25 July, 2023
Rep. Adam Smith
On Understanding Mental Health
-For me, mental health was very simple. Either you were normal or you were crazy. And at some point in my life, I decided that I was normal. So cool. I don't think about that anymore, you know?
-It's really important to think in those terms, to think about, okay, what is necessary to get to good, good mental health.
On Mental Health Stigma in the Military
-There's a lot more public discussion of mental health. Even in the three years since I've written this book, it's become much more public. But I think a lot of it is just sort of voyeuristic, like, wow, look at how messed up that person is, you know, as opposed to, okay, what are we going to do about it?
-For a long time it was like, you know, that's part of what it means to serve in the military. You don't have issues, you suck it up and you do the job and you move forward.
-There is a path to getting better. And again, I believe in the ability of people to get better.
On Accessibility and Emphasis on Mental Health Services to the Armed Services
-We're working on this a little bit within the defense bill to try to get greater access to these treatments.
-We need to really, really make sure those services are available to the armed forces.
-That again, is an access issue and it's an emphasis issue too.
On Trauma and Its Impact on Mental Health with Military Members
-If you don't address that traumatic event, it will eat away at you.
-It's worth it to examine that. And with our service members, there's obviously a lot of traumatic things that happen in their lives that they need to deal with.
-Trauma doesn't have to be great. It just has to be something that in the moment that it happened to you, it traumatized you and you didn't deal with it.
On Persistence vs. Self-awareness
-We're just going to push on through it. Okay? You know, and that's not a bad thing, by the way, as an approach, if you have pain or stresses and strains in your life, you know, just keeping going is a very initial positive way of looking at it. It beats the alternative of simply quitting and stopping.
On Dealing with Depression
-The depression I had, it was just this utter blackness about everything. And my life was really good at that particular point... It's a deep seated thing inside of you that needs to be looked at more closely and in more depth.
On Recognizing Clinical Problems
-While on things you need to think about, if it crosses over into that level of clinical anxiety or clinical depression, then you've got a bigger problem that you need to really take a look at.
-It's important to draw a distinction between sort of the normal ups and downs of life: stress, strain, good days, bad days, and then a clinical problem.
On Being Honest with Yourself about Struggles
-You have to be honest with yourself about what's really going on with you now and in the past, because we all lie, okay? And we all lie to ourselves.
-And that's where being able to be honest with yourself and those are the things that sort of dig down into your psyche and produce anxiety and depression that seems unrelated to a specific cause, which is why psychotherapy is so incredibly helpful in that situation.
-Things that happened in a relationship or happened to you at some point that you don't think was fair and it was never adequately dealt with, in your view? Rightly or wrongly, if that's the way you look at it, you need to be aware of it.
On the Importance of Accepting Help and Therapies
-There are things you can do to help deal with those challenges. If you're struggling to deal with stress, if you're struggling to deal with a period in your life that has you feeling unhappy for lack of a better way to put it, those are things.
-There is no no magical solution. And sadly, as an individual, you do have to take responsibility for trying to figure that out.
-It can be a bad thing if you bury things in your life that are really, really troubling you that you've never adequately dealt with.
On the Overarching Impact of Anxiety
-Without question, I would say anxiety because that just impacts everything. My thing is I think I love thinking anxiety robs you of that because everything is right here in the moment. You cannot know, my way of approaching that was if there's something that's gnawing at me, I must resolve that before I can move on to something else. I couldn't resolve this, okay? So I couldn't move on to something else.
On the Difficulty in Pinpointing Mental and Physical Symptoms
-I think all were combined. I would actually clearly say number one because that impacts your ability to deal with anything else without any question. I mean for me, it's hard to separate them in my mind because the pain made me anxious and the anxiety also caused some pain. So it's hard to separate them.
On the Human Tendency to Avoid Painful Truths
-But it can be a bad thing if you bury things in your life that are really, really troubling you that you've never adequately dealt with.
-There is another answer. And this is, you know, not to get a little Buddhist on you here, but we are all worthy of love simply because we exist.
On the Role of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
-And what cognitive behavioral therapy does is it tries to teach you how to better process the information coming at you. [...] if you don't have that sense of self-worth, if you haven't dealt with the psychotherapy piece, you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic with cognitive behavioral therapy.
On Mindfulness and Meditation
-The final piece of this on the mental health side that is really helpful is meditation. [...] This is you know, you have to just put everything aside, put all thoughts out of your head. Just sit there for 20 minutes. That clears your brain.
-I'm just going to notice the world around me. I'm going to try to process it and I'm going to try to figure it out. I can try to solve anything. If a thought comes into my head, that's okay. The phrase is "notice it and let it go."
On Physical Health and Muscular Activation
-So there are 43 distinct muscle patterns in your body and they've determined this. So every move that you do is controlled by one of those 43 patterns, and those patterns occasionally shut down if you overstress the muscle or compensate or whatever.
On the Role of Rest
-Me staying up for another couple of hours, worrying about what's going on in Ukraine is not actually going to solve this. So I'm going to go to sleep. I'm going to get up tomorrow morning well-rested.
On Adaptation and Continuous Learning
-This has to be an intuitive process, trial and error. Learn as you go. I mean, if I believe in just one thing, it is the ability of human beings to adapt, learn and get better than I believe in.
On Physical Therapy
-I start doing a little 12 minute stretching routine after I walk. And I don't hold anything for longer than maybe five seconds. But basically it's just moving your body in ways that it wouldn't ordinarily move more than stretching to make sure that it doesn't forget how to do that.
On Healthcare Coverage and Rationing
-Understand that there is more demand for health care, goods and services than there is money to pay for it. And that is true in every single health care system. Currently in existence or ever devised.
On the Over-reliance on Pharmaceuticals Drugs
-We are way too reliant on drugs. It almost pains me now to watch television just to watch those advertisements because they're advertising drugs like they're advertising fricking kool aid.
-And frankly, that's as much the patient's fault as it is the health care system's fault, because I've always felt this about advertisements. You don't have to go to Burger King just because they put a Burger King ad on television.
-And particularly when you're dealing with anxiety, I'll give you this other warning: the antidepressants, the SSRIs, Zoloft, Prozac and all that. You know, it works for some people.
-That's how we're going to make a decision on what sort of drug we're going to pump into our body by who has the snappiest tune on their commercial.
On Hard Work and Time in Healing
-You don't go to a muscle activation therapist once and then wake up the next day feeling great. It took a while. Okay. You don't go to a psychotherapist and have one 20 minute conversation and walk out feeling great. It takes time and you have to work at it.
-I suppressed it for 49 years and then I spent three years trying to drug it into submission. And that didn't work either. I worked for a tiny little time frame. It's there. You've got to deal with it.
On Self-help and Personal Responsibility
-You can get better. You have to take responsibility for it.
-I wanted to be 40 years old and be happy, so I was going to work towards that goal instead of working towards a solid reason for why I could feel sorry for myself.
-There is a far higher degree of individual choice number one and number two, take responsibility for wanting to get where you want to get to.
Guidance for Younger Generation
-Understand the choices that you have in your life and try to make the best choices possible.
-Really have empathy for the people around you and listen to them.
-I think being young can be a really frustrating thing because you're trying to figure the world out and trying to figure out your place in it, understand the choice and understand the fact that you can have more affirmative impact on that than you may realize.
Empathy and Listening
-Really have empathy for the people around you and listen to them.
-I always use the line" selling is listening". And I think when you're a young person, there's this presumption that you have to prove yourself and that the main way you can prove yourself is by explaining to other people how you really understand what's going on.
-You want to establish with people that you know what's happening when in fact there's incredible strength in listening to the people around you, and that will get you farther.
-What people want to know is that you're going to be willing to listen to them and learn from them.
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