Mental (w)illness | Christian Wehbe | TEDxZurich

Oh losing your mind is a bit like losing your virginity happens when you least expect it when it does it's pretty underwhelming and takes you a few years to appreciate its full potential in my case thank you in my case that all happened when I was 28 years old I was a peak of my career I built a very promising future in the hedge fund industry traveling the world and had finally found some financial stability after reimbursing all my student loans but I had a small problem at dr. Jekyll mr. Hyde kind of situation there are times I was a phoric above the world happy indulging and everything I really want to put my mind to I was basically still a teenager followed by moments of sadness and withdrawal yeah just feeling pretty bad but that alone wasn't enough to realize that it was a problem I had to wait till things got worse and I did I started having loosen ations I used to see a little child next to my bed every second night and I would hear voices every time I'll close my eyes talking to me so that plus a few comments from my friends that I realized maybe I was starting to lose grasp on reality and more importantly on my life so one evening it was January 12 2009 I packed up my stuff in the office like every other night took my briefcase and I headed out except this evening I didn't go back home I went to the nearest hospital as I walked through the sliding doors and headed straight to the reception desk at the emergency center and I was greeted with a really warm smile hi how can I help you I realised I hadn't thought this through because now it was in a very public area and had to explain in one or two sentences what was wrong with me so I blurted out the first thing that came to my head and it was I think something is very wrong with me I think I need to be institutionalized the woman looked at me really surprised because you have to imagine she saw this 28 year old the cliche banker outfit and the gelled hair and the pinstripe suit who seemed put together but was asked to be put in the loony bin she didn't say it but I'm sure she thought it I always knew you bankers had a lot of issues so before I knew it I was whisked away in this small little room and the head of Psychiatry came down and she changed my life with one simple sentence she says Christian I believe you're suffering from bipolar disorder bipolar disorder but by what bipolar disorder it's a mood disorder which people used to call manic depressant depressive sorry which is characterized by mood swings from moments of mania to depression I was really underwhelmed at that point because my next comment or was like you do realize I am seeing things and I'm hearing voices and you're telling me I am moody and she told me these are some of the symptoms that come in advanced case of bipolar disorder and it's more serious than being moody it's classified as a serious mental illness up there with other disabling disorders such as schizophrenia PTSD and behavioral personality disorder okay the good news was I didn't have to be institutionalized she told me as long as I want to see a 2 to 3 times a week and I would go on my meds we should be able to get this under control so I left the hospital I got home and I did the first thing that anyone would do I started researching the topic I wanted to understand this whole bipolar thing was this some kind of New Age illness that had just been invented or was this that has existed for a while so I was really surprised actually bipolar disorder you can date it back all the way to three hundred five hundred eighties when the first case is well except in those days they didn't call that they call it being possessed by the devil or demons and the and and the way they treated it was even better so you were segregated from society chained in a cellar had you blood let out or had electrical eels applied to your skull it's really happy I didn't question my mental state in those days as I realized as time went on you know we've evolved as human beings and our treatments as well and with the arrival of modern psychiatry at the end of the 19th century in the beginning of the 20th century the term manic depression was coined the treatments changed as well in those days they then used barbiturates and sedatives basically transforming you into a drooling zombie and in more extreme cases they use electroshock treatment which meant the guy's 1,500 years ago weren't so far off with those electric alleles and my personal favor prefrontal lobotomy which for anyone who hasn't seen I watched it on to you in YouTube I do not recommend it it's basically they take an ice pick and they put it through your eye socket hammer it through your skull into your brain and rummage it around supposedly it calms you down who would have known so relieved again that I that we still evolved from this period a continued research continued research II so how does this become bipolar disorder well the problem was in those days they realized that if they kept calling it manic depression people would only heard that here the depression part which is a situation even today most people may believe that manic depression means massively depressed which it doesn't at all and the second problem was anyone who was having a manic episode was by definition called a maniac not the best of medical terms so they came up they came together and they came up with a more neutral term which was bipolar disorder makes a lot of sense once you studied all the history and you're a doctor for everyone else it just sounds like some bizarre identity crisis disorder of polar bears so now I've understood the situation I study up the symptoms and I was ready to confront the world so I did two things the first thing I went to my boss I explained the situation to my boss I said look I was diagnosed with this illness and the problem is I have to see my doctor two to three times a week so I have to take slightly longer lunch breaks he was super understanding very sympathetic and say Christian of course all I want is for you to get better two weeks later I was fired shouldn't have been surprised because the hedge fund industry is known for not being the most empathetic of industries but the second thing I did is I went out and I did this bizarre coming out to a small group of friends so when I met up with them the discussions didn't go as good as I was hoping but they all went the same way did I at that point explain to them in an understanding way how they could understand this illness for instance hey John I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder bipolar disorder is a mood disorder where you go from manic phase to depression manic phase imagine me as a Jack Russell I'm bouncing off all the walls I'm running around with no direction and I believe I can take on any Doberman in the park okay then comes depression Here I am the owner of the Jack Russell okay I'm exhausted I am fed up and half the time I just want to kill myself that would be a simple way to explain bipolar disorder but instead I did it what most people do I started listing symptoms and it will go a bit like in a manic phase I feel really hyper energetic I sleep three hours a night I'm doing really poor decisions etc etc etc then I get to depression and the list is even longer as you can imagine by the third symptom everyone's eyes glaze over and can I blame them not really because I realized is this conflict that most people with this disorder suffer from which is on the one hand you have your doctors that are telling you Christian this is a really serious illness you have to take meds for you will have to monitor it for the rest of your life and the other side you have your friends and family saying dude we all have good days and bad days just snap out of it and they have a fair point and it took me some time to realize that that they had a fair point because what I realized is I was describing the illness by listing symptoms of emotions everyone has the only difference with me they're a bit more enhanced so of course nobody understands what that actually means and the problem is is that enhancement is what brings people to do really poor decisions so what happened was at that point I was sitting at home without a job without a career friends not understanding me popping eight pills a day I was on antipsychotics antidepressants and lithium and they never will happen I started feeling sorry for myself and this is a situation many people with this is order feel because they feel misunderstood and hopefully I'll be able to give them an alternative thanks to this story in my case the self-pity didn't last too long lasted two to four weeks about and it all changed with the movie I never thought a movie would affect me this much but anyways I was at home as going through my DVDs collection and I liked to watch my movie according to a theme if I'm feeling in a certain mood there's a certain movie that will fit perfectly in this case a beautiful mind for those people who haven't seen it a beautiful mind is the story of John Nash who's a famous mathematician we're talking about the equilibrium of Nash before who was a paranoid schizophrenic I talked about how he deals with his illness now as I was watching this movie and coming towards the end of the movie I was getting more and more excited because I was thinking to myself my god this John Nash guy he's seriously crazy like I'm crazy here he's crazy up here but he also happened to win the Nobel Prize in Economics so that's when my philosophy changed completely and I thought to myself maybe I'm looking at this completely the wrong way maybe there are hidden gifts that come with my disorder and so what I did is I started researching bipolar disorder and leaders and the results were phenomenal it went from Van Gogh Winston Churchill Frank Sinatra Kurt Cobain Axl Rose Mike Tyson Mel Gibson Patricia Cornwell Virginia Woolf and the list goes on and on and on not bad for side-effects so having these people as leaders with all this stuff so I started analyzing what did they have in common and I realized there were a few things that in common first they were all pioneers in their industry second they were phenomenal communicators be it through music movie writing thirdly they were definitely out-of-the-box thinkers fourth they were creative beyond any normal person's imagination so that sound like pretty optimistic news to me so thought to myself why don't I focus on the positive and just try to control the craziness and with that I came up with a three-step plan so my next meeting I went to my doctor and I told her doc I have a strategy it's very unorthodox but please hear me out and she was used to these kind of declarations before most of my ideas were really bad but this one she listened through it and she said okay Christian let's hear your pitch so I said well first of all I think I need to be reduced completely in my medication I feel I'm constantly in a haze I can't focus as well and I want the old Christian back okay secondly I have to get rid of this self-pity and the only way I can do that is I have to stop talking about this disorder with people around me until I've had it under control she says okay fine and thirdly I want to build a company now here I gave it a 50/50 chance to end up in the hospital because that's a typical manic thing to do you come in like a I don't want to take the meds and I'm going to set up a company in an industry I have no knowledge on no contacts and it's going to be great and and in hindsight I hope I hope she sees this talk one day because she agreed to everything and it just shows what a phenomenal doctor she was because she realized that she had to treat me as a person and not my symptoms and she understood that the way for me to build myself was by building a company so what happened next was chemistry class over the next couple of weeks we tested different kinds of meds and then after two weeks it finally happened we eliminated all the antidepressants we limited antipsychotics to extreme cases and reduce my lithium my mind was sony razor sharp I could process things faster than ever before I felt like my IQ jumped 30 points even though it didn't but I was just really focused I could multi-process things etc and most importantly I found my creativity back as when I was a kid so what did I do with all of this since well since I've built two companies one of which we traded over a hundred million dollars in physical gold with offices in Switzerland and Hong Kong I've been a consultant to various companies across industries and I'm a regular speaker on failure schools conferences and companies but that's only half the story the other half fell flat on my face more times than I can remember I failed in business and I've had setbacks in in my disorder but you want to know something that's helped me out each time was my mental illness it was my capacity that my disorder a gift that my disorder gave me of turning around bad situations into opportunities so why am i standing here in front of you today I'm basically breaking the second rule of not talking about my illness in ridiculous proportions it's because six years ago I met a girl and like most stories in life there's always a girl behind it and when I met this girl I I told her I don't think this is the best time for us to get together because you know it just came out I have this crazy disease and I'm playing around with my meds and I don't really have a job or regular revenue and I'm trying to set up a company and she just looked at me and she says Christian I don't care about any of that I will stick by your side no matter what in exchange though I want you to make me a promise I want you to promise me that the day we do have this illness under control you will come out and you'll talk about it so maybe we can alleviate some of the stigma that people by bipolar disorder or with a mental illness half did she keep a promise no still even better she agreed to marry this crazy man this summer so I'm standing here in front of you because years ago I made a promise to my fiancee and then expect this to be this emotional okay so yes I made a promise to my fiancee and I I'm going to keep it and the way I'm going to do this is I just want you to walk away with the understanding of what mental illness really means so the definition of mental illness to me is this it's being positively crazy when things go bad it's changing the perspective when you have failed in order to find a secret gift and make it turn it into an opportunity now that's a lot of words and many people have said similar things and you're never going to remember any of it anyways so I thought I'll give you live demonstration of what mental illness actually means this is why I have this glass here so for the optimists in this room this glass is half full for the pessimists and the French it's half empty how would someone that is embraced mental winless and is positively crazy perceive this class well first of all they'll stop looking at the glass from the side they changed the angle look at it here suddenly see that they can access what is inside the glass and be curious enough to taste it and as they do they might just realize they are holding the most vital commodity to survive the palm of their hands if you can remember this you will have understood mental illness and most importantly you let me to keep my promise to my fiancee Claudia thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 20,126

Rating: 4.8285713 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Switzerland, Health, Communication, Family, Illness, Mental health, Personal growth, Positive Thinking, Struggle, Success

Id: -PF1YwJAwqw

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2016