EP 5 | Ask Kev | I STRUGGLE WITH BIPOLAR EVERYDAY AND IT'S OKAY

Episode Summary

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to struggle with bipolar disorder? 

In this eye-opening episode, Kevin shares his mental warfare with BP and paints a vivid description of how it feels in both manic and depressed states. He explains how mental health issues combined with auditory and visual hallucinations pushed him to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge when, in reality, he didn’t want to. He also talks of his daily battle with paranoia and how he copes with negative people; This was the first step for Kevin to become a mental health advocate. 

Kevin shares valuable life lessons in this episode, so please tune in!

Key Take-Aways

  • If you know someone mentally ill and contemplating suicide, please know they don’t want to die; but believe they have to because their brain is telling them so. The truth is they want to survive. 

  • People with suicidal thoughts believe they have no other options, no way out. 

  • People suffering from bipolar disease experience extreme mood swings. When they are depressed, they don’t know how to help themselves. 

  • Your decisions can change the course of your life, your history. 

  • 75% of people who want to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge are pulled off.

  • You are not the disease, you have bipolar disorder, and you can beat it. 

Resources

  • Remember to visit the Crisis Now website for more information. 


Hinesights Podcast_Ask Kev_I Struggle With Bipolar Everyday and It's Okay: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Hinesights Podcast_Ask Kev_I Struggle With Bipolar Everyday and It's Okay: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Kevin Hines:
My name is Kevin Hines. I jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. I believe that I had to die, but I lived. Today, I travel the world with my lovely wife, Margaret, sharing stories of people who have triumphed over incredible adversity. Now we help people be here tomorrow. Welcome to the HINESIGHT's podcast.

Kevin Hines:
Who I am? My name is Kevin Hines and I am 30. And I almost didn't make it to 30 because when I was 19 because of bipolar disorder and the depths of depression that I was in, I attempted to take my own life by way of jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. What I say now is the single worst decision of my entire life. And people ask me, they say, you know, don't you think that it had to happen for you to grow and become what you are? And what I am now is, well part of I am now is I'm a public speaker and I advocate for all things mental health equality, mental health awareness, suicide prevention, drug and alcohol prevention, and more. And people say, well, you know if you hadn't done what you did and live, you wouldn't be here. But what I say to that, you know, yes, that's true. But look at the destruction it caused my family, my friends, people who love me. And also, you know, look at the near-death I almost caused myself. And when you think about it like that, you look back on your past. I think in hindsight, you know, it's always, what are they? Hindsight is 2020, you know, that old cliché. But when I look back and I remember because I remember every second of all this pain, of all this mental warfare going on in my head. I remember every second and sometimes we're violent and, you know, self violent, sometimes we're completely manic, you know a natural high. You're not on drugs, but you have a natural, euphoric high where you think you could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. Some people think they could fly. And then the depression was, you just you fall into this pit, this hole that is so dark and dismal and it's so deep you don't think you can dig yourself out of it, and even if you had a backup, you couldn't do it.

Kevin Hines:
And you know, I look at the past and I go, yeah, it was a great learning experience. But if I was there at that moment and while I was on that bridge contemplating the end of my life, while I was having hallucinations both auditory and visual saying I had to die, while I was on 14 psychotropic meds to stop the mental health problems that were tox in my brain and making it worse because we found out later some of the meds weren't supposed to interact with one another. So all of these things came into play and I ended up on that bridge and I ended up jumping off and I say this is my speech and it's true, the millisecond my hands and feet left that rail I said to myself, what have I just done? I don't want to die. God, please save me. And I thought it was too late. And for the 1,558 people who have died there, it was too late. And there are only 33 known survivors, 19 of which have come forward and said basically the same thing I said the millisecond I had freefall, I knew I made a mistake. And what happens we understand from a scientific level is that, or at least a psychological level is that you are in such great despair, mental anguish, and pain that you don't necessarily want to die but you believe you have to. There's a big difference. Even at the film of the bridge, I said at the time I wanted to die, but when I was there at that moment, I never wanted that to happen. I desperately wanted to live, but my brain was telling me I had to die, much like the book by Susan Blauner, How I Survived When My Brain Was Trying To Kill Me, I resonate with that story. It's about bipolar disorder, it's about your brain telling you that you're a horrible person and that you're useless and that you have to be gone from this earth. And you know, you go through life and you make decisions, and those decisions sometimes can change the course of your life, your history. And you know, it can all depend on you walking down your normal street to get home, and instead of going straight away, you make a left and you run into someone you know who loves you or cares about you, and then you reconnect with that person and you find hope in that in that meeting, you know, or you could be deciding that you want to go drop off a piece of mail at the post office. The post office that's nearest to you is at your work, but you don't want to do it till later that evening near your house. And when you do that, you run into your old high school teacher. You know, something like that. And these things change and modify our lives as we go along and the decisions we make. And my whole thing about talking about this, and talking about why I did it and why I made a mistake and why people should not die by suicide, especially the youth who are, you know, sixth-highest rate of suicide is fifteen to twenty-four year-olds in the world. And yet you see, all you see on the news is about homicide because the media doesn't know how to portray suicide on television without screwing it up royally, because they sensationalize everything. And of course, they did with me, it's a bit of a sensational story. I jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, the highest point of suicide in the world. Not the highest point as in physically, I mean, the highest number of suicides in the world to date, and you're talking about 30 to 37 to even sometimes 40 people dying a year at the Golden Gate Bridge. That's one or two every two weeks. And they pull off seventy-five percent of the people who jump and saved their lives. And those people never attempt again. And there's this illusion that, oh, if you just build a net, they'll just go somewhere else. That's been disproved time and time again by these doctors in the field of sociology who have done epic research on these issues and found that 96 percent of the jumpers who were pulled off and saved either died of natural causes or never attempted to get in any way, shape or form. One individual went back to the Golden Gate Bridge and ended his life. He jumped. He survived. He went back. He died. And that's one individual out of the majority who go, are saved in some way, shape, or form, and they get help, they live their lives.

Kevin Hines:
That's not to say I don't struggle. I struggle every day. One of the things I can't break, no matter what I do, I was talking about this last night to my family and friends, and I can't do it, I can't break the paranoia. Every waking moment I'm alive and awake and aware I'm paranoid at some level, some level of, when you think about it, inconsequential paranoia where it's so beyond belief that even the guy who's like the police officer who sits in the back of the restaurant, looking at the door, being aware of his surroundings and knows if something goes down, I'm going to take care of business or the Vietnam vet who does the same. It's not like that. It's like I walk down the street. I look at it, two guys walking toward me, and I believe that they're going to come and kill me. I laugh at myself because I think to myself, you're not that cool to be assassinated, at least not yet. But these are the thoughts in my head on a regular basis. Or, you know, wasn't that car following me two blocks ago? And it's a beast, and it's painful, but nobody knows. That's why I loathe it. They just, oh, Kevin, he's doing great. He's on his routine and he's doing well and he's fighting for wellness and blah blah. And even sometimes when I go speak, people are like, well, how can we believe? People have said this to me, how can we believe that you went through all that, you seem so fine. And now, you know, the old term is, you know, he's a high functioning bipolar. Well, first of all, I am not bipolar. I have bipolar disorder. That's what I try to teach young people that they always come up and say, I have bipolar, too. No, you don't. You know, I'm sorry. They say I am bipolar. I say, no, you aren't. You have it and you can beat it. And I think that's why my story has resonated with so many people. Then there's the haters out there that disagree with all my ideals, and they try to tell me things like, you should just go jump off the bridge with an anvil tied to your legs and do it right this time. Or the people that write on social media sites, they say, oh, Kevin, you know, they should just put it down and get out there and let it happen. That's someone's personal choice. And to that, I say no. These people who are dying by suicide all around the world, they're ill. I'm not saying they're necessarily mentally ill. I'm saying, if you do intense research on these individuals, you will find mental health instability somewhere. Whether they were Fortune 500 Forbes guy and they had all this money and they lost it in the market and they jumped off a building, or whether they're the person who contemplated it for years and then jumped off that bridge, those people are the same. And I say that because when they come off that bridge or on that building or with that gun or the rope, at the moment of the decision to die by their own hands, they're faced with a miserable reality and they don't want to die, they, at that point, believe they have to. And if we can tell people that don't understand this fight that imagine you and your daughter or your sister or your cousin, you love very much, and I imagine they thought of suicide. Instead of the knee-jerk reaction, don't do that, that's so selfish, that's wrong. No, it's not selfish. It's a terrible situation. But to tell someone that they're a selfish person for believing they have to die just makes them want to die more. They believe they have to die more. What we understand in the field of psychology, you know this because you studied it, is that people inherently want to survive all things, all stormy weather. They want to survive. They need to survive. And so this is the exact opposite of that process, except it's not. They still want to survive. They just believe they have no other option, no way out. If I can help one person in every audience, I don't care if there's one person in the audience, I'm going to be there and I'm going to present and I'm going to present well and I'm going to try to help that one person because that, the person needed to be there as opposed to the prima donna speaker performer who gets the two people in the crowd and goes, that's it? That's all that came? No, wait a minute. Those are the ones that needed to be there. Maybe that connection is more important than having a room full, filled, you know? So I do this work because it's my life's passion. It means the world to me.

Kevin Hines:
Margaret and I love sharing stories of people who have triumphed over incredible adversity. For more content and inspiration, go to KevinHinesStory.com or visit us on all social media atKevinHinesStory or on youtube.com./KevinHines.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you'd love including automated transcription, automated translation, transcribe multiple languages, world-class support, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.

Margaret Hines