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It is often said that one in five people suffer from mental health issues. This perspective is a bit flawed, because everyone is at risk of experiencing such internal battles no matter who they are. Marc Lehman discusses how we can reframe mental health and eliminate the backward understanding of its issues with Eric Kussin of the nonprofit organization #SameHere. Together, they explain how society and treatment must focus more on addressing one’s underlying trauma and less on being reactive to the disorders arising from it. Eric also emphasizes the impact of technology and social media on mental health, particularly for young people.

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Reframing Mental Health With Eric Kussin

Welcome to Normalize It Forward, the podcast that openly talks about mental health and wellness. We are welcomed by my friend and colleague Eric Kussin, who was, for over twenty years, a professional sports executive. He got his start at the NBA League office, working with the expansion Chicago Sky, and then the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. He switched over to the NHL, working with the New Jersey Devils and the Florida Panthers, becoming the league’s youngest chief revenue officer. Eric has had some difficulty since then with mental health, which we’ll get into in a bit, and that has led him to launch his latest business called Same Here Global. Welcome, Eric.

Thanks for having me.

I probably didn’t do it justice.

I’m sure anyone who watches any podcast or video, when your bio is getting read, you cringe a little bit because if it goes too much into detail, you’re like, I sound like this heady person, and then if it’s not detailed enough, you’re like, did they learn enough about me? There’s no right answer to how anyone’s introduced. Don’t feel weird about that. Though it’s interesting, though, as long as we’ve been friends, I got to call you out on this in a collegial way. My last name is pronounced “Cusin.” I like talking openly and transparently when I know people are going to be listening because it’s like, you can know someone forever and something as simple as that.

Eric Kussin

My name is Marc with a C, and everybody spells it with a K. I appreciate the correction. That’s important. You want your name to be said and spelled correctly. I’m glad you said something. Thank you. Eric, tell me, you have such a fascinating story. Anyone who knows Eric knows he’s not a heady person at all. You have such a huge heart. Every time we talk, it is very clear to me that your passion for helping people and working in the space of mental health and wellness is super high. Let’s start off, if we could, just tell us a little bit about Same Here.

Same Here was born. Thank you for those comments, by the way, that means a lot. There’s a lot that happens in this space that I’ve been in, where, because mental health is becoming a bubble, people are realizing it applies to more and more people. My theory would be everyone, but there are a lot of people in this space who, quickly on the first phone call with them, they reach out to you on LinkedIn or get connected to you through a mutual friend.

Immediately, if you’re intuitive, you can tell that they’re in the space because there’s some endgame for them, or there’s a dollar sign that they’re chasing after, or, in this space, an exit strategy, which is a term that was foreign to me when I worked in sports, because you’re working for sports teams, you want to win titles. You didn’t have an exit game of like, “In 3 to 5 years, I want to make.” That wasn’t even something I thought about. Appreciate those comments because I’m in this space. When you ask about what Same Here is, it’s because of my own lived experience and how awful, and I say this in a loving way towards mental health professionals out there, because I don’t think it’s their fault. I think it’s a system issue. Am I allowed to curse or not?

You are, absolutely.

We have a very fucke*-up, backwards mental health care system that leads with disorder. The best analogy I can make is everyone on this planet is walking through a high school together. Over the loudspeaker, we’re hearing, “Third period, please go to your third-period classrooms.” Some people are jumping into science class, math class, English class. Most people, 80% of people, are going, “Why is someone even making an announcement over the loudspeaker? I’m just going to keep walking through the hallway because I’m around friends and talking.” That analogy is how we are looking at mental health as a society, who has it and has to go into the classrooms, the 20% of people in the year. The stat is 1 in 5 people have mental illness all the time, and then who doesn’t. They’re like, “Who gives a shi* that I’m in a class, we’re in a school. I don’t need to go into some separate subject because this doesn’t even apply to me.”

Same here was born out of my own lived experience, which we’ll get into. I didn’t think it applied to me because of the way it’s marketed. That’s a brilliantly deceptive marketing message by the pharmaceutical industry. Why is it brilliantly deceptive? Because when you make the topic binary, that there’s 1 in 5 people who have it, you make it reactive for the whole rest of society. They don’t think they have it, and guess what happens to that rest of society? Because we know stress and trauma are cumulative, they eventually do have it. You’ve got the 1 in 5s who feel like they’ve crossed the line and have symptoms, to go, “My life is falling apart, I feel awful, what do I do? What’s the fix?” We grow up getting strep throat, bronchitis, pneumonia, and going to the nice man or woman in the lab coat, and they give us the diagnosis and then the medication for it.

That’s what we think we need to do, and then everyone else, where I fell into that category, doesn’t think they have it. I don’t have depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, an eating disorder, alcoholism, or addiction, all the names that get put together in, “Well, I don’t have that, so if I don’t have that, I’m fine.” What ends up happening is this concept of what stress and trauma are, which are the sources of really the things that I just described or just named, are symptoms. They’re not diseases. You don’t ever get to the source. You don’t think about that source because you start treating, “Oh, well, I got to find what is depression and how do I fix depression? How do I fix my anxiety issue?” Same Here was born off of crashing because of not knowing that and trauma building in my own personal life, leading to me realizing there has to be a complete reframe in the way that we discuss, talk about, and normalize mental health. We are way too focused on labeling and diagnosing and not focusing on the fact that everyone goes through challenges.

There’s divorce, job loss, breakup, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, bullying, cyberbullying, sickness of loved ones, loss of loved ones, caring for sick older parents, moving to a new market, and being the one who’s isolated and doesn’t make a lot of friends right away. That’s the human condition that changes our nervous system states, which leads to this dysregulation, which leads to these symptoms that are then called disorders. The problem is, since that’s not universally understood, people don’t think they have it. We have these awful outcomes where people die by suicide, die by overdose. Same here is meant to say, “Why same here?” You and I, we’re the same. We can say that to every person on the planet, that it’s 5 in 5, not 1 in 5, because Marc, you’re a human being. I’m a human being. Anyone who listens to this, you’re a human being as well.

You’ve been through one, some, or many of that list that I just shared of those challenging life events. That means your mental health has been negatively impacted in some way. That makes the topic applicable to every single one of us, and then it becomes less scary. We can talk about it openly and share what we all go through. That’s a lot different than going, “Alright, the group of anxious people stay here. The group of depressed people stay here in those classrooms.”

Only you guys could talk, only soldiers know what PTSD is. They need to stay on their own, because they fought a war. No one else understands. The mother who lost her child at a young age, that’s a pretty harsh war that she’s fighting. It breaks my heart that the relatability isn’t there. I gave a long description to you asking what it is, but I wanted there to be commonality and understanding why we need to reframe.

Responsibilities Of Parents

Eric, I have to say that resonates so deeply with me. I’m a family therapist by background. I work with young people. One thing that I just, for the longest time, honestly didn’t understand but am coming to understand over time is how parents will bring their kids to every place under the sun to get ready for college, except for a counselor. Except for the support that we know, statistically, when we look at kids on college campuses, they absolutely will need it. I saw a statistic the other day that said something like 86% of kids at some point will reach that level, whether it’s a diagnosis or, as I call it, subacute, right below.

I look at all of the kids that I’ve worked with over the years, and those kids will go to college. They’re feeling decent, they’ve got some symptoms of stress or anxiety, but then they go to college, and all of a sudden, those symptoms climb. Maybe they reach a point of diagnosis, maybe they don’t, but clearly, there are lots of kids out there on every college campus that need assistance. I think one of the biggest reasons why parents aren’t thinking about it is exactly what you just said. We’re a very reactive society when it comes to wellness.

One of the biggest pushes that I’ve been making, and really starting this conversation to do so, is to get families to understand we are all involved in this. Helping your son or helping your daughter create some momentum going to college, or going to high school, or even getting out of school, towards their self-care, towards their wellness, towards things they’re able to do to manage life stress. Because one thing we can predict, and we know, is life stress is coming. It’s coming, it comes for all of us. The question really is, how do you handle it?

The issue on the parent side of things, which is interesting, because your practice and having people come and raise their hand and say it, and I can share with people, I’m not being critical of anyone who’s averse to it, because I didn’t know that it applied to me until I was 34 and the crash happened. I’m putting myself, raising my hand, saying I’m in your category as either a sufferer or a parent who’s not talking about it. I get calls all the time from people who are parents, because my friends are parents’ ages, and I haven’t grown up yet to get to that point. They’re so quick to put explanations on others in a way that doesn’t relate to them and their own parenting skills.

“Eric, do you have someone that can work with my kid on the perfectionist attitude they have on the soccer field? Do you have someone who could deal with the repetitive thoughts that they’re having when they get up to the plate and they’re batting and they can’t get out of their own head?” It stems a little into the classroom also, but I see it a lot on the ball field. That’s a much easier thing for a parent to ask for help about because it doesn’t seem like, “I did it.”

No, this is my kid when they are on the field, or on the court, or on the ice, or in the classroom, they’re dealing with something because of the situation. As opposed to when parents go, “Okay, we lost Grandma Millie three months ago, and Johnny hasn’t been coming out of bed over the weekends, he’s sleeping in until 2:00 or 3:00 PM. Okay, you know, Cousin Sarah is sick, and we go into the hospital, and, you know, Johnny’s been quiet recently.” They don’t share that second part, and the reason is because, and I see it in my own parents, I’m being real with people.

It feels, to a parent, like you think that you failed your child, that it’s hard for them to deal with these life situation things. It’s much easier when you see them dealing with it in situational things that they’re trying to be ambitious about. “Oh, how do I get them to be better athletes? How do I get them to be better students?” But no, in my house, no, look, we’ve got this under control. What I say to parents, because it’s your audience, is there is no perfect way to parent. What we go through in life as human beings, starting as children growing up, you could be the greatest parent in the world. What goes on up here in our heads, it’s the way that we’re wired.

It’s the way that we experience the world. I think Brene Brown is the one who tells a story. She had a client who was 35 years old, a beautiful woman, like lit up a room. The woman was what clinical psychology would call severely depressed. She’s saying, in her head, Brene is thinking, “What could be wrong with this? This woman has everything. She’s beautiful. She’s wealthy.” They start talking about the history and the past. “Tell me about your friends growing up.”

“Oh, I had a best friend who lived across the street from me.” Oh, tell me about that best friend. “She was really smart. It was back in the days when we would put the report cards up on the magnets on the refrigerators. My friend was really smart. She was really smart. She was really smart.” Brene’s picking up on this. It’s like, “Well, tell me about your relationship with your parents.” She said, “My parents were so supportive that they told me how beautiful I was all the time. I was in beauty pageants.”

And it starts to click for Brene. This woman, when she was a girl, was watching her friend get patted on the back by her parents across the street, talking about how smart she was. But because her own parents were talking about how beautiful she was, more so than how smart she was, she developed her own complex that she was not a very smart individual.

That’s a perfect example, hopefully, for parents, that you could be loving, caring, and supportive. My parents were amazing. When my brother was sick, they were driving me to every single practice there was. I look back, and I’m like, “Did they have seven cars to get me to all these places?”

They were phenomenal at being there for me, at hugging me after an event. What they weren’t great at, because it wasn’t their skill set, maybe I’m airing too much dirty laundry here, but it’s reality, I’m doing it for the help of other parents. My parents were not very good at talking about what was going on, because they themselves, it hurt them to talk about it. If my brother was sick, my dad’s way of dealing with it was saying, “Todd’s going to be fine. The chemo is going to work great. Everything’s going to come out great.” My mom’s way of dealing with it was to go into silent treatment and she pretended it wasn’t happening, but she didn’t talk openly about it. She would just be very reserved about it.

When you’re an 8, 9, 10, or 11-year-old kid, and my little brother is six years younger than me, you have these thoughts in your head. You’re like, “What happens if my brother dies? Where will he go? Will I ever see him again?” There’s no answer for these things. If your parents aren’t openly talking about them, you’re going to sit with those thoughts circulating around in your brain, trying to figure out what the answers are.

You don’t feel like you have the opportunity to open up and share. I share that background so that parents understand bringing your kid to therapy is no different than getting your kid a baseball coach to do batting practice with. I’d argue it’s more important than the sport or the grades, because this is the foundational work. This is the plate on which everything else lives. I promise you that they’re going through a breakup they haven’t said anything about, or a friend who said something hurtful that they haven’t told you about because they’re ashamed to tell you about it. There are things that kids hold onto, and having that support system is so needed.

Social Media And Internet

It’s amazing, Eric. I will say, I’m the first one to say, I’ve been a parent for a long time. My kids are 23 and 21. I find myself saying, as parents, we’re guessing all the time, and oftentimes we’re guessing, we’re doing a good job of our guessing. We’re certainly making mistakes. There’s no playbook. We’re doing what we think is right. Like you said, if, in your mind as a parent, you’re thinking, “Nope, I don’t think therapy is going to be helpful to my son or my daughter,” then they simply overlook it. But to your point, let’s face it.

We live in a world that is so different from when we were growing up. Whether it’s phones, social media, COVID, all of this stuff has just shifted life. For young people, it’s hard to even compare life as a young person versus when we were younger. Eric, when we were younger, let’s remember, I would call a friend, I would talk to their mom, I’d leave a message, I’d wait a couple of days. They may or may not call me back. It was so different back then.

If you think of the science of what’s happening because of phones, because of access to media. Let’s just not even take social media for a second. Let’s look at what happened in the Persian Gulf war. When we were growing up, the video person would take footage of this light in the sky that looked like it was on another planet. You’d get no HD, it was grainy footage. They’d mail it back to the studio to then air it the next day on the news. Meanwhile, these kids are looking on their phones, and in real time, not social media, they have CNN or Fox News, or whatever their choice is of what they listen to.

I’m not trying to make it partisan. They see faces of children being burned. They see limbs being taken off. That, combined with social media and the comparisons, combined with the way that social media is built like a slot machine for updates. The fact that in your phone, takes social media out of it again, you get text messages, you get direct messages, we had beepers growing up. You had to go and call on a pay phone. Your email comes in 30 in a minute, as opposed to 30 over the course of three days.

That sympathetic nervous system response of the alert message, it wasn’t in place the way it was for us. We had this thing when we were younger called boredom. Like, it’s a joke. When I share that with kids, and some of them get the joke and some don’t, I was like, “We would sit around each other’s houses and go, we just played that video game because we only have three of them. We’re bored of that one. Let’s go outside and play.” You had to search for the next dopamine hit, but you didn’t know it was dopamine back then.

Looking back on it, I want to go play spud. I want to go play dodgeball. It’s fun to do that with friends. Those kids don’t need that. It’s literally here, and then in it being here, their brain is going “ping” over and over and over again. That exhausts the nervous system. The nervous system can’t take that. This concept of chronic stress and trauma, the list that I gave earlier of the divorce and job loss and breakup and all those things, that’s just the baseline that’s then compounded by all this technology.

You add up all these things that are building and building and building inside of us. It’s definitely not the same. These kids are going through worse. We’re going through it as adults at the same time as them, but we at least have the luxury of remembering what the time was like before technology and going, “Okay.” This is weird to say, but it’s true. I’ll be proud of myself if I watch a movie on Netflix and don’t check my phone. To me, that’s meditative. Back when we were kids, our parents would go, “Get off the TV. You’re watching too much TV.”

It’s a luxury now to be able to spend time on TV and not check your email. That’s what we need kids doing more of. It’s uncommon upon our generation because you have baby boomers who probably the technology is not common to them the way it is to us. For those of us who are the generation above these Gen Z’s and these kids that are in, it’s on us to go, “We understand the technology. We understand what it does for us, but you only know the world through the lens of this technology. You don’t know the world when there’s a calmer state. We need to help you find that balance.”

Self-Care

That’s an excellent point. I find that so often when I talk to young people, they don’t have that frame of reference. Shifting into that, Eric, because it’s a really important topic, self-care. Self-care is something within mental health and wellness that gets talked about. Parents may get on their kids to do this or do that. I guess I wonder, when you think of self-care, what does that mean to you?

The plug for this, only because I believe it in my heart of hearts, there’s a campaign that goes on social media, “Self-care isn’t selfish.” My facetious comment to that is, your campaign is not a very good campaign if you need a campaign to explain your campaign. People think of, when they hear the term “self-care,” things like massage and bubble baths and candles. That’s an important piece of a self-care routine. That’s why that phrase “self-care isn’t selfish” is there for you because it makes it seem like, “I’m doing stuff for me.”

Self-care is really work. That’s why we call it STAR, which is stress and trauma active release and rewiring, a gym for the brain. You got to make people understand new concepts, you have to make it analogous to existing concepts that they already do understand. We understand that the body falls apart over time if we don’t get to the gym and do something about it. If we don’t eat well, that means there’s work to do for our body to stay in decent shape. Obviously, there’s different levels of that, some people want to look like Mr. or Mrs. Olympian.

Some people just want to be able to live an active lifestyle where they can walk around the block without getting winded. That’s your choice of where you want to be on that. That same concept should be understood for mental health, that there’s work that I need to do in order to keep this in a decent place. It’s sad that that’s not the common understanding. The reason it’s not the common understanding is because there’s a pill for that. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m in the 4-in-5, nothing’s wrong. I cross over into the 1-in-5. What do I need that fixes me? That’s like dealing with your heart health by saying, “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

I’m not taking a look at the scale as the weight goes up and up and up and up. “Oh, wow, I just had these pains in my left side of my chest. Let me go to the doctor and get the statin drug.” That’s not a way to live healthy. You need to get on the treadmill. You need to walk around the block. You need to get yourself active. When I think of self-care, I think of work. People don’t like hearing the term “work,” but you have to be specific with them and direct with them and say, “You want to feel a certain way.”

It takes a certain amount of work to get to feeling that way. We’ll make it fun. We won’t make it like what you were talking about, where people dread sometimes having the therapy session. We’ll give you mind-body practices. We’ll give you exercises that enable you to feel like you’re doing something that’s active, that’s moving the body. To not do anything is a recipe for disaster, and I’m a perfect example of that.

I like how you said that, Eric. I think many of us are, honestly, because that becomes the default of, like, okay, we’re feeling a little lazy, a little sluggish. We’re just going to default back to that. I’m a big fan of making sure young people and adults have actual ideas and things as they’re listening to conversations like this as takeaways. It’s like, okay, you know, what can I do? Okay. Eric’s talking, Marc’s talking, what can I do? The typical kid, when they go to a college campus, you said it best with the heart issues, they’re not paying attention to needing to do anything until they’re having that really bad issue.

Until their anxiety is at an 8 out of 10 and they’re feeling really awful, they may not choose to do anything, kind of the proactive-reactive. I’ll just throw this out. I’m a huge fan, obviously, of being proactive and recognizing, hey, if we just take care of ourselves, even if we’re doing one thing each day, getting good rest, getting some physical activity, don’t climb Mount Everest, just get some physical activity, eating a decent meal. We all have the ability to make those choices. I’m throwing it out because, to me, as far as self-care goes, if we make those choices, we’re taking care of ourselves and we avoid those issues. If we’re not, we’re waiting for them to come.

Also, obviously, I’m living in an idealistic world that I know we’re ten years away from this understanding. When we were in the 1980s going to the gym for the first time, there were charts on every single wall showing you what each piece of equipment did. There weren’t many colors that the printers could print with, so they were made out of brown. They showed the muscle groups in the body. If you lift like this, you’re working out the bicep muscle. There’s a misunderstanding with mental health that when your mental health is off, it’s strictly this thing called the chemical imbalance. Let’s put chemicals in to balance out the imbalance.

When the reality is your amygdala starts to become over-functioned. It starts sending beta and gamma waves out throughout the rest of your body and telling your HPA axis, “We got to start shooting cortisol throughout our adrenals so that the rest of the body gets into an activation mode.” Our vagus nerve starts to lose vagal tone. It goes from being this rubber band to being more strict like this because we’re holding ourselves like this all the time. Our gut becomes porous, and we start to get gut overgrowth as well as gut dysbiosis. I’m throwing out geeky science terms for a reason.

Those are the equivalent of the muscle parts that we saw in those pictures in the 1980s that got us doing the exercises for it to become second nature for us to know, “Okay, if I want bigger shoulders, I do these things called shoulder flies or shoulder presses. That’s my deltoid muscle.” We need people to understand that the events of stress and trauma start to impact the structures in our body. The structures in the body, there are exercises, when you ask about self-care, I’m diving deeper into it, that I can do, what does tapping do on what meridians are and what even are meridians and how do meridians start to get clogged? What does havening do on that amygdala function to start to dampen those beta and gamma waves and start to get it going in alpha wavelength? If we don’t understand those things, one, what are we doing?

You don’t go to the gym and run on a treadmill, not knowing why you run on the treadmill and just sweat. You run on the treadmill because you go, “It increases my cardiovascular health. I’m allowed to, I’m able to, I should say allowed to, I’m able to run and walk longer distances. I can pick up my kids when I want to. Maybe I’ll have this benefit of losing weight because there’s a caloric deficit versus what I ate. Sure, I’ll go on the treadmill,” and then we get on the treadmill. We don’t have that in mental health with the exercise. We have, and you’ve seen the meme, and I hate the meme, and it devalues what you all do as practitioners.

It’s a person sitting across the couch from a practitioner. The person has all these tangled-up balls of yarn in their head. You, the practitioner, are the one that’s untangling them and putting them into new separate colors. That is telling people you need to go to Marc so that Marc can fix you with his magical powers. That’s not how therapy works. It’s not how self-care works. It’s Marc’s giving you the tools for you to do the work. You understand how to work on yourself so that you have control and agency in this. We’re far away from that because, I beat a dead horse on the pharmaceutical industry, but we have a system, and it goes back to me saying that our mental health system is fucke* up, we have a system that works for a lot of people.

If CBT and DBT, not to knock them because they’re great, but if those are the gold standards in what you do when you go to a therapist, and med management is the gold standard when you go to get medication, and it stays within that, what that does is keep a recurring revenue model of patients continuing coming back. Why is that going to change when the system is based on that? It’s not going to change. We got a ways to go in terms of educating people and getting the folks like you and the folks who are part of Dr. Plainer Same or Psych Alliance to go, “Guys, there’s ways for you to actually get to the source and start to heal so that you can start to do some of these things on your own. You don’t have to be in therapy with me forever.”

Not that being in therapy is a bad thing. Do maintenance therapy once a month, like have a person that you check in with, do it through telehealth, but I’ll land the plane on that comment with this, I think of the show The Jeffersons, and I remember a scene, it was a scene in every single sitcom we had growing up. Helen is the neighbor, and Weezy Jefferson goes, “Oh, Helen, you’re looking great lately.” She made some comment like, “It only took me 30 years and my entire life savings of therapy to get to this place.” It was a joke back then, but it’s real. It’s like you’re putting that much time and effort and money into feeling better to get to this place. It makes no freaking sense. How do we learn the exercise and the practices so that we can start to take more of the control along with the guide from the therapist?

Stigma Of Trauma

I think you make a number of good points, Eric. I want to just expand on one for a moment. I run into a lot of parents that, when you use the word trauma, it got me thinking. I run into a lot of parents that will say, “Well, my son or my daughter, they haven’t been traumatized. They haven’t had this. They haven’t had that.” I sat back and watched the shi* show that went on on college campuses last spring, and how college campuses couldn’t get encampments off campus and all of that. I remember seeing an interview with a young person. He was a freshman, I won’t mention the school’s name, but he was a freshman.

He was being interviewed, and he looked right at the camera and said, “This wasn’t on the tour.” I thought, spot on, my man. Like, you know what? It wasn’t. There’s stuff happening for young people we can’t predict. I can’t tell you how many times, Eric, and it’s really sad. I’ll get in a meeting with a young person and say, “How was your week?” They’ll say, “Not very good. Someone killed themselves in my building this weekend.” They didn’t even know the person, but it’s a contemporary. Those are all traumas.

Look at what your comment ties back to what we were talking about with parents’ readiness and willingness to bring their kids to therapy. Saying, “My child’s never been through anything traumatic,” is a protection mechanism of the parents saying, “I’ve never put them through anything traumatic.” They want to believe that they’ve created this cocoon around their kids. That’s why I brought up the Brené Brown examples. You don’t know what’s going on in your kids’ minds. It starts with helping a parent to understand trauma is not specifically an event that was awful that happened. Trauma is anything that they experienced that overwhelmed their ability to cope in the moment. That could be applied to anything, like being broken up with.

If you’re fourteen years old and what they call puppy love, which is a bullshi* term for it because that’s trying to minimize what someone felt, that’s the first time a human being fell in love with someone, even if it was a three-week relationship. That person gets broken up with, and what kids do, that boy or that girl is seen with someone else right away. That crushes that person. The ability to feel in that moment and cope with that experience of being crushed, the child doesn’t have those, and then all of a sudden, they think, “I can’t tell my mom or my dad about this because it seems weird that I got dumped and I’m a loser,” and that is trauma.

I give that example, and I’m sure you give these examples when you speak with clients who come in, because we have to normalize that trauma is not someone’s head went through a windshield. That’s one thing that’s possible, but there’s so many other traumas that happen that is that inability to cope in the moment and being overwhelmed by it. That should not be something that we’re shamed of. That should be something, if anything, that’s a badge of honor, that we’ve been able to overcome and get to this point that we’re at, given what we’ve had to live through.

Eric, I have to say, it’s a great segue. I have told so many people over the years about Same Year, and it’s amazing to me how many people, the next time back in my office, will remark on 5 and 5 because it resonates. It resonates with people to say, “You know what? I’m a human being. Eric’s a human being. They’re human beings. We are all susceptible to shi*. It just happens.” I think when we get to that place, we normalize this conversation and bring it into a focus of, guess what? We don’t have to be scared of this, but we do have to deal with it. It’s really important.

The 5 and 5 thing, which is funny, is because people will skeptically, when they come back to me, and I’m of the belief that 1 in 5 is a planted statistic because of the deceptive marketing that I shared, and then I’ll say, “Well, in a space where people are looking for there to be improvement, don’t you think instead of continuously saying 1 in 5, they might say things like, Great news. We’re down to 19.3% instead of 20%?” You’d never hear that movement. They’re like, “Yeah, but Eric, wouldn’t that be better if it was 3 in 5, 4 in 5, like, because then more people would think to get help?” I say, “No, the second you make it binary, it doesn’t matter if it’s 4.9 in 5 or 5 out of 5, you’re telling a group of people they don’t have it.”

That’s why I disrespect, with all respect, the NAMI’s of the world and the Mental Health Americas of the world, because they’ve started to use the “everyone has mental health” message, but it’s always coupled with “1 in 5 people have mental illness.” The reason they’re doing that is because they’ve got a group of people they’ve protected, that have donated to them, that are the parents of the quote, mentally ill group that think, yeah, everyone has mental health, but my kid has it worse. Your group sticks up for my kid. My comment to society, that group of people, and everyone else is this concept, the stigma that everyone talks about and bandies about is on every single podcast, that never goes away if you keep people in separate groups. If you want to say, “you have it worse,” congratulations, like you can make that claim all you want, but what’s that?

It’s not a contest.

It’s not a contest. If you want to even hold onto it as a contest and believe, because of your symptoms, I’m someone who was in bed for two and a half years, couldn’t function, I don’t want that to be the understanding that I had it worse than other people, because then the person who only has it for three days instead of two and a half years will never relate to me. We have to be on the same team. If not, that concept of stigma never goes away. When Kevin Love says, “I had anxiety and a panic attack, and I ran off the basketball court,” and Michael Phelps says, “I had depression and suicidal ideations,” and Simone Biles says, “I had depression. I had to pull out of the Olympics,” that’s not normalization. The reason that’s not normalization is because it’s doubling down on the existing erroneous message that all mental health is if you have a disorder.

We need Michael Phelps and Kevin Love and Simone Biles to talk about what they went through in their life so that we can show we all go through things. Simone Biles’ story is a lot stronger when she talks about the rape with Larry Nassar. I know it’s very difficult to discuss, but she has talked about it openly at some points, her brother being on trial for triple murder. Those are things that are traumatic to our system that, “Oh, my brother got in legal trouble,” “Oh, my friend was the victim of rape,” or “I was the victim of sexual abuse.” That’s relatable in a way that labels are not.

Subacute

Here’s the thing. I can only say, as a therapist, Eric, that so often I’ll have a family come into my office, and there’s an identified patient. “My son, my daughter has Asperger’s, or has this, or has that.” As a therapist, you just become attuned to watching for certain things. Quite frankly, I would say a very large portion of our population is what I would call subacute.

They don’t meet the criteria for the DSM, but do they have symptoms? What the fuc* is the difference? Honestly, I’m the first one to say it. What’s the difference? To me, if you need some assistance, number one, get it. Number two, look at that and say, hey, we can all live a happier lifestyle. We should be talking about it more. We should be making decisions on a regular basis for our wellness, and we should stop shaming everybody.

What you’re describing there is why the continuum model, I think, is so important and why we use the scale. In polyvagal, they call it ventral vagal, sympathetic, dorsal vagal. We call it thriving, gliding, surviving, fluctuating, struggling, sinking. I ran through that quickly just to say the fluctuating and the struggling, which are to the right before the final place to the right, which is sinking. Fluctuating and struggling is what I would agree with you on as where most people live. It’s over-sympathetic nervous system dysregulation, where, whatever their genetic makeup is, that increase in sympathetic response has been going on, and they’ve been thinking about things over and over again.

They’ve been through a lot of difficult events in their life. They’re starting to see, based genetically on how they’re wired, those symptoms start to manifest. For someone, it looks like the way they get through the day is washing their hands fifteen times. For another person, it looks like, I know I’m talking about OCD things, but they get sweaty palms before they go into a meeting. As long as they wipe their hands off and clean them off, they go into the meeting, and they can feel more confident. We have to start to notice those things as signs of dysregulation that’s leading towards, to your point, what modern psychology would call clinically depressed or anxious.

We just call it sinking, which is you’re at this place where the sympathetic response has been going on for so long that your neural pathways have been wired in that way, where you’re stuck in that spot. It’s hard to get out of this spot unless you’re given the tools from someone like a Marc who can help you get out of it. You get to use those tools throughout the rest of your life to start to keep yourself out of those ruts. If you see it on a continuum, you at least can go, I’m moving to that place. My thoughts, my feelings, my behaviors are changing to that spot. At sixteen years old, when the ambulance would go by, when I was playing basketball Saturday and Sunday, every single weekend, it was two miles away from my house.

My brain kept going, that ambulance is going to be at my house when I get home. It’s going to be at my house when I get home. That is subacute in the place that you’re describing it. That’s what we would call on our scale, either fluctuating or struggling, depending on having those repetitive thought patterns over and over again of catastrophizing, that I didn’t know at the time that that was a maladaptive thought pattern. I just thought it makes sense because my brother’s been sick a lot before. That thought’s still in my head. That doesn’t mean it’s healthy, and we should keep it there. We should do something about it. That’s why we wait and we wait and wait until these crashes happen.

Episode Wrap-up

You make an excellent point. I push the concept of being proactive because we don’t have to wait. As parents, I think it’s important for parents to hear that message. As you mentioned before, typically parents wouldn’t see symptoms in their young kid, let’s say physical symptoms in their young kid, and ignore them and let them build up and wait and wait until they have a heart attack. Why would they do that in this case? Look, first of all, I have to say, I could talk to you all day long, Eric. I think your passion and mine are definitely in line. I really appreciate, number one, your time and your energy. If you guys haven’t seen Eric’s Instagram, check him out. Your videos of you’re sitting in small chairs for an individual like yourself, Eric, are hysterical.

You can laugh out loud. You do so much good work out there, Eric, really. I want to point people to you. I want people to understand what Same Here is. More importantly, I want to normalize this conversation. I want wellness. I want mental health to be out there. I want people understanding the more we’re able to talk and share situations and stories and be honest, which you are all the time. I really appreciate that. The more we’re able to guide this conversation in a healthier manner. Thank you. Thank you so much for all of that.

I’m glad you’re doing these podcasts. I think the more people encourage other people to continue to listen to your podcast here and then encourage people to have these conversations like we’re having with each other, because it doesn’t normalize on its own. Campaigns do not normalize. I appreciate you saying 5 and 5. I think that helps us start the conversation.

We need people who are peer support advocates who get out there and go, this is my stuff. I’m not ashamed of it, and you probably have that stuff too. Let’s talk about it. If all you need to do is just listen to me, that’s fine. I don’t need you to say anything back to me, but just hear what I have to say, and eventually, you’re going to feel comfortable enough opening up to me.

I really appreciate your message, Eric. If I could put you on the spot as well for a moment, Normalize It Forward. The concept behind it is what I’d like to do is ask if you had an individual in your world, either a friend, coworker, or relative, that you think would be helpful for me to interview next so that the conversation could continue. I’d love to just get your thoughts on that. Anybody come to mind?

It must be serendipitous that you asked that question at this time, because my phone rang as you were asking the question. There’s a guy who’s got a good following too for you in terms of how to help with the reach of your podcast. His name is Ryan Phillips. He was a professional hockey player. Didn’t make it to the NHL ranks, but sexual abuse, abuse by coaches, and has been through a rigmarole of different treatments and been all over the country, been all over the world.

He’s Canadian-based when I say all over the country. He did a bike tour all over Canada, but he’s one of the few people who I’ve spoken with who, from a lived experience perspective, he just lets it rip and there’s no guard up whatsoever. He’ll tell you what he’s felt and what he’s been through. He’s a good soul and a good person who wants to help people.

Awesome. I appreciate it. We’ll connect, get his information, and get him on here because he certainly sounds like a valuable individual to continue this conversation. Once again, Eric, thanks for your time. Thanks for your energy. I really appreciate it. We’ll talk soon.

Awesome. Thanks, Marc.

Take care.

About Eric Kussin

Eric Kussin is a magna cum laude grad of Cornell University and 20+ year professional sports executive, who got his start at the NBA League Office. After five years with the League, he went the team business route and rose the ranks with the expansion Chicago Sky, and then the NBA’s Phoenix Suns.

He then switched over to the NHL, working with the New Jersey Devils, & Florida Panthers, becoming the League’s youngest Chief Revenue Officer. However, a debilitating mental health crisis stopped Eric’s career and life in its tracks for over two and a half years. After many failed treatment modalities, he was lucky enough to learn healing practices that enabled him to dig out of his abyss, and found a higher calling, launching a non-profit at the end of 2017 called, #SameHere – The Global Mental Health Movement. #SameHere’s Alliance is comprised of athletes and celebrities, along with media members, expert practitioners, advocates, and everyday heroes who’ve come together to make talking about mental health a common topic for “5 out of 5” of us.

Their #SameHere Movement has swept across college campuses in the US from Cornell to USC, K-12’s, Corporate Offices from CNBC to JPM Chase, Professional Sports Teams from the Golden State Warriors to the New York Mets, and military & first responder groups from the NYPD to the DOD. The Movement has recently begun to expand globally as well, with events in markets outside of the US. Eric hosts a podcast called “We’re All A Little ‘Crazy’” with NHL great Theo Fleury, and has launched an app called the: SameHere Scale to normalize emotional health monitoring & daily check-ins. To “keep his foot in sports,” Eric consults for a number of professional sports teams and leagues, guiding their ticket and sponsorship sales and retention efforts.