Mental health. It’s not always something people in college stop to think about. But just because everything seems to be going right, that doesn’t mean everything actually is.
On Tuesday, Texas A&M University-Commerce got a visit from mental health advocate and speaker J. Danee Sergeant, who spoke about living with mental illness … and the value of self-compassion.
Danee Sergeant prayed for death. That was how she figured she’d get off drugs.
"There were times when I wished that I would get shot and killed or go to jail because I wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore," she says.
This was in her early 20s, just before Hurricane Katrina. And she WAS in and out of jail. A lot. Mostly for lower level crimes like trespassing and disturbing the peace. But nothing that put her away long enough to get out from under weight of her addiction.
And even though her mother had left her a trust fund, Sergeant burned through it. To pay for drugs.
"I was homeless," she says. "And even though people were dropping dead around me and overdosing and stuff, that didn’t matter."
Actually, she was hoping to OD herself. She didn’t want to kill herself because she didn’t want to end up in Hell, as her faith told her she would. But if she'd just dropped dead, she wouldn't have minded.
Somehow, she had enough clarity of mind to realize she was in a bad way. So she got into a 12-Step
program and a medical detox facility and decided to turn her life around, in New York, at Fordham University, in fact.
When she got there, she was confident; certainly proud of herself because it was the only school she’d applied to. She was also completely off drugs.
So why was she still so down?
"I thought it was just the drugs," she says. "We took the drugs away, and I thought that was it."
It wasn’t. And hough she was far away from the dangerous life she’d led back in New Orleans as she ever was, Sergeant couldn’t get her mind right.
"Things were going good in my life," she says. "But I still felt like I wanted to die. And I’m like, 'How can this even be?'
Turns out, her brain was working against her very survival.
"I did not want to die," she says. "But I felt like my brain was telling me I had to."
Sergeant was eventually diagnosed with psychosis, a mental illness whereby the mind divorces itself from external reality. She had been misdiagnosed before with the catch-all depression, but she needed specific medication to fix the schism in her brain.
How she got to that help, she says, started with a few casual conversations about her feelings, and then, what she says is the most important part of mental health – other people.
"When I told somebody, it’s kinda like they took the reins and made sure that I went to the hospital," she says. "I told enough people. Fortunately, I told it to the right people."
The “right” people included her teachers, who Sergeant says told her they wouldn’t have been able to tell something was wrong if she hadn't spoken up. Which is to say that trying to carry yourself like too much of a tough guy can be legitimately fatal.
A few years on, Sergeant says she performs “routine maintenance” on her mental health – making sure to avoid triggers that set her down a bad path -- like high stress and lack of sleep – something she’s aware can be a real issue for college students.
"In college that’s hard," she says. "I remember I’d be up cramming all night, some of my best papers came from all-nighters."
She still wants to stay up late. But she knows what sets her off. So, she says "I have to practice self-compassion."
