Is that everybody?

Yeah, I think so.

There's Katie.

Yeah.

I don't see Steve.

Look at how tiny I was.

Well you were tiny.

I would say I was always a little quiet, but very curious about life, just trying to figure things out as a kid.

I had very few friends, which was really hard.

It took us a while to get it out of her.

She really like didn't wanna talk about it and we knew something was wrong.

I told my parents one night that I wanted to die.

Well I guess we tried to remain sort of calm so we wouldn't frighten her and talked to her about it and why she felt that way and what was going on.

I was very scared.

I didn't have a plan or anything it was just like a thought and so I knew I had to tell my parents so they decided to take me to a therapist.

I think it helped her quite a bit.

She did not express any real ideation of suicide or really talked about it too much and that issue went away.

I love this picture.

I do too.

Yeah.

My psychosis started when I was 26, 27.

Being home, living here for like two years with her parents during Covid, she was really not very happy.

Nothing, no indication of any kind of psychosis that I noticed at all.

Leading up to psychosis I would isolated my room a lot, just reading books all day long.

I was very unhappy.

I was getting migraines a lot.

One night around 5:30 in the morning, she came into our room, my wife and I were sleeping and she said you need to stop talking about me.

And we're like, Maddy, we're not talking about it, we're sound asleep.

Go back to bed.

And then she said that she had heard, we were talking to her sister who lives in Colorado and so then I knew something was wrong.

And I was very unaware of it.

Like I didn't know what was going on.

Shock, surprise, fear, uncertainty, not really knowing what's going on.

So yeah, it was difficult.

Three days later I decided to go to the ER.

It was one of the most horrible experiences I ever had.

They didn't treat me for 24 hours with a psychiatrist.

So I was just sitting in bed hearing voices all day long.

And so then my parents just took me out and I went to an inpatient facility for three days.

I don't recall how I found NAMI.

One thing that was really helpful, they had a training education program for like six, eight weeks where every week you would meet with a facilitator and a group of parents.

The stigma that's attached to mental health is is still very prevalent and so that's very isolating.

That really opened our eyes about it and that other people were very willing to share.

So you know, that was very, very helpful.

Once I got off the medications and once I started like functioning back to my normal self, I don't hear voices anymore.

Mostly I just hear thoughts that sound like voices.

But I can tell a difference now.

Nowadays I'm in therapy and I go to family therapy with my family, it's really helped me a lot.

Just learn how to cope with going through psychosis and just, I'm still recovering from it, but it was really one of the hardest experience I ever gone through.

But it made me really strong.

And she's fantastic.

She's seems much happier.

She's now pursuing her master's to become a licensed mental health counselor.

So she's doing great.

I think NAMI actually really helped me decide to go back to school because when I first got outta my mental health struggle with my psychosis, I took a peer to peer course which helped me like learn about medications and how to cope with my anxiety and my psychosis.

Nowadays for NAMI, I facilitate groups as a peer group facilitator and I really enjoy doing that because it gives me a chance to like help other people in my own shoes.

I also started joining a running group, which I really liked.

I'm actually a certified yin yoga teacher, which really helps just like calm and relax my mind.

I also run my own business called Mental Health Wizard, where I'm a mental health coach to help people in recovery.

I would tell parents to find as many resources as they can and to find as many doctors as they can because the health system here for mental health is really not that great.

And I have experienced that firsthand.

I have a really good psychiatrist now who's excellent and without any of that help I wouldn't be the person I am today.