The Campaign to Change Direction (Speech)

Many of you may not know this, but I ghost write a good number of speeches, in fact it's one of my favorite things to do as a writer. Last night I actually got to deliver something I'd written - to a crowd of about 900 over the course of the day. It was an awesome experience. Some have asked me to share the speech - here it is.

Answering the call to Change Direction is no small task. It means changing the direction of mental health, mental illness and wellness in a million little and big ways.

We must change the dialogue about mental illness. We must change the political discourse. We must change the darkness around this topic and change the deception of mental illness – how it hides among us and within us, daring us to name it aloud. We must change the denial of its existence. And we must change the disgrace that we assign to it. For as long as we say someone is courageous for admitting they have mental illness, we are requiring courage of them.

We must change the definition of what it is to be human – recognizing that what goes on in our minds is an echo of the essence of our souls, the most vulnerable part of ourselves, the part that whispers its truth, its hunger and its pain to us.

We must change how we define normal…to expand that definition, in recognition that one in five of us faces mental illness in ANY GIVEN YEAR. We must change the way we dehumanize, depersonalize and degrade our brothers and sisters who are suffering and instead, we must defend them.

We must change the delay in the delivery of services and support. Change the ways we discourage people from getting help – knowingly and unknowingly. We must no longer demoralize those who live with mental illness – change our propensity to deny that we, ourselves are ill – we must change the depth with which we care, change our detachment from one another, change the desensitization we have developed toward the homeless man on the street, or the colleague who’s hurting, or the friend who can’t get out of bed; change the design of those human relations.

We must change the ways we depend upon one another. Change the determination with which we face this illness. We must change how we disparage those who cut or burn themselves to find relief from the pain they cannot touch, to no longer disregard those who walk the razor’s edge of anxiety, live within the clutches of addiction, drink the deceptive nectar of mania or live in the dank basement of depression. We must no longer look upon mental illness as a disgrace.

To do this, we must change direction. We must change our diligence. We must change the dignity with which we treat one another. We must change and embrace the diversity among us, that beautiful spectrum of life experience that goes far beyond skin color or faith tradition or politics to that immeasurable galaxy of the mind. Where every human emotion lives, within every single one of us, waiting to be awakened. Waiting to be named. Waiting to be heard. And waiting to be welcomed as an essential part of what it means to be human.

Tonight, together, we change direction.

It is no small task, but together, we can do this. Thank you for being here to help us chart a new course.