Talking About Mental Health
Blair interviews David on his recent article in which he was very open and honest about his struggles with depression and anxiety.
Links
"I Struggle With Mental Health. Maybe You Do Too."
Transcript
Blair Enns: David, you recently posted an article titled I struggle with mental health. Maybe you do too. When I saw that show up in my inbox, I wasn't surprised because we'd had a conversation a week or two before when we were recording our previous episode, you and I ended up talking about mental health for about 15 minutes, and then we agreed that, you know what? Let's have this conversation again and we'll record it. You've been very open and willing to discuss your issues.
I guess that was the impetus for the article. I saw the article come across. I wasn't expecting it, but my immediate reaction was, I think in the 25 years that you've been doing this advising creative firms, this is certainly going to be the posts that creates the most feedback and has the biggest impact. We haven't talked since we've traded some texts, but five or six days later, how true is that statement?
David C. Baker: If we can classify it as impact and not necessarily separate the good or the bad, then I would say you're absolutely right. I didn't really know what to expect. In fact, I actually felt like I should have talked with you before I submitted it as a friend to say, "Hey, do you need to save me from myself before I send this?" Or I don't want to steal the thunder from the episode we were going to do. Anyway, back to your question, I quit counting that about 200 email responses from people. All of them were very kind. Some were from folks who said, "Man, thank you for talking about that. I don't know what to say, but I'm with you in spirit, one form or another there".
Most of them, the vast majority, probably at least 80% of them said, "Oh, my goodness, I had no idea. This is how I've struggled. My father tried to commit suicide twice and failed and now he's in a wheelchair. My husband had a mental breakdown and left me with both kids. I've struggled with this forever, but I haven't ever talked with anybody. My brother and my wife don't know. It's like, wow."
That was the bit that was overwhelming to me because I didn't really know what to do with that. I've been on the other side of it too, with a couple of family members where you know they're struggling and you have no idea what to say, but it just feels silly not to say something, so you just say something and people's hearts were really, really good, but I just didn't know what to do with it. Hundreds of responses so far.
Blair: As much as I'm sure writing that was cathartic and then all of the good sense of relief that comes with it. I imagine, and correct me if I'm wrong, I imagine you probably felt like you'd done the right thing just based on the amount of feedback that you've received, encouraging other people to speak up because I had people reach out to me and said, "I had no idea. David seems like the perfect flawless person. I can't imagine that he would ever suffer from anything."
David: You corrected them quickly, I'm sure.
Blair: I set my wife straight after that.
[laughter]
I said, yes, you don't know him like I do. Has it also opened a can of worms for you because here you are trying to maybe let go of something, I'll let you speak to your motivations, but from the stories, you must have had people ask you for help as well.
David: For sure and in a cry for help way. I don't know what to do with that. It's pretty much a full-time job to keep me close enough to the sanity line that I just don't know, I don't have any skills in that area either. Like some people who are profoundly empathetic, but have no training are really good at listening and not saying the wrong things. I don't know that I'm that kind of person. I did. I have had some second thoughts obviously. Let's double down and do a podcast too, whole bunch of people, that's makes sense.
I have because you think, so first of all, I'm a consultant. People are not going to be interested in working with loser consultants or ones who can't control their emotions are struggling with. That obviously now I knew that before I wrote the thing. There's also part of the struggles was mental health for me is just second-guessing myself all the time and crazy thoughts mixed in with some real thoughts that shouldn't be ignored. Was this self-sabotage, was this trying to say, "Hey, people, if any of you don't like me, then just fuck off basically". Or this is me either accept me or don't.
I don't think that was any part of what I did, but there are times when in mental health struggles, you just want complete clarity and you don't care what the results are. That's one thing that I just thought a lot about, like, "is this the right thing to do?" I finally, as with many things I've done in my life, I really didn't know if it was the right thing to do, but I felt like it was worth the risks. I imagine 30 or 40 people out there who I don't have any answers for them. None. I really have no answers. I have a few answers for myself, but they're not necessarily transferrable.
All I can do is say, you're not alone. I can't help you, but if you think that God has singled you out and is punishing you with some strange mental disease, no, that's not the case. As far as I know, I don't have a direct line to God, but that's my belief there. I just wanted people to have the sense that even though I don't have any answers beyond that, it's like, you know what? This is part of what it means to be human. It's okay.
It's not always fixable, but it's okay to at least know you're not being singled out and at least give you more freedom to talk about it with some people. I assume that the feedback I'm getting will die down pretty quickly here. Then five years, 10 years from now, somebody will send me a note and say, that was an important point in my life. I've began to just think a little bit differently about my struggles with mental health, how it's okay to talk about them. That was really the longer term secret goal. I know that will happen. I've second-guessed myself about this, but now I'd do it again.
Blair: Well, as your friend and therapist, I really need another one.
[laughter]
Before I finish that thought, you were talking about, I'm wondering if you're qualified as the right person to be guiding people on this or giving feedback. I'm keenly aware of that sentiment in myself in conducting this conversation. To you, David, and all the listeners out there, if I fumble through this or say something stupid, ask the wrong questions, or make a joke where it's inappropriate, I apologize in advance. I'm just a human being, trying to be helpful in this situation.
Your point about part of the message is you want people to recognize that if they're feeling this way, either anxiety or depression or any other form of mental illness that they're not alone. I was on the Never Not Creative podcast recently. In fact, I don't know if the episodes aired, but Andy Wright, the host of that is based in Australia. They've been a partner, sponsoring some research on mental health in the creative professions.
I think it's just done in Australia, but I also think it's fair to extrapolate out to the creative professions in other markets. Looking at the most recent study, which was done in 2020 and their first study was done in 2018. We'll post links to this. If you think of just the numbers here, in the creative professions, 20% say they suffer from severe depression and 24% severe anxiety. Now this is severe. The quote from the study is much higher than national averages.
One in five of us is suffering from severe depression from time to time and one in four of us suffering from severe anxiety. When we look at mild to severe on the anxiety scale, 52% of people in the creative profession claim to have mild to severe anxiety from time to time and 56% claim mild to severe depression. To the listener out there who maybe previously was thinking they feel alone, you are so not alone. In fact, you're in the majority.
[laughter]
David: Oh, just thinking, if you were managing a team of people and they represented a cross-section of that marketplace, just think about the implications of managing folks who struggle with that. It's like all of a sudden the handbook isn't enough. It's going to take being human and thinking and listening. I don't have any of those answers, but is there something about this field? What's the connection? Does this field breed that or are people attracted to this field because they struggle with that. That'd be an interesting question.
Blair: Andy put that question to me. I hadn't thought about it too deeply, but I almost brushed it aside and said, "I don't think there's anything about the creative professions." He had a hypothesis around deadlines, et cetera. I said, "I don't know that there's anything about the creative professions." Obviously, I hadn't thought about this as deeply as he had in his organizations as sponsoring this research. I think in hindsight, I gave his hypothesis short shrift.
I was talking to Collette about it after the interview. she said, "I think there is something about, it's not necessarily the work that we do, but when you think of creative people, I've heard you say previous and you're a big student of personality theory that the most successful people tend to have highly skewed personalities, number one. Number two, they're aware of that. Skewed in whatever dimension, but when you think of sometimes people have gifts on one dimension and gifts almost always come at a price. I think our field has a higher incidence of people who have these creative, superpowers that come at a price. Often that price shows up as some form of mental health issue. What do you think of that hypothesis?
David: I think that's very possible. I don't have any inside information to know whether that's true, but I think it's very possible. To me, again, a lot of what I say today could just be me expressing my own challenges and not really representing other people's. There's something about the creative field that the people who succeed are the ones who absorb everything around them. Then they use that information and they find patterns or they find anti-patterns and they break those.
There's no way to do the creativity that we're talking about without absorbing all of this stuff around you. It's like you have your phone that's beeping at you all the time and you can't turn it off. It's like your own version of hell. I think doing a great job in the creative field means you have to absorb all of this stuff and it crowds out what you need to be doing to think about yourself. There's less peace. At least that's how I experienced it. I don't know if that's true for other people, but that's how I think about it.
Blair: That's really interesting. I have a friend who speaks nine languages and understands, I think 13, and we've traveled with her and she's very sensitive to the point where if she can't go out for dinner because she's overwhelmed and I didn't appreciate it, but we're in these global cities where there are people from everywhere and you hear this cacophony of noise as people around you are speaking different languages and it's easy to tune out because you don't understand.
She understands it all, her antenna is very sensitive and she picks up and processes everything that comes in and it wasn't until she explained that. I saw this connection between how sensitive she is to stimuli and the fact that she's tuned into all these languages. There's a connection there. I'd never thought of the idea that creative people generally to be good at what you do, you have to be good at picking up things from the outside tuned into social, cultural things, trends, et cetera.
David: You have to be empathetic as well because you're constantly putting yourself in the shoes of whoever the target audience is. That means, again, you're outside yourself and you're living inside other people all day trying to think about, "All right, what messages will resonate with them? What are they losing sleepover?" It's like you're a therapist to the world, 10 hours a day, then you just stop for some odd reason and you realize, "Oh, my goodness, I've just been thinking about everybody else. I've basically just shoved down whatever it is that I'm feeling."
I described myself in the article as a high-functioning, slightly broken human. I think a lot of folks in this field fit that same category. I'm maybe a little too generous with myself about high functioning, but I do think of myself as high functioning. I don't think that's incompatible with struggling in some way. I am not proud of the mental struggle at all. I'm a little embarrassed about it, but I can't ignore it anymore. This has been a part of my life.
Formally, it's been a part of my life for the last probably 15 years where I've said, "Oh, something's going on here." Then really acutely in the last 10 where it takes some pretty intentional efforts on my part to manage it. You and Collette were on the receiving end of this and I think we mentioned this in a previous episode where I was just lost and I don't know exactly when that was, but I think it was about 10 years ago. The same time I referred to in the article that we'll put in the show notes, but I remember like, "Oh, should I even call them friends?" I remember thinking, "What must they think? Like, "Okay, can we meet at some resort in the desert and talk about nothing? Would that be okay with you?"
[laughter]
That's partly why people like me and others struggle with mental health. Just keep it inside because it feels stupid. It's like, I don't even know if I want to talk, and if I did, why would I talk about it? I'm like, all I want is, I want to just go sit by myself at a bar with a lot of other people who aren't going to talk to me. Somehow, that's what it feels like in a mental health struggle.
It's illogical from the outside because people who really want to help you, they don't know what to do and you sometimes can't tell them what to do. I remember a family member going up to him and saying, I don't know what's going on. I know something's going on. I don't know what to say. I'm here. That's it. [chuckles] That's all you can say it sometimes.
Blair: Yes. I remember that incident. I knew you were going through stuff, and I knew we'd crafted some reason to get together and talk about each other's businesses, but it was really just about spending time together and being together. I think of that incident, I was tuned in to an extent of what you are going through. Only to an extent, I knew you were struggling with various issues.
The impetus for this conversation, when we spoke a couple of weeks ago, I was saying to you that in the last, I don't know, year or two, I've just had my eyes opened to how many people in my life struggle with anxiety and particular and depression. The depression is easier to spot, I think, but the number of people in my family immediate and extended family on my team, in my client base, among my friends, that I now see so much clearer that they're struggling with these issues almost entirely because they've said so.
I think back to previous times in my life, even that 10 years ago, when you were in your darkest moments, I didn't have an appreciation for how many people are affected by mental illness of some form, because you said you're a little bit ashamed about it and it begs the question. Why do you feel a certain amount of shame around it? At the same time, I know the answer to that question. There is stigma around mental illness.
I think what we as a society and maybe we in the creative professions hopefully are finally starting to get right, and we're not there yet, is talking about it and removing the stigma. I just think of how blind I was to the people in my life previous to just a few years ago. Somebody said on Twitter in response to your article, I guess we all suffer from this.
I'm thinking, well, I don't identify with depression or anxiety. I'm one of the lucky few. But then again, as I was saying, there's so many people in my life that I see them everywhere. I wonder how many things I've missed over the years. I wonder how many people have tried to reach out and have a conversation and just say, "Hey, I just need you to be here." I completely missed the cues.
David: Or even if you don't miss the cues, how do you stay in a place where you can actually step into a situation like that and not endanger your own mental health that much. There's only so much that can be done.
David: It would actually be an insufferable person if I didn't have mental health challenges.
[laughter]
Blair: Well, thanks for taking it for the team.
[laughter]
David: It'll knock you on your ass in terms of your pride, in terms of how self-confident you are. If there is a God, then this would be one of those, all right, he needs solutions 6, 7, 8, somebody go to the box and throw it on him. This guy is going to mess things up if he gets too confident. In other words, it just creates unique pressures that need to be thought about carefully. Here's an example, what would be more effective than waterboarding me if you needed something out of me? It would be to never let me right again.
Blair: Because it's therapy?
David: Exactly, it is therapy. To the extent that my writing has helped folks, maybe not as much would have happened without this. There are uncomfortable, but still good side effects, side benefits from something like this, it's not completely a curse, it's just what it is. It's just a truth. It isn't going to change. Probably. I think that was a big moment for me. This also could be read as the moment that I quit trying. I understand how that could come across. I just don't know what I'm talking about here, but recognizing, "Okay, I am not going to find that elusive medication that solves this."
I'm going to quit trying. Now somebody else, it might be very important for them to keep trying. We have different journeys. Each of us does different stops along the way. I'm not suggesting that's what somebody else should do. I'm just saying that, for me, part of that decision was coming off medication. In fact, I remember going to my psychologist, I was on three at the time, we'd tried so many and I said, this is just not working. We've tried everything. Nothing's been really significant. I want to get off of all of these.
She strongly advised me not to. I said, "I'm serious. I know it's not good to take yourself off these things quickly. I need help getting off them slowly," whatever that means. She was not willing to do it. She said, "We'll talk about it next time." I went home and this explains a little bit more about my personality, obviously. Its like-
Blair: I know you well enough to this is going.
[laughter]
David: You can finish this story. I go to Wikipedia and I look up titration. Because I knew enough about that word. It's like, screw that. I'm going to manage myself.
Blair: Self-titration.
David: Right. [laughs] Some pills you can't cut in half because they mix all together. I knew enough about that. Anyway, I just did it myself and never went back. I'm not blaming her. She may have been the smart one in that case. For me, it really helped to get to the point where I wasn't trying to find it elusive solution. I was still open to it. I've gotten lots of really interesting suggestions from people, but now I'm going to live with it. I can't keep putting life off here.
Blair: You could, I guess, two main ways. One is like I give up and the other one is just letting go. I think the first step in 12 steps is let go and let God, as they say, it's like, okay, I'm turning this over to a higher power. I've done what I can do. I'm just going to basically live with it or accept that this is part of the package. You were talking about if there was a God throwing these levers and I was imagining, okay, hubris is 8.5. Let's ratchet up anxiety and depression to 4.5 and that'll offset. That'll keep them human.
David: They're like, there's some lab up there with all these. I picture it. I can see that.
Blair: Where do you, David Baker, go from here?
David: Well, in terms of the impact on my business, my potential clients and prospects will decide that. There's nothing-
Blair: You got a lot of free time.
David: -yes, I know that's all, I have a lot more time to self-medicate experiment stuff and all that. In terms of me personally, nothing changes just in the sense that certain days are harder than others. My goal is if I hadn't said anything about that, I don't want my clients to ever notice. I want them to continue to receive value and objective level-headed fairness, no matter what, that's the professional goal.
On the personal goal side, nothing changes because I just have to keep doing the same things, which it's different for everybody. In my case, it correlates pretty well with sleep, with activity, particularly outdoor activities. I do a lot of that with getting rid of toxic friends and clients, in some cases, managing notifications. Like I mentioned that earlier, I don't know, there's something, maybe it's just me, but the notification stuff just drives me, flip them crazy.
Then just keep delivering value to my clients and keep being as human as possible with my family and friends. Nothing's changed really, I took a day out and said, all right, people, don't know if this is a good idea, I'm just going to tell you what I've struggled with back to your jobs. I hope this helps.
Blair: There's a few things in there I want to pull on, if you don't mind.
David: Nothing's off-limits. Ask anything you want.
Blair: When is sleep, and you mentioned in the article that you used to sleep really well and every night you'd hit the nightly reset button. At some point, things change for whatever reason. In this mentally healthy survey that I've referenced that we'll link to sleep comes up in almost every other neurological or mental health issue or just general as a biomarker for general health, sleep quality is almost always the number one issue.
It appears that sleep quality is an issue in the creative professions, but can you point to anything and maybe you don't want to talk about it, but you've just said you're an open book, or is it physiologically or just through aging? Was it something happened where all of a sudden you weren't able to get the quality of sleep?
David: I think my wife rewired our sleep number bed just out of torture, no. Part of it was just aging. I think in a way I've only been through this once. I'm not sure.
Blair: That you know of.
[laughter]
David: Yea, right. I don't know how related this is, but I've had three deep spinal surgeries and four other really serious operations in that area. There's been a lot of pain associated with that and a lot of physical therapy or what I call physical terrorism, my PT doctors. I don't know if that was partly related or not. I suspect that there's not much connection there. I think it's probably more, as I got further and further away from my childhood and both of my parents died, they were both older and it's not like they were in fantastic health.
It wasn't some gruesome accident or anything. They just both passed away, pretty close to each other. I think that just sparked a whole lot of new thinking for me. As the oldest son, I had to dive in to fix all the estate mess. It was a whole disaster and it was very expensive. You're doing all that, which has to be done, but then all these feelings are coming up. I think that's probably what contributed to it feeling more like a crisis as who am I now? My parents are gone. What can I keep blaming on them and what do I need to own myself? I am plagued with a mind that will not turn off and I wish I could turn it off really. That just got worse and worse during that time. I think, for me, that's probably what precipitated it.
Blair: I remember that. I remember your parents dying rapidly. You're in quite a lot of physical pain. Then there appeared to be all the emotional stuff from the death of your parents. It just seemed like you got hit by the perfect storm of physical and psychological stuff all at the same time.
David: We had a granddaughter who died at three weeks old and Julie's dad died unexpectedly and my best friend died from cancer. It was just a lot of stuff all at once. I know that has an impact. I just don't know how to measure it.
Blair: Well, I mean, I think people listening to this, some people have lived that reality with the different variables and worse, and then others who've been blessed, listened to all of that at once and think, "How the hell would I ever survive that?" I remember you sending me a note you're in your deep introspective moment saying, "Well, if this doesn't work out, I could always go do-" I forget what the other thing was. I waited a couple of days and I sent you a note saying, "What the fuck do you mean if this doesn't work out? You're David Baker. You've had a greater impact on this field than anybody else on the planet. Get your shit together, man."
David: This is you, my kind friend being empathetic and helpful.
Blair: The shoulder to cry on when you need one.
David: Well, that's why not even all that comfortable talking about all these contributing factors because, by any measure, I have so much, there's nothing I lack. It feels like such a slap in the face to people who struggle with the same things that I do, but are thinking about food or childcare or losing their job, or it's like, I don't have any of that stuff happening. It just feels stupid.
That's part of what happens with mental health is you feel like anything sounds like an excuse, or maybe you deserve this. That's the biggest challenge as mental health is that it is illogical. That's why CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, it just didn't work for me because my therapist would say something and give me an exercise. It's like, "No. I know this stuff. I'm not learning anything here." I would have been a bad patient.
Blair: Oh, my God, your poor therapist. You've joked a few times about wearing therapists. Oh, man, I guess I am your therapist unofficially. This issue of talking about it and I just can't say to you enough, and I know you've had hundreds of people already say this, just you talking about, I think is so helpful, so impactful. Here's a line from this study I've been referencing mentally healthy, compared to 2018, we're 24% more likely to consider disclosing if we've been diagnosed with depression and 22% more of us believe that our peers won't be treated differently if they were to disclose a mental illness. That's a difference in 18 months.
There is definitely some momentum on this front where people feel like it's more okay to talk about these things. I hope or know your post is going to have a significant contribution to that. I hope this discussion will too. You opened your piece. It was so well written. It's such a difficult topic and it was just so, so well-written, but you open it by saying, "This isn't me being brave. This isn't me crying for help. This isn't me with any answers."
To that last point, again, not putting you on the spot for answers, but as you point out in this article, many of your readers and our listeners they're in leadership positions. Whether it's them struggling or whether it's them opening their eyes to their team members, struggling, do you have any parting thoughts that you want to share with people on how they might think about things or do things differently?
David: Well, one safe conclusion I think we could make is that it's really good to at least write to be honest with yourself, that's what writing is really. Because there's people looking over your shoulder, it keeps you honest with yourself. Even if there's nobody looking over your shoulder, just writing for yourself, I think that would be really good. Then being more candid about this with the people around you, not so that they will understand you better, that might help, but so that they can understand themselves better. That's what we're doing.
Some of the most fulfilling things you could do are the things that you aren't doing for yourself. You're doing for other people. There's just so much hope that just builds up when you have the right mix of outward-looking, thinking about other people without using that as an excuse to not look at what's going on in yourself. A good balance of that stuff, I just don't think there's a whole lot of downside in honesty. Don't take my statement too far. Everything you say should be true but you don't necessarily have to say everything that's true.
I do think in this space, there's room for more honesty, even if you don't do the crazy thing of writing your entire list but just talking with maybe your coworkers, maybe your families, somebody else, the solutions are different for everybody too. It's okay to find your own path and you're not going to solve this, probably, you're just going to find some easy truths with yourself that will need to be maintained.
You're never going to be at a withdrawal, the troops, there's an easy truth there. Figure out what that is for you. Be honest, if it helps you, if it helps other people or both and every day it's every day, get up every day, keep doing what you need to do. It's like got through today. That was good. All right, what's happening tomorrow. That's how I have to think these days.
Blair: One day at a time, as they say.
David: Yes.
Blair: Well, personally, I want to thank you for writing the piece and being so open to talking about it. I know I speak for thousands of people out there who are appreciative of you showing the way. One of the things that I take away from this is if you're struggling with any of these things and you've benefited from David telling his story, just ask yourself, are there people in your orbit, on your team and your family and your life who might also benefit from you opening up a little bit? The biggest thing that we can do as a profession together is to make sure that it's okay to talk about it. Let's keep talking. Thanks for this, David.
David: Thank you, Blair.