interesting because the research they're doing with the brain is talking about exactly the same thing.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: I know.
Steve Pitman: When the connections aren't there in the brain, things go awry for us.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right.
Steve Pitman: And I don't think the solution to these problems all lie with clinicians. I think it starts with family.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Good point.
Steve Pitman: Then it goes to community, and at some point clinicians yes are and should be engaged, but I think we're foolish and naïve to think that, "Well shoot. There's a touch of bipolar here, I'll just send them off to a professional down the street and they will come back a cured person." That's just simply not the way it works.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right, no.
Steve Pitman: But I think anyone who as ... Whether with or without mental illness who becomes disconnected from family and from community, from their tribe if you will, is going to suffer. There's just no other way to express it. We are social people and I think one of the first mistakes that we made with the pandemic is talked about social isolation. That was a huge mistake. Physical isolation, got it. But you need to maintain, we need to maintain those social relations, that social connectedness for any of us to thrive and you take that away and we all suffer.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: It's wired in us.
Steve Pitman: Indeed. Exactly right. Exactly right. Take a newborn child away from his or her mother and put him in some sort of an incubator kind of system where they're not interacting with people, they're not the same five years later.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: No.
Steve Pitman: So why we think that somebody at 18 or 25 can do that is kind of beyond me. I think we need to make connection and I think I may have shared this story the last time we spoke, but it's worth telling again as most stories are.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Please.
Steve Pitman: So there's a very prominent psychiatrist in the county that does all sorts of tests that most psychiatrists don't do. To his credit, he doesn't prescribe psychotropic drugs without doing them and I will guarantee you there are still places in the county where you can walk out with a prescription in five or ten minutes. To me that's unconscionable. He doesn't do that, so there's a lot that he does that's very good and very right.
One of the families that I know had a 31-year-old son who lived with schizoaffective disorder that they took to this particular psychiatrist, and they were in a meeting that both parents, the young man and the psychiatrist, they were in a meeting kind of going over the results of all they had discovered through these interviews and all of these other tests. They were about 45 minutes into the conversation and the psychiatrist stood up and walked across the room right in front of this young man and almost knelt down in front of him and said to him, "I can tell this has really caused you pain." The mom, when she told me the story, and they had been searching for treatment for 15 years. This was not the first run at it. She said the most impactful thing anyone had ever done for her son was that two minutes of time.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: It gives me chills.
Steve Pitman: I'll tell you another similar story that gives me chills as well. I had a tour of a homeless facility not long ago and accompanying me on the tour was a monsignor in the Catholic Church, a priest. About 90 years old. Sharp as a tack. Shuffled a little bit but intellectually he was all there and capable, and you have to understand that you go into the shelter and everyone either is just coming off of being homeless or two years ago they were and now they're working in the facility to help others make the same journey.
There wasn't anybody that we walked by that he didn't walk over to, and he reached out his hand and he touched their hand and he said, he said, "I'm working my way to heaven. Will you help me?" Well their eyes just almost popped out of their heads, nobody had asked them to do anything for anyone for 100 years and here is this very respectable priest asking them for their help. Well of course they all said yes, and he said then a prayer that couldn't have lasted 10 seconds. And they just walked away, levitating because I think the human condition is to serve others and my granddaughter figured that out and she served others by helping them work with their mental illness. I think it's up to each of us to find out how we best can serve others and through that connect with others because I think it makes us more mentally well and healthy and I think frankly obviously it helps them as well.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: The alchemy between helping you helps me and vice versa, there is a relationship there that is sacred and we will not be okay if we disrupt that natural way of things.
Steve Pitman: Or pretend that it doesn't exist.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Or pretend ... Good point. And pretend it doesn't exist, deny it, right? So I hear you loud and clear that that is something that we need to think about and be very aware of and conscious of is whatever way we can, whatever is within our power, whatever is within our circumstance, is to -
Steve Pitman: That's exactly right.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Ensure that we don't stop connecting.
Steve Pitman: That's exactly right. I read an interesting article recently by Richard Rohr who is a Franciscan priest who has a center in New Mexico, the Center of Action and Contemplation I think that it's called, and I read his stuff if you will every day. He wrote [inaudible 00:36:45] within the last week or two about being socially active to fix some of the flaws in our society and he was talking about specifically about Cesar Chavez who obviously led in organizing the grape workers and he was saying that there's three different kinds of actions, one is the person who works in the food center and passes out bread and another is the person that engages in the larger community and a third is the person who decides to become an advocate as Cesar Chavez did. The point that he made I think was a good one. He said one is not more valuable than the other. These are all equally valuable things that we need to embrace and basically cherish in our society.
So for each of us, hook into the problems wherever you can and the rest of us all need to appreciate everyone's contribution as opposed to minimizing one person's contribution over another's.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right, and that goes back to what you were saying about what we can do right now is realize that everybody plays a part.
Steve Pitman: Yep. Inescapable.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Exactly, in everything, but specifically to this conversation the mental health of ourselves and our neighbor and our family and our community.
Steve Pitman: Right. The only thing I ask in a figurative sense is get up off the stool and do something. It may just be engaging in a conversation. It can be fairly quick, but the conversation has to be had and you need to find your place in the continuum of services to decide where you're going to help forward it.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Absolutely and nobody knows that better than you because you've been leading these classes now for how long?
Steve Pitman: I think I'm about 15 years in. I've taught the family to family class 36 times, but then who's counting?
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah well who.
Steve Pitman: But you're right. People always say ... We so appreciate the sacrifices you're making to teach these classes, which obviously is nice of them to say. But if I didn't get as much out of it as I do, I wouldn't continue to do it.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Absolutely.
Steve Pitman: For me it continues to be healing.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: So that's a perfect example of what you were just describing and it's win-win. Helps me, helps you.
Steve Pitman: Yeah. There's no sacrifice in it.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right, and there's healing for both parties and there's so much ... Like you were saying before, there's so much that we don't realize from isolation or from ... When you're talking about your family, with your brother, seeing the psychiatrist that told that you all need to isolate and be separate. I mean that is ...
Steve Pitman: The wounds in my siblings are still apparent.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: I'm sure, and exactly. The trauma, the generational trauma that is incurred by something like that.
Steve Pitman: Yeah, and I escaped it because I wasn't there.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Exactly. Wow.
Steve Pitman: I can remember ... This goes back four or five ... Well I guess more than four or five years ago, my brother passed away about seven, almost eight years ago. But I can remember, maybe it was 15 years ago, something, he was still alive, but I thought since I wasn't there and I missed out on all of those things, I said it would be interesting to talk to my other siblings and my mother to see what she remembered and they remembered of those early meetings with the psychiatrist.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right.
Steve Pitman: I did and then I thought and it would be interesting to hear John. See what he thinks or thought.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Definitely.
Steve Pitman: The thing that made such an impression on me is that it was with John, it was like pulling a scab off a fresh wound. He was right back in it.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Trauma.
Steve Pitman: And I don't know that he remembered exactly what the psychiatrist said, but I can assure you he thought he did and he could go on for paragraphs of what the psychiatrist said about the family and their role in this and all of that kind of thing, like he just walked out of the therapy session.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: That's the nature of PTSD, right?
Steve Pitman: Yeah.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: That's ... You know?
Steve Pitman: Yeah. We all leave marks on the people we come in contact with, and they should be blessings, not scars.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right. So compassion, connection, awareness, support.
Steve Pitman: Again, these are all roles for the larger community. You don't have to go to a clinician to get any of this stuff.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Exactly.
Steve Pitman: Again, it's not to say they don't play an important role, I believe they do, but let's not forget that the community and the family has a huge role to play.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Well I love this message because it's reminding us that we all have a role, we all have a part, and they all work in concert together. We don't exist in these silos where everybody is just separate and we all have to address our own things separately. We are all connected. Whether we like it or not, we all affect and impact one another.
Steve Pitman: We're stuck with each other.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah, and we're all collectively as a society, as a community, as a family, as a neighborhood, going through something together right now in 2020 and beyond and we have to recognize that and make good our choices around it.
Steve Pitman: Yep. And the guy that just cut you off on the freeway is going through his or her own set of problems and you should assume that rather than wonder why.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah. That's a good reminder. That is a good reminder, and possibly one of the silver linings to this time too is like you said earlier, a higher consciousness of things. Maybe realizing that as we slow down a little bit, that we don't all have to be in crisis mode all the time, and to have a little bit more compassion and awareness for our neighbor.
Steve Pitman: That's right, and in doing that, you will provide healing for yourself.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Exactly.
Steve Pitman: It's not that there isn't a benefit to the larger community, but I think in many ways the largest benefit comes from the giver.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: And what that reminds me of is how important it is to take care of the giver as well.
Steve Pitman: In family to family, we have one whole class about self-care. Because moms have a really, really hard time with that.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yes we do.
Steve Pitman: It's important for the rest of us I think to be conscious of that to ensure that the moms take the time and are given the time for that self-care.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah. Thank you.
Steve Pitman: Well it's been that way for a long time.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yes it has.
Steve Pitman: But that doesn't mean that it's okay.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: No, and caregiver burnout is a real thing and that looks like a lot of different things and circumstances and as a mother, as a parent, as a caregiver, as a father, you take on the responsibility and that becomes your livelihood all the time and it's important to have somebody say to you, "Oh no, you matter too," and without you, they can't be okay. Without you taking care of yourself, you cannot take care of them and it's so cliché, right? Wear that oxygen mask on, put your oxygen mask on first before you put it on theirs but it's cliché for a reason. It's so true.
Steve Pitman: You can't give away what you don't have yourself.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: You cannot. If your tank is empty, what are you siphoning off? Nothing. All your energy, all your resources, and you're suffering.
Steve Pitman: Yeah. So take care of yourself.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: So take care of yourself.
Steve Pitman: It's interesting in the family to family class, in the first class, typically the moms, which most of the attendees are always moms which is also an interesting conversation.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah, that is.
Steve Pitman: But their faces are just drawn with stress and as the class goes on for 12 weeks, you can just see the lines lifting from their face because more often than not they're starting to pay a little bit more attention to themselves.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: And they're experiencing community and the weight is not all on their shoulders too.
Steve Pitman: That's correct. They're no longer being judged.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Right. That feeling that you felt when you could finally exhale when you went to that meeting for the first time? There's just nothing like that.
Steve Pitman: Well, and the word we get on it, because we do evaluations obviously, but the word that we get again and again and again and again is this class was transformative.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Well it doesn't get better than that.
Steve Pitman: No. No.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Thank you for doing that for so many years and for being there for those in need, for all of us as a community.
Steve Pitman: Yep. I'm happy to be there.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: I could talk to you forever. I'm so grateful that you're here. Is there anything else that you would like to say before we sign off?
Steve Pitman: No, I think this is an exciting time in the discussion of mental illness and mental health, mental well-being, and I think the completion of the north county campus is as I've said before the end of the beginning. I think now the really difficult parts start because we're bringing together providers and communities from different cultures. They operate differently and our ability to find our way to succeed, we are going to have to bring those cultures together and I think that will be a challenge for us all but I think it's one that we gladly embrace because I think it's absolutely critical in finding solutions.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah. Right. You see the necessity in this right now, so happy to be part of pioneering that effort for sure.
Steve Pitman: Yeah. Yeah. Me too.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Can you tell us a little bit about how to find the classes that you're talking about at NAMI or any other support that one can find through the organization?
Steve Pitman: Yeah. The place that I would start is to just call NAMI Orange County. They have in the first person that answers your call all of our classes and of course they're all on a website, namioc.org. You can make the call or you can go to the website, either one, and sign up. The classes are starting all the time, they're done virtually. I was in a support group which is one of the options that we provide to people on Monday night, and there was a psychiatrist and his mother calling in from Singapore.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Oh wow.
Steve Pitman: We taught a family class that ended about six weeks ago I think and we had two people in the class from the Republic of Georgia.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Really.
Steve Pitman: Now they had family members in Orange County and that was the reason that they were involved but we wouldn't have thrown them out if they didn't, I mean, but that was the connection. So as much of a shattering experience as moving into the virtual world has been for many of us, it's also provided us some options that we didn't have before and so I think even once the crisis abates, we won't go back to where we were before. It will be something new, different and better, and I think being forced into it maybe was the way that opened our eyes.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah. Only way we could stretch.
Steve Pitman: Yep.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Yeah.
Steve Pitman: Yep.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Wow interesting. That's a really good thing to hear.
Steve Pitman: Yep.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: Thank you for all the work you do for helping destigmatize mental illness and empowering those that need support, so thank you.
Steve Pitman: Happy to be a part.
Kate Gosney-Hof...: All right Steve. Thanks again.