Spiraling Higher by Gina Bourne and Samantha Chung

July 24, 2024 77. Kate Speer: There Is No Shame In Mental Illness

Mental Health activist, writer, and speaker Kate Speer authentically shares her mental health journey from feeling different as a child to being diagnosed with ADHD and later a misdiagnosed bipolar disorder. Feeling unsupported from such a young age by the education system due to limiting criteria for diagnosis as well as the stigmas surrounding mental illness, Kate experienced a myriad of symptoms.

*Trigger Warning* : This episode discusses suicide and psychosis. These mentions are authentic to the storyteller.

After experiencing 15 years of disabling mental illness, chronic psychotic breaks, enumerable psychiatric hospitalizations, and a suicide attempt, Kate was told by doctors that the only way she would survive was to live in a long-term, locked psychiatric ward. Kate, stubborn to her core and no stranger to defying the expectations of her care team, told them to go to hell.

She refused to give up. She met with doctor after doctor, and even after being told that she needed residential care by all of them, she kept searching. In one last-ditch effort to not end up in a ward, she met with a trauma therapist known for his intense behavioral methodologies who told her that she was about to work the hardest she ever had in her life to overcome her patterns. Kate didn’t think twice about it. She committed to the work and began the recovery of a lifetime. She worked relentlessly using disciplined exposure therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy to tackle her OCD, Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, and PTSD. Day after day, Kate leaned into the discomfort of her fear and though terrified, she continued to do exactly what the doctor prescribed anyway.

Despite everything Kate has faced, she is one of the strongest, kind, accepting humans we have ever known. Her journey with mental illness has helped her emphasize the importance of self-acceptance and contributes to her desire in creating a world where people can hold space for both pain and joy. One of our favorite parts of this conversation is how openly and radically she encourages embracing the messiness of life and rejecting the pressure to present a polished image, giving us an opportunity to share our collective thoughts on the negativity of social media.

Now, nine years later, she is happy (ish!), married, and has transitioned into public mental health work after her five-year tenure as the CEO of The Dogist, where she scaled the company’s audience to five million subscribers. She is currently working with Harvard to scale public health campaigns that help today’s youth while finalizing her very first memoir. Her hope for the future is to use social media for good instead of the bottom line and scale academic-creator collaborations that reach young people online where they get their information. This is just the beginning of that work and though she is unsure of where exactly it will take her, one thing’s for sure – even though her doctors were convinced that she would only survive in a locked ward, she proved them spectacularly wrong.

If you have ever struggled with mental health, this conversation contains the most madly inspiring, radically humbling, and honest message for you at this time: Healing is absolutely possible, but it won't be perfect and it will happen little by little. You got this.

Timestamps:

03:11 Self-Acceptance and Dark Nights of the Soul

09:44 Stigma and Mental Illness

14:20 Acknowledging The Problem and Being the Solution

23:06 Embracing the Messiness of Life

23:33 Changing Our Relationship with Anxiety

26:18 Embracing the Messy Process of Growth

28:38 Befriending Our Bodies

31:06 Finding Joy in the Little Things

34:51 The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health

38:27 The Power of Focusing on the Process

43:34 The Power of Small Steps and Celebrating Victories