Finding Mental Health

Cinda Johnson, a professor and the director of the special education graduate program at Seattle University, joins us in this episode of the Finding Mental Health podcast. After her daughter was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in college, the two collaborated to write “A Perfect Chaos,” a memoir told from the perspective of mother and daughter about the path from diagnosis to wellness.

Cinda is also the director of the Center for Change in Transition Services and a leader in helping with the transition from high school to the post-high school landscape for young people with disabilities.

In this episode, Delaney talks with Katherine Switz, co-founder of The Stability Network, after woking as a successful consultant with the prestigious Macenzie Consulting Firm. Katherine tells her how her personal experience with mental illness propelled her to start The Stability Network—an organization whose mission is to find professionals willing to speak openly about their mental health problems. Katherine shares her efforts to combat stigma in the workplace and remembers what her first episode was like as a student at the Harvard Business School. Find out more about The Stability Network and how you can get involved, here.

Penny Frese has a doctorate in Fine Arts and for the past 20 years has advocated for universal mental health education in schools. In this episode, Penny shares with us how her husband and psychologist Fred Frese’s illness, schizophrenia, and her daughter’s illness, depression, led to her current life’s work. She recalls the story of when her daughter was in the throws of depression in high school and how they launched a curriculum for mental health education directed toward schools, parents and physicians. It was the beginning of the now nationally acclaimed Red Flags mental health program.

Delaney talks with Jessie Close, who alongside her sister, actress Glenn Close, founded Bring Change 2 Mind, to fight stigma surrounding mental illness. Jessie was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 45 and recalls that “even with so much evidence I didn’t want to believe I had a mental illness. I thought maybe I was faking it.” She discusses the devastation her illness caused before she got appropriate care, her son’s plight with schizo-effective disorder, her advocacy campaign with her sister and her upcoming memoir, "Resilience".