Ep. 1660 – AMY SIMPSON, Mental Illness: What to Know and How to Help / KATIE MILLAR WIRIG, PREPARING OUR CHILDREN FOR REAL LIFE

SPEAKER 02 : 0:00

Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now, with The Good News, here’s Angie.

SPEAKER 04 : 0:08

Hey there, friend. Angie Austin here with The Good News. Joining us is Amy Simpson. She is the author of the book Mental Illness, What to Know and How to Help. Welcome, Amy. Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today. You know, this is kind of a pet conversation. project for me getting the stigma removed from mental illness. I did another interview this week, and I’m really passionate about this topic because mental illness runs in my family in terms of a couple of my brothers, my father, and It doesn’t end well for many people because it’s often difficult to get the proper care. My dad was estranged from us for 30 years, and he had his PhD. He was getting straight A’s in law school, and we would not have thought he’d be the person battling that. It doesn’t fit the stereotypes oftentimes. One of my brothers is in an institution right now, and the other one was murdered when he was with a group of other people that I’m assuming were suffering from some form of mental illness. I really want to get the stigma off of it so people can get the proper care they need without being embarrassed to ask for help. So thank you for writing this book. Yeah, you’re welcome.

SPEAKER 08 : 1:14

And yes, I know what you’re talking about with the stigma. So many families and so many individuals affected by that and kept silent and not getting what they need.

SPEAKER 04 : 1:23

So in Mental Illness, What to Know and How to Help, what led you to write the book? I know you’ve got a family connection to this as well.

SPEAKER 08 : 1:31

Yeah, that’s right. Like you, this really came for me out of my family experience. My mom has a severe mental illness. She actually suffers from schizophrenia. And this was, as far as I know, not diagnosed until I was a teenager and not treated until then. But it certainly disrupted my mom’s functioning and disrupted our whole family experience. you know, long before that point and was present before I was born. So I really grew up with this reality in my home and in my family and affecting my life. And then seeing my mom, just the continued progression of her illness over time and seeing her declines. It’s a difficult experience to see someone suffering and then to try to navigate, how do we, how do we provide the help that this person needs? How do we get help ourselves, you know, kind of sorting through all of that. That’s, my own experience as well.

SPEAKER 04 : 2:27

You know, I find that, you know, there’s so much sympathy for a family member that has cancer or, you know, is dealing with something, a debilitating disease, but for mental illness, it’s not the same. Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll pray for your mom with cancer. But with schizophrenia, I, I even find ourselves as family members sometimes anger. I remember because my brothers would self medicate with drugs, so I’d be furious with them for the way their lives were going, for the people they were associating with. And as I got older, I better understood one was definitely diagnosed with paranoid, schizophrenic and bipolar disorder. So he had a diagnosis. But treatments, too, because this is kind of the shelved issue in our society, the treatment that he had Was, you know, medication that, you know, for decades and decades they’d be using that made him like a walking zombie. So I can see why he wanted to go off the medication because he had no facial expression. He had no affect. He walked around and even his tone of voice when he would talk to me would be like this. No wonder he wanted to get off the meds, because these meds were like something that they maybe started using in the 40s. Like, let’s get some advancements, people. Let’s help these people and do some research in these areas to get them medications that might actually let them function in society as a normal person or feel more normal. in terms of, you know, family members, I’m ashamed to say that many times I was enraged with them and their behavior and the violence and the things that would come out of them when they were dealing with their issues through non-medical means, you know, by doing it with drugs and alcohol. I say non-medicalists and, you know, they weren’t going to a professional. They were just going to the liquor store.

SPEAKER 08 : 4:06

Yeah. And it is very difficult, not only for people who are you know, living with a mental health problem, but also, again, the family members and the loved ones who are trying to navigate that situation, you know, and deal with your own feelings and sort through all of that in a life that’s kind of probably, I would imagine, frequently in crisis, you know, to try to handle all of that. And I think often the family members who are trying to navigate those things are kind of the ones who get really lost or really forgotten because when somebody has a, a mental health disorder that’s visible, you know, and other people can see that there’s something not right, which is usually the case with something like schizophrenia. They’ll be marginalized for sure, but those family members and loved ones may just not, maybe just completely under the radar and there’s no thought often to, well, what do those people need from us? What kind of support do we need to offer to them? You know, you mentioned we respond very differently to mental health problems than to other forms of health problems that it’s completely true. And it’s, it’s interesting. It’s sort of, it doesn’t really make sense, you know, but often what I, what I say is with many forms of illness, like use the example of cancer, you know, people tend to move toward that person, the person who’s working and mental health problems, they tend to pull back and to move away. And that certainly includes within our churches.

SPEAKER 04 : 5:35

Oh, good point. That is a really good point. That is so true. Yeah, and I think that sometimes people feel, I’ve heard it said even within my own circles, well, maybe you won’t need medication if you get right with the Lord. I’m hoping for that. I’m praying for that day that if you can get your spiritual journey in order, you know, your house in order spiritually. you know, the Lord could heal you kind of thing. And that bothers me because you don’t say that. None of my Christian girlfriends go visit their friend, you know, in the hospital with cancer and say, you know, maybe you could just get off this chemo if your faith was strong enough and that you’d be healed. And so I don’t want to put that burden, that weight on someone dealing with mental illness that if you could get your act together, you know, and get right with God that you could get off the medication. I mean, certainly I found solace in my own faith and it’s given me a lot of peace and uh however if i needed medication for to balance my brain chemistry i would have no issues whatsoever with taking it and not feel like i was a failed christian you know what i mean so yeah i think sometimes the churches do um not understand it either and i think we feel helpless as family members and then as i mentioned shamefully in my own case anger with them you know it’s very angry with my dad for being not present for a good 30 years and um and so with with um you know family members uh i think okay this is sad my brother um last time he called me which was probably a year ago he called himself a self-made orphan because i’m the only one that talks to that brother in the family because they’ve just thrown their hands up in the air and they don’t even know what to do with him anymore and so he calls himself a self-made orphan yeah what a painful story behind that right yeah yeah and yet for for the family member you know to try to be

SPEAKER 08 : 7:19

navigating this kind of thing on your own without support you know you’re limited in what you can do as well and that can be a very difficult situation for anyone who’s trying to provide support or care and you know it’s like when you are in that situation I’ve experienced that kind of anger as well and in that situation you know you have really you feel like you have two choices you can be angry and you can take it out on that person or you can set your anger aside and Put your own feelings to the back and kind of ignore them. And neither one of those is probably likely to lead to a healthy place over time. So that is part of your book.

SPEAKER 04 : 8:00

I’m sorry. I want to make sure that I gave you the chance. I didn’t mean to step on you. Your book is Mental Illness, if you’re just joining us. Amy’s talking about mental illness, what to know, and how to help your book. So let’s go to the how to help part because I still feel exasperated in many ways by it. And I haven’t seen my brother. One time I couldn’t find him for 10 years. He doesn’t have a cell phone still to this day. And so I only find him when he reaches out to me. And generally, he’s moved from the last time. He was homeless for many years. So I’m still exasperated as to how to help because he’s the one of the three that are still alive. So that is part of the book. How do we help? Hope and healing.

SPEAKER 08 : 8:39

Yeah, it’s a great question. And unfortunately, the answers are vague. very complicated and individual, right? Because every individual situation is different. And yet there are some commonalities. And one of the interesting things that I would say I’ve experienced and observed is that often it’s easier for non-family members to help in these situations because they don’t have the sense of attachment or dependency that family members tend to have. Like with my mom, when I was growing up, if my mom was behaving strangely or in a way that I didn’t understand, even as a young adult, I had more Attached to that behavior than a stranger would have. Oh, yeah stranger long who might be might have some understanding of what’s going on. They’re not going to feel personally threatened. They’re not going to feel personally the kind of grief that I would feel. And they may be able to intervene in a way that I can’t because they have a greater sense of detachment. So that’s one thing that’s really valuable for people to understand for us, for the church and for our Christian community to understand that actually what we might expect, well, you know, this person, your wife can handle it or your kids can take care of you or your, you know, your parents. Yes, the family members, the loved ones are in it as caregivers. And yet there are things that the rest of us can do and do more easily, actually. And that might include having a hard conversation with someone to help them understand how their behavior is affecting other people or how they’re hurting themselves or what the resources are that are available to them in the area to get help and get better. It might include meeting some of those practical needs. We, you know, the church is really good at responding to many forms of crisis and making sure people have what they need, whether it’s, you know, setting up a meal schedule where somebody’s bringing you food every day, taking care of your kids, giving you rides, helping with legitimate financial needs, that kind of thing. And yet, when there’s a mental health crisis, we don’t think first of those things at all. In fact, we may not think of them at all. We might think, well, I don’t know how to help. I I’m not a psychologist. I’m not a psychiatrist. You know, they just need to go to the hospital. Well, sometimes they do. What about the family members who are now left behind and dealing with that hospitalization? Sometimes they don’t need to go to the hospital. Maybe they just need to, you know, give their treatment plan more time or they need to manage a condition and they need support. So just thinking in terms of those practical needs is where I encourage people often to start. What do you already know how to do to support people in crisis? How can you offer that kind of support to a person or a family affected by a mental health problem?

SPEAKER 04 : 11:31

You know, I think when you described, you know, with your mom when you were younger, I’m sure it was scary. But one thing I think we don’t think about, too, especially in your case, you know, being a child, embarrassed. You do not want your friends to come over and see that. I remember being in high school and my brother was just like I had girlfriends over and I was maybe 16. And there’s also the physical violence aspect. I mean, I’ve had three surgeries to fix what my Marine brother did when he kicked me in the face with combat boots. So there’s that fear, right? But my fear of embarrassment was almost as great as my fear of physical threat. And when he started like saying weird things in front of them, like, I see you’re in black, you know, witches wear black. And you’re like, oh, great. You know, I’m just trying to have some friends over, you know, and like, listen to some music and do our nails. And I got to deal with this. You know, so there’s that embarrassment factor as well. You know, I want to have you come back. I think this is such an important topic and there’s so much to cover and we’re out of time today. But first of all, in terms of your book, Mental Illness, What to Know and How to Help, Amy, give us the best place for us to go to get in touch with you.

SPEAKER 08 : 12:38

Yeah. So you can you can find this book through Rose Publishers. But you can also find a copy of it, you know, pretty much through any place where you would normally buy Christian books. So whatever your favorite place to get your new Christian book is that, you know, you should be able to find this book through there. But it is published by Aspire Press, which is a part of Rose Publishing. As for me, I… I am on social media. I don’t have a website currently. I have another gig that keeps me busy most of the time working for a Christian publisher. But I can be found on Facebook and on Instagram and on X. So if people want to find me there, they can do that. Otherwise, yeah, look for my book.

SPEAKER 04 : 13:28

Excellent. Well, I will find you. And I found the book easily, Amy Simpson, on Amazon. So thank you so much. And we’ll get you scheduled back on the show. Thank you. Thanks so much. Have a great day.

SPEAKER 01 : 13:44

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SPEAKER 03 : 14:38

Pueblo, thanks for tuning in to Colorado’s Mighty 670 KLTT.

SPEAKER 04 : 14:49

Welcome back to The Good News, friend. Angie Austin here, along with a friend of the show, Katie Millar-Wierig, author of The Mean Teen Parenting Machine. And she is back. We miss you, Katie.

SPEAKER 07 : 15:00

Yes, so happy to be back.

SPEAKER 04 : 15:02

Oh, I’m excited about our topic, too, because earlier we were talking about preparing our kids for, you know, heading off to college and how many of the kids when they get to college, according to the study that we were talking about with my prior guests, between 70 and 80 percent of high school students who enter college as Christians leave with little or no faith. I know your kids are very involved in faith and will probably go to a school where their faith is a big part of it. Mine, too. I was telling you, I’m looking at a school in the middle of a cornfield for my daughter where, you know, going to worship, et cetera, is part of the curriculum. But with that said, most kids in the United States of America are not going to Christian schools. So how do we prepare them and how do we help them to keep their faith while they’re in college?

SPEAKER 05 : 15:50

Absolutely. I think this is a question on a lot of parents’ minds, especially like my children aren’t. I have one that’s probably two years away from college, and then I have a couple that are a couple years more away from that. And so even now I’m already thinking about how to prepare them. And I think one thing that happens to us parents is we become really overwhelmed at the thought of all that we need to do to get them prepared. And so a practical advice that I give to a lot of my clients is to think of like how the Lord worked with the Israelites when they were wandering in the wilderness with Moses and when the manna fell from heaven and how there were times, you know, when he would say, prepare way far out. But in the case of the manna, he told them, just prepare what you need tomorrow and then have faith that God will reveal and give you more the next day. And so often when we’re dealing with our 13-year-olds, we start to panic and think, am I doing everything I need to right now that my 13-year-old will have faith when they’re 21? Or am I doing this for looking a little too far ahead? And instead, I tell clients, instead, think today. What can I give my child today? What manna can I give my child today that can incrementally increase their faith in God, their trust in themselves, and the tools that they need? And because If we try to build too quickly or jam-packed there at the end, it doesn’t stick. But if it’s a habitual thing that starts earlier in life and we’re giving them a little bit each day, then trust in the Lord is gained, but also trust in themselves and in their own abilities. And so I think it’s really important as we talk about these things to recognize that this is a process for all of us. And so we need to start with our kids incrementally. Now, second with that, There may be a lot of parents that have done this and still their children step away from faith or from the decisions that we hope that they would. And I think it’s also really important in those moments to recognize that life is a journey for all of us. And there have been times in my life my faith has been really strong and there’s times where I’ve stepped back and not always been the person that I’ve wanted to be. And even in those times when I have my own, even though they’re very minor, comparatively prodigal son moments, when I do make my way back, my faith is strengthened and it is even more burning than it was before. And so I think we also have to recognize that our children have their journey too. And that their journey may not always look like what we want it to look like, but it It is a part of becoming who the Lord is preparing them to become if they allow it, right? And so I think we also have to recognize that not all is lost if our child and their young adult years isn’t living the life we hope for them, that we have hope in the atonement of Jesus Christ. We have hope in his grace and hope in his mercy. And that means that even if everything goes wrong and we’ve even given them all that man and prepared them, that there’s still his grace is sufficient for all of us.

SPEAKER 04 : 19:00

Now, as you’re preparing your kids to go to college, and yours are just a teeny bit younger than mine because mine are all in high school right now, so really getting ready to shove them off the diving board here soon. I was talking… with a friend about, you know, groups that I’ve already started looking up groups for my son because going to a school as large as the University of Colorado, if you don’t seek out these Christian groups, you know, it’s going to be more difficult to find the Christians, like, within your classroom. It’s going to be a lot easier to find, like, a frat party than it will be to find, you know, a Bible study, per se. So you’ve talked in the past about something I think is really cool that I try to do, but I think many of us get… get weak in the knees and trying to let our kids experience the repercussions of their decisions or let our kids, you know, go through the muck that might be because of a bad decision rather than trying to helicopter in and send the rescue basket down and pluck them out of their bad decisions with, you know, our expertise or our power or our phone calls or whatever. And it’s really difficult sometimes. I mean, I’m obviously not talking about putting you in danger, but that like, they’ve got to, there’s always a way out. There’s always a way to figure out a solution to a problem. You know, whether it’s the perfect one or not, you know, I don’t know, but they’ve got to work on those critical thinking skills. skills. And I know with the younger girls, they just kind of go, well, I gave you the info. And you’re like, well, you dismissed your such and such. Well, I gave you the info. And now like, well, look at my text here. I wrote you back and said, you choose a day and let me know when you want to do such and such. And then they drop the ball because they always assume we won’t drop the ball, but we’re not going to be there to catch the ball, you know, and pick up the pieces when they’re in college.

SPEAKER 05 : 20:51

Absolutely. And I think that’s something that’s on all of our mind is You know, as like we were talking about this incremental parenting and incremental learning when they’re younger, we have to be a helicopter, right? They really don’t know what’s safe. And then it’s like, how much do you pull back and when do you pull back? And sometimes we even look and say, oh, I pulled back too early or I didn’t pull back early enough. And now I’ve enabled this child to think that mom will always be there to catch them. And as you’ve explained, that’s just not true. And so it is hard to know, and I think it’s also individual for each child on when is the right time to pull back. And I think that can be done with a lot of prayer and a lot of knowing your child. But as you were saying at the beginning, I think it’s important to reiterate that when I look back at my life and as I look back at things, I remember seeing people who had just remarkable faith or success and just these wonderful stories of how they got to where they were at And I learned that the pattern for them was that they went through, in some ways, astronomically challenging things. And some of them, it was, you know, things where no one was there to rescue them. And they had to have harsh conflicts and things like that. And I learned that if I wanted to become like some of these people, I had to allow myself to lean into pain, to lean into discomfort, and to accept that, like, life wasn’t easy. But weirdly, as I became a parent… I would try to jump in between those experiences for my children and be like, I’ll absorb the pain for them, thinking I was being Christ-like in some way by acting as a proxy for them for their pain, and say, I’ll absorb this pain, but then realizing when I did that, I also absorbed the personal experience and the life experience and the becoming that my child actually needed to learn from that experience. And so this has been a very hard thing for me as a parent, is stepping back, like you’re saying, and allowing them to experience disappointment and hardship and life and allowing them to figure out the solution for it. The reason I think a lot of kids lose their faith around their college years is because we as parents have protected them so much up until that point. that when they get there, they also experience a loss of identity, a loss of understanding because they’re not used to handling their own consequences or their own choices. And so I think that’s something as a society and as individuals we can work on is allowing our children to experience things a little bit more. And I know we see that like even in our schools and with our team, we see parents jumping in and maybe intervening too early in their children’s lives. That’s something we’ve talked about a lot on this show. And we just have to be so mindful that when we do that, we’re not always protecting. Sometimes we are preventing them from having real important life experiences.

SPEAKER 04 : 23:50

Yeah, and what we do, you know, to interfere, their contemporaries, their friends, their groups, they remember when we’ve been inappropriate. There are two moms I can think of that there was something going on on a text thread, and somebody, like a boy, there was like a group of, let’s say, a dozen really close friends, and a couple of those friends were boys. Well, when the boys start dating someone, they add this girl into the group that this… core dozen kids. They’ve gone to like elementary and middle school together. This isn’t a random text thread, right? It’s very close friends that have known each other for many years. And so they took this person out and said like, no offense, but this is a different, this isn’t just we’re texting about Friday night. This is we’re texting about all kinds of things over many years. And so they, he kept adding her back in and they’re like, Dude, then you go start your own thread. So the mom got on the text thread and started getting really nasty messaging as her daughter saying this, that, the other. The kids still talk about it to this day. When we ran into this family and had to interact with them through sports and other things at school, my littlest daughter was like, let me tell you something about this mom. And then every time we’ve had an incident since then or a weird interaction, she’s like… I told you about these people, mom, I told you. And then there was another mom, same thing. She, this was another type of text, right? But the mom got in and started going after these girls for how they were treating the daughter. Now I know it’s hard to pull yourself back. Like you might just want to say like, Hey, this is Alyssa’s mom. I’m going to take her out of the group for right now. Cause her feelings are really hurt or something like that. Something innocuous. Right. But to get in there and be arguing with children and, At the time, I think they were like seventh or eighth grade when this mom first did it. So we drive by them. They were dating. I live in a big city like you. So it’s not often we bump into these people. So she shows, oh, my gosh, that’s so-and-so’s mom in the Jeep there. And then what do we remember? How that mom inappropriately got involved. So we are not sometimes helping our kids when we think we are putting our nose in their business. We actually can make things worse for them. And I have learned my lesson in going to parents about kids’ issues. It did not end well once. And when another mom said, hey, I want you to come over to the house and talk about this issue our daughters are having, I declined. I said, you know, you’re my friend. I really like you, but I want them to settle this themselves. And now guess what? They’re the best of friends. They do things together all the time and they’re teammates. But I didn’t want to get involved anymore because it never went well for me. And it never went well for the moms I saw getting in their kids like personal business.

SPEAKER 06 : 26:35

Absolutely. And it’s empowering for your daughters to have had that experience where they had a conflict and they resolved it on their own without feeling like they needed to call in a referee of a mother. And I think it’s important to note too that oftentimes our friendships as parents are dependent on our children’s friendships.

SPEAKER 05 : 26:53

And so we have noticed that as our children become teenagers, I have friends that I really love, but our children are not necessarily running in the same group anymore. And it’s just like, okay, it’s a phase of life where we just kind of have to learn how to like manage maybe a little bit of awkwardness as our children have drama, but we don’t have drama anymore. And we have to be the bigger, mature people in that point to say this will pass. We’re going to maintain a very positive relationship with each other as parents. and let the girls learn these really important life skills together. And I think that’s really wonderful that you did that.

SPEAKER 04 : 27:26

You and I could have a whole segment on this because it was such a wake-up call to me. All my friends from NBC in Los Angeles were like, when I go back to California, I have a dozen good friends, probably more than I have here, and I’ve been back in Colorado for 20 years. Here’s what’s happened. Those friendships, when the kids aren’t friends anymore, I thought, oh, well, the mom’s my friend. We’re still going to be friends. No, no. Apparently we’re not. I’m not kidding you. Every friend that I had, good friends that I really, really loved, a couple that I would have considered best friends, when our kids stopped hanging out, they dumped me. And I’m really not a bad person. They didn’t dump me because I’m like a jerk. It was just like, well, we could do a whole segment on that. It was shocking to me, having not had kids until my 30s, that really my good friends are the friends I had before I had kids. So let’s make this a topic next time we talk.

SPEAKER 05 : 28:15

Of course, I would love to.

SPEAKER 04 : 28:18

I always love talking to you. We’re in such the same stage of life. All right, what’s the best place for people to find you, Katie Millar-Wierig?

SPEAKER 07 : 28:26

Yes, you can reach out to me on the Balanced Mind Project on Instagram, and I would love to connect with you there. You can DM me in the chat. It’s great to hear from you.

SPEAKER 04 : 28:34

Awesome. Thanks, Katie.

SPEAKER 07 : 28:35

Thanks, Angie. It’s good to talk to you.

SPEAKER 02 : 28:38

Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.