Thorne
In our times of big grift energy, it’s always nice to find a company with a product that truly adds to the quality of your life. In the 90s, your livelihood could come to a grinding halt if someone called you a fraud, today not so much. I’ve heard tests have been done on a large amount of popular supplements available on Amazon. Some 70% of products had no active ingredients or trace elements of whatever it is it claimed to be.
Since wellness supplementation is a fundamental part of my health practice, and I’ll pay good money for quality, I stopped buying from anywhere else when I found Thorne.
My favorites: Glycine, Magnesium Bisglycinate, Advanced DHA Fish Oil, Ovarian Care(Myo-Inositol).
These supplements are pivotal for longevity but also brain health, which I am obviously big on. These help me perform at a high paced but rewarding job, run 5ks with ease, and sleep well at night. My only complaint is that some of their products work TOO well, so I can’t take them everyday.
Olachi
www.thorne.com
pink drink
The degree to which food impacts our overall health is profound. Growing up on organic food was luxury most folks don’t experience. But it didn’t become important for me, until I my health reached a critical point almost a decade ago.
Since then, organic food has been a passion of mine. But I always kept making ridiculous shakes with way too much in it. Complicating an easy and joyful process.
I’m happy to share some of my daily practice, that strengthens my mind and body connection, and is easy to put together.
This is pink drink. A probiotic heavy smoothie that maintains simplicity and high quality ingredients.
No aesthetic photos. The ingredients are:
1 cup frozen organic strawberries.
1 pitted Medjool date. (Buy them with the pit and rip it out yourself)
A little over 1/2 cup Lifeway Organic Coconut Honey Kefir
1 serving of Vital Proteins Collagen
1 cup Harmless Harvest Coconut Water
I add psyllium husk and ground flaxseed but this is not required.
Enjoy!
Emotionally Perfect
My appearance on the Make Them Hear You Spotify Podcast with Sabah Muhammad. I always pause before sharing these types of appearances. No matter how often I do them, and no matter how passionate I am about them, there will always be one tiny glimmer of pause. Some diluted descendant of stigma. I am a decade and counting from true stigma. Miles from the lack of grace Chicago had for me. But just like any human, you might pause when you give this much of yourself. In the end, I am better for it. And, I could never be the person I aspire to be, without sharing my truth.
Mental Illness Happy Hour Podcast
I was a guest on Paul Gilmartin’s Podcast, Mental Illness Happy Hour. It was such a safe space to discuss the realities of mental illness in the criminal justice system. The conversation was a delight. You can find it here: https://t.co/CgyjRId6YQ?amp=1
Crisis Response Article for NAMI
My NAMI Article for Mental Illness Awareness Week
When the police locked me in a cell, following the weeks I spent on the street, I thought I was entering a dream world. After abandoning my job due to psychosis and wandering alone in a delirious state, I simply appreciated the tray of food I was given. I didn’t realize where I was. But for a moment, I could catch my breath.
I didn’t know that the iron bars wouldn’t provide the safety I was looking for. The hallucinations kept coming, and I was shackled and left to wait for trial in a Chicago jail. For an entire year. Now, as I look back on my situation and other stories of incarceration, I hope to educate law enforcement and the public on a better approach to mental health crisis response. The bottom line? People in crisis do not belong in jail.
My parents originally called the police department when they couldn’t find me in Chicago. My medication had stopped working, and I was wandering the streets. Now, as a mental health advocate, I know it is common for families to reach out to law enforcement for help when their loved ones experience a mental health crisis. In return, many are rebuffed with excuses from police who say they can’t be involved. In the most tragic cases, the loved one they hoped to save dies at the hands of police.
Since my time in jail, I have helped train the same police department that caged me within its walls. Specifically, I’ve been a panelist in crisis intervention training through NAMI Chicago.
If officers better understand what is happening to someone experiencing a mental health crisis, they can take an informed approach when responding to a call. They also need to understand the consequences of holding someone with severe mental illness in a jail cell — how it can impact them for years to come. This knowledge could change everything.
During training, you can hear the passion some officers have to better handle mental health crises. In others, you hear hesitation. It becomes obvious that what is right doesn’t obviously intersect with what is procedure. I get a sense that the very best insight we give contradicts training they’ve received before.
An arresting officer faces complicated decisions. And the future of a human being rests on that officer making the right one. Do I take them to the hospital or to the jail cell? Should I book them or do I call a doctor, a social worker? These estimations determine the outcome of the person in crisis.
In many ways, we are asking police officers to play doctor and social worker, while still balancing the scales of justice. In critical moments, it is up to an officer to decide what justice will be. And if they have no background in mental health, the easiest response is a jail cell.
While speaking up and making educational strides is important, real impact requires more legislation on the topic. Policing as we know it has to evolve with the concerns of humanity (perhaps in the direction of leaving crisis response to community supports). It has to evolve with what we know about health and crisis.
Models like CAHOOTS in Oregon, in which a mobile crisis response team consisting of a medic and a crisis worker are dispatched by a non-emergency number, are a good place to start. We need the involvement of well-staffed and well-advertised psychiatric services. And perhaps most importantly, we need more space in treatment facilities.
After almost a year as a panelist in crisis intervention, I have learned one golden lesson: If you are a police officer, and you are wondering what to do, the best response is to leave it up to a doctor, not a judge or prosecutor. Take them to a community facility to receive care, and leave it to the professionals.
Until the police are relieved of these situations, as they should be, we have to diversify an officer’s toolbox — to inform them of decisions they can make for the better. To enable them to make healthy decisions with their authority. Ultimately, a punitive system cannot be the answer to a national mental health crisis. The jail cell cannot be the response to things we don’t understand.
People with mental illness are deserving of recovery and respect — and we must keep this in mind during our response to them in times of crisis.
A Plea for Compassion
When the hallucinations came, I thought I could see stars raining onto my hands. It wasn’t my first time handling symptoms, but it was the first time I lost control. Little did I know that, only days later, I would be in jail.
I probably don’t need to tell you that the criminal justice system is not the place for people suffering with severe mental illness. To me, the fact that I ended up in jail during an episode of psychosis shows the extreme lack of compassion in the criminal justice system. A society without compassion will always seek to vilify, demonize and mercilessly persecute offenders without asking why.
To create change, we need to ask why, and build compassionate answers.
When I Had My Breakthrough Episode
I had my first episode of psychosis in my dorm room at Boston University. After that happened, I transferred to a small university in my hometown, chased by voices each day. The only thing I had was the love and understanding of my family, a resource that is sometimes rare for many. As I walked the stage to accept my honors diploma, I still had voices at the helm.
Years passed, and I thought with voices, I would just have to manage. I had no insight into the framework of my disorder. I didn’t know the components of the storm. I fought each day to not be the hushed secret that is mental illness. I thought peace was a thing of the past. Joy and salvation were things I had to fight for, harder to see in the ill dense fog.
Then, in 2014, I lost control at my desk while working at a major tech firm. I felt the earth move beneath my feet, shape shifting my sense of ground, to the suffocating moves of quicksand. I was sinking. Doctors later called it a “breakthrough episode,” where my bipolar symptoms broke through the barriers of medication. I heard the voices of my coworkers, threatening and menacing. I fled from my workplace, deserting a mandatory meeting.
When I Was Arrested for Having Mental Illness
I wandered Chicago north-side streets with no sense of reality, and no sense of right and wrong. At this time, if anyone asked, I would be unable to tell them my name, as I walked clouded with hallucinations and delusions. I was a volunteer at the Art Institute of Chicago, and life now resembled the surrealist paintings there. There was no way for me to detect real life. I wandered the streets and my mother called the police, filed missing persons reports. The police told her there was nothing they could do because I was an adult. They couldn’t act until something happened.
I managed to find myself at O’Hare Airport, where I heard and felt gunshots and explosions. The delusions convinced me the airport was under siege. The delusions were not real, but they were real reflections of collective memory. The pieces of witnessing real American mass-shootings and violence were condensed into these hallucinations.
I thought the airport was under terror attack. I found a family beside me, and I immediately thought they would need my help to flee the violence. The young mother had a child nearby. I picked up the child to help them reach safety from the panic only I could feel. I took several steps. One step too many. The mother took the child back from me within moments, seconds. I continued to walk through the airport, unaware of what had happened.
Hours later, several police officers circled me. They threw me in Chicago’s notorious Cook County Jail. They charged me with aggravated kidnapping. In many ways, I thought I watched my future come to an end.
When I Finally Got Treatment
My remorse is immense for these events and hits me in waves each day. I was acquitted by “not guilty reason insanity,” after a year languishing in jail, with shoddy medications, alienation and demonization. The Cook County Jail is the biggest mental health care provider in the region, if not the country, but only after it locked you in, labeled you an outcast, a threat, non-human.
I had no criminal history, but that didn’t matter to the system. The color of my skin was an added sin too. The Treatment Advocacy Center reports that people with mental illness are “16 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than any other civilians.” Perhaps I am lucky I left O’Hare alive.
I was sent to the state hospital with its own set of horrors, but I did find the treatment I needed. I found the medication that would put me on the hallowed path to stability. A strength and concrete steadiness I cherish now, as I have not heard a single voice for years.
I now have a blessed quiet I didn’t think was possible. I am charmed with the sounds of family, the laughs of my nephews, real and stable and sweet. However, the grasp of the criminal justice system still hasn’t ended. It took me six years to be granted the opportunity to reach a better place.
When I Worked to Create Change
The state hospital didn’t function for the discharge of patients. Instead, many people found themselves trapped inside a stereotypical snake pit without anyone to advocate on their behalf for years or even decades. On average, a “not guilty, reason insanity” defendant committed to a mental hospital is confined for twice as long as people found guilty and sent to prison.
The criminal justice system is not sure whether it functions to treat or incarcerate, so oftentimes you get both. Prosecutors often have a knee-jerk reaction to keeping people in a locked hospital setting, dismissing any treatment-oriented progress being made and relying instead on fear mongering in front of a judge of what “could” happen upon release.
To bring about meaningful change, the system itself has to be restructured and it starts, quite plainly, with having compassion, implementing real mercy into the constructs of the system. Understanding the mental is not inferior to physical. An illness can claim the best of us, and through compassion we are restored.
I was lucky enough to advise and participate in a new co-responder training for an Illinois Police Department’s mental health calls. The most common question asked by the officers was “what are we supposed to do?” The answer is be compassionate. Try grace and understanding. Ask questions. Maintain your compassion even if it’s hard. Have real diversion programs for people with serious offenses, too. Before we throw people who may be suffering into jails to waste away for a lifetime. Believe that no one chooses mental illness and treatment does work.
Published on the NAMI Official Website