Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Autism is a complex neurodevelopmental condition that affects millions of people worldwide.
It is characterized by difficulties in social interaction, communication, and repetitive behaviors.
Although autism is becoming more widely recognized, there is still a lack of understanding and awareness surrounding the condition.
As a result, many individuals and families affected by autism struggle to find the support and resources they need.
Why Not Me The World podcast aims to bridge that gap by providing valuable information and insights into autism, fostering empathy and understanding, and promoting acceptance and inclusion.
Nashville based Music Producer Tony Mantor explores the remarkable impact his guests make by empowering their voices in spreading awareness about autism and helping break down the barriers of understanding.
Join Mantor and his guests as they delve into the world of autism and mental health to explore topics such as diagnosis, treatment, research, and personal stories.
Together, we can create a more informed and compassionate society for individuals with autism.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Eric Smith: From Music Prodigy to Mental Health Advocate
Eric Smith shares his remarkable journey from child piano prodigy to mental health advocate after battling psychosis and addiction.
His story reveals how finding the right medication after a decade of failed treatments transformed his life from hospitalization and FBI involvement to becoming a Texas Judicial Commissioner on Mental Health.
• Displayed extraordinary musical talent from age three, studying under world-renowned pianists and performing with Grammy winners
• Experienced early warning signs when grades declined in middle school, with a psychologist predicting future psychosis
• Developed full-blown psychosis after getting sober, believing he had decoded assassination plots involving world leaders
• Contacted the FBI about his delusions, leading to multiple meetings before his parents sought help from his former psychiatrist
• Required three hospitalizations over several years before finding success with Clozapine after more than 10 years of failed medications
• Experienced a profound moment of clarity two weeks after starting Clozapine when the "noise" in his mind quieted
• Returned to education, maintaining a perfect 4.0 GPA through graduate school
• Now serves as a commissioner with the Texas Judicial Commission on Mental Health and runs his own consulting business
• Advocates for better access to effective treatments like Clozapine, which international guidelines recommend after two failed antipsychotics
Visit www.ericwtsmith.com to learn more about Eric's consulting work or to contact him directly.
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intro/outro music bed written by T. Wild
Why Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
Welcome to why Not Me? The World Podcast, hosted by Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City, usa, nashville, tennessee. Join us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry. Their stories Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real life people who will inspire and show that you are not alone in this world. Hopefully, you gain more awareness, acceptance and a better understanding for autism Around the World. Hi, I'm Tony Mantour. Welcome to why Not Me? The World Humanity Over Handcuffs the Silent Crisis special event. Joining us today is Eric Smith, a nationally recognized mental health advocate, public speaker and consultant. He is a commissioner with the Texas Judicial Commission on Mental Health and is the founder of Eric WT Smith Consulting LLC, where he provides invaluable support to families and individuals affected by serious mental illness. With his wealth of knowledge and experience, we're grateful to have him here today. Thanks for coming on, hey, tony. How's it going Going? Great thanks. Can you give us a little background on how your journey with mental health started?
Speaker 2:So right around age three, a little kid living at home with my mom and dad, they had an old school upright piano, small home, small piano. I have memories of this and there's photos of it somewhere here. Music was such a driving force in my life. I remember getting ready for a bath one night I had this melody in my head from the sound of music and it was, you know, it's the famous Doe a deer female deer song, if anyone's familiar with that. And I had this in my head and I remember the bath is being drawn and I just run, run, run out to the piano and I'm there, not playing some expert version of it, but I'm sitting there. I plan a key, a key a C, no flats, no sharps for the musicians listening. So it's one of the easier keys to play and I sit down and it's like the notes Do a dear a female and I'm doing it. My parents are like you gotta be kidding me, like, like he's transferring melody Melody to the piano at such a young age. And the picture to which I'm referring that still exists is me sitting with a. I've still got my sweater on but I've got like no bottoms on. So I'm just sitting there at the piano, just kind of like going all out trying to play as a musician, and I think at that point it became very apparent to my parents that nurturing my creative music side was a good idea, because it was something I was gravitating to in the first place.
Speaker 2:So let's fast forward to like third, fourth grade type stuff. I am in what were advanced classes. For the time I was in advanced math, advanced English I had a lot of friends which will be relevant to a later part of the story where I did not have a lot of friends, but for this time I had a lot of friends and I was studying music. It was a huge part of my life and it got to a point where at the start of fifth grade, when I moved to Texas, there was my piano teacher who eventually became, for the next several years, my teacher.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to share her name, anya Grykowski, who is a world renowned classical pianist. I started studying under her and within a very short period of time I ended up starting to learn pieces that were like college entrance and college exit pieces. But I was like in middle school. At that point it truly became clear that this was more than just a hobby for me and something that I was excelling in Fast forwarding to high school. My sophomore year was the last full year of high school because I dropped out of high school. My junior year and that's relevant to note because right around that same time I opted to stop playing music. And this is after I had had the local CBS affiliate do a primetime news story on me about my musical achievements and the accolades and whatnot. It was after that I had the pleasure of performing on stage with William Warfield, grammy Award winner from famously known as singing Old man River from Showboat, and everything looked like it was a line where I'm going to succeed and be a musician.
Speaker 1:You left high school, you stopped playing music. What changed for you to do this?
Speaker 2:Serious mental illness and addiction threw a huge wrench in it and I don't want to get too lost in the weeds of it, but I felt very creative when I was seriously mentally ill. Very creative Part of it was the mania, part of it just straight up the psychosis. There were periods of time I'd stay awake for a day, a day and a half, just recording music, writing music, tightening up the lines, changing up the lyrics. It was making my symptoms worse. After I finally got sober in 2006, and after I finally found sanity some years later, I was afraid to get back to playing music, performing it, writing it, because it was so closely tied to my addiction and serious mental illness. And I don't want to do an injustice by saying music is bad. I'm saying for me, it scared the hell out of me that it was so tied to my addiction and my serious mental illness that I was afraid to have it be an element in my life again.
Speaker 2:And I've only recently, for the first time ever, performed publicly again. It was small. I'm a member of the board of directors for the Schizophrenia and Psychosis Action Alliance and a good friend of mine and colleague, Dr Rob Leitman you may have heard his name before he's there and he serves on the board as well. So he gently coaxed me into playing there for the board of directors and the people who were there for that meeting and it was nice. I turned around, everyone had their cameras out, lots of applause, and it was the first time I'd performed publicly since before I fell ill with psychosis and I know that was a long answer to your question, but I'm trying to help you understand how much music meant to me and also how much it scared me due to how my life unfolded.
Speaker 1:Not a problem. Music is a very powerful instrument. It can bring back the best of memories. It can bring back the worst of memories. So I totally get that. What happened that got you off track for everything that you were doing at the time? You mentioned psychosis. With that said, what path did your journey take you to next?
Speaker 2:For me, I was a straight edge kid, like I had never been drunk or high of any kind prior to my sophomore year of high school. But because my grades started to dip in middle school, there were parent teacher conferences called and the teachers were concerned that I went from being in advanced classes to barely passing and then eventually ultimately failing, having to go to summer school. For a teacher, it's a teacher. It's easy to look at a couple of red flags to explore. Is there fighting going on at home, which was not the case I grew up in a very loving family or is Eric using drugs or alcohol, which up until the point I was a sophomore in high school wasn't true. So you just had teachers trying to just figure out what in the world is changing in Eric's life, my brain chemistry, like. I'm no doctor, but I do know what it's like to start falling ill with serious mental illness.
Speaker 1:With all this happening, what did your parents and teachers come up with? Did they get any answers?
Speaker 2:My parents.
Speaker 2:Just they rearranged their entire schedules trying to take me in to get help, take me into tutoring, seeing counselors, psychologists, all of that.
Speaker 2:And as part of that first major step in that journey, I did a long standardized test that would be analyzed by a clinical psychologist and the team to find out are my answers for that standardized exam consistent with the answers of those provided by people with a specific diagnosis? And, as it turns out, I remember sitting in that room when the results were being discussed with my parents and I was there. The doctor said Mr and Mrs Smith, your son Eric's answers are consistent with individuals who were diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And they were like so you're saying he's got bipolar disorder? Doctor was like his answers are consistent with it and would explain some of the high highs he's having and some of the low lows he's been having. The piece I'm about to say this is actually what, for the first time, really had me questioning the validity or reliability of psychiatry and counseling, because what he said next was both wild and would later prove to be true.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting point of view for your age. What did he have to say?
Speaker 2:He said Mr and Mrs Smith, don't be surprised if at some point later, when your son is in his 20s, if he also falls ill with psychosis or some sort of psychotic spectrum disorder like schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. At that point I could collectively feel in the room like my mom, my dad and me, not necessarily in denial, but just in disbelief. Like what are you doing? Like for sports fans out there who remember, like Babe Ruth famously, like pointing out to the stands and then cracking one out there, come on, like for a doctor to look at someone who's in his young teens and say, hey, don't be surprised if you're psychotic in your 20s. That was a wild thing to consider at that time. That is exactly what happened, fast forwarding kind of through my teens, where I drop out of high school in my junior year I get a general equivalency high school degree and I try college.
Speaker 2:I do okay my first semester. I failed spectacularly out of it in my second semester. The years go by, the mental illness gets worse, the addiction gets worse. As a point of relevance here, I did get sober in 2006. I did not get full-blown psychosis until about three years later. It's worth saying, when you're asking me this question you asked me here a little ago, like what contributed to things going off track, like what made it happen. Some of it was choice, right, like I chose to start using drugs. The addiction thereafter was not my choice, but I definitely made a choice to start using drugs.
Speaker 1:You made that choice. That happens. The other part of this is your doctor brought up bipolar and mental health illness in the future. That wasn't your choice. What happened next?
Speaker 2:The worse the illness got, and the worse the symptoms got, the less control I had over any of it. I went through a period of more than a decade's worth of trial and error with antipsychotics, antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, ssris, like the whole gamut of everything, and things kept getting worse. So I finally got to this dangerous point rooted on deeply, deeply flawed logic but made sense to me at the time which was this If I had any of these diagnoses that all of these meds are designed to treat, when I took them as I did, things should have started getting better, but things kept getting worse. So I finally got to a point where I was like, look, I don't have those diagnoses because the meds that are designed to treat those diagnoses did not and do not help me. I was convinced I could just live the rest of my life the way that I did. But at some point it got so bad.
Speaker 2:The FBI got involved, the Secret Service got involved. Various embassies and consulates from around the world, unfortunately, were brought into the mess of things. Before people are listening to this story, they're like, oh my God, Eric, did things ever get better? Yeah, and I hope we can unpack that and it included me being pointed in as commissioner by the two highest courts in Texas our state Supreme Court and our Court of Criminal Appeals here in Texas, where I live.
Speaker 2:I'm so grateful to have had opportunities to, year over year, be invited to talk with Stanford University law students about my journey, talk with them about policy and practice. This is a university that I would never have ever had a chance getting into. Now I get to talk with students who are living their lives hoping to change the future through whatever line of work it is they choose to do being involved in major media, doing this conversation like I'm doing with you right now, tony, the way my life ended up. Right now, the rest of my life will be spent trying to help other people who have desirable outcomes, because, on paper, dropping out of high school, failing out of college, getting arrested for stuff related to mental health and mental illness that generally doesn't bode well for the trajectory of things. But I got lucky. I got the treatment that I needed, I got the resources that I needed, I had the support that I needed and for the rest of my life I will be spending it trying to help other people also find that life. It is that they want.
Speaker 1:That's a great thing to do. Now you brought up the FBI and other agencies. Can you expand on that and what part of the journey that was for you?
Speaker 2:That's both interesting and terrifying. What happened Right? So I appreciate the question. It was like 2007, 2008,.
Speaker 2:Right around the time Twitter first came out, and I will assume, for the sake of this discussion, that people know what Twitter is. If they don't, it's famously called X right now. Here's why it's relevant to this conversation. It was brand new at that time. It was like the wild west. Social media was not how it is right now, where everyone's walking around with a smartphone and cameras and followers and all of that. Social media existed, but it was fringe, like Facebook was established mostly for college age kids. Myspace existed and it was, for the most part, like an established user base of emo kids and musicians. It wasn't like it looks right now, and here's why that's relevant. We are now living in an era where musicians, models, writers, world leaders they have tens of millions of followers. At that time, people had a few thousand followers because it was so new and because there were so few people on the platform. It was huge if you had like 10,000 or 20,000 followers, and I remember John Mayer, I think, was the most followed guy on Twitter for a while and he had like 15 or 20,000 followers at the time, just to put that in perspective. So I'm getting on Twitter at a time where it's very easy to throw a tweet out there at somebody and they'll see it and, like, within like a day or two, they'll write back.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately for me, because I was so unstable at the time, I started to feel this inflated sense of importance where, like I remember, I tweeted at Paul Wall, who's a famous Texas rapper, and he tweeted back a few times. I remember I tweeted at Wyclef William and other famous musicians that you might know out there and they wrote back. Wyclef, he retweeted something I wrote to all of his followers and I remember right around that time I was like man, this is a guy I grew up listening to and I love his music and now it feels like I've made it, it feels like I've arrived. So the stuff that I'm doing now, whatever music I'm writing, all of it, it all matters. I'm elevated, I'm on this new level where people are just paying attention to me.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, that was accompanied by paranoia that had long been bubbling up and it went from me being excited about people kind of knowing who I am and paying attention to me feeling like things were almost Truman Show-esque If you're not familiar with the movie we're like. I thought there were cameras everywhere. People were watching me. I couldn't get away from all of it. Very shortly thereafter there was a very steep decline. I remember waking up one day and looking through random Twitter feeds. People were writing.
Speaker 2:I thought that I had found a code, decoded it that identified there was going to be assassination attempts on President Obama, who was the president at that time, and the Queen of Jordan, who was one of the first world leaders to kind of hop on Twitter and understand its value. The more and more I got into it, the more and more I was convinced there was definitely going to be an assassination of President Obama and the Queen of Jordan to destabilize the West World War III. All hell breaks loose and I did what any sane person would do I Googled the FBI's phone number and I called them to tell them about it. I told them everything was going on the code that I believed I had broken. They asked if I'd be willing to meet with them. I did on several occasions meet with them, a few times in a blacked out suburban, in a big business parking lot, and also at their FBI headquarters where I live here in the city of San Antonio.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting story. Was you in full-blown psychosis at that time? Ultimately, how did they handle it from that point?
Speaker 2:I was in full-blown psychosis at that time and after several meetings with the FBI, they tried to tell me as much. In fact, the last meeting that I had with them the FBI agents who I was meeting with their offices there in that San Antonio headquarters they said, eric, are you diagnosed with any mental health conditions? They're being very delicate and respectful about it and I was like, well, yeah, why Are you on medication for it? And I was like, yeah, why? But now I started to get mad because I saw where this was going. They were like I could see they weren't believing the things that I was saying and they were trying to tell me essentially, you are a crazy person, you need meds. But they were trying to do it as delicately as possible. All that really made me do was have to prove that much harder. All of the stuff that I said was real. So I want to be very clear in all of this. Like I was full blown psychosis already, I was not walking around with even one toe. In reality, I was full blown psychotic at this point. I remember leaving that FBI offices for the last time and understanding I needed to prove all of that was real and I had stuff going through my head of like well, maybe the FBI knows about all of this, maybe they're in cahoots with all of it and they're just trying to tell me that I'm crazy, and maybe they're really involved. Maybe they're the ones who are the reason that there's going to be World War III and the assassinations. So I started with the paranoia hitting hard and the psychosis hitting hard, realizing that maybe I was on my own with this, possibly having to just one man against the world to stop World War III and assassination plots. So I remember at that same time my mom and dad. They contacted my then most recent psychiatrist who had fired me for being too difficult to the patient to treat. And I want to say I understand both sides of that and I think this is important for your audience to hear. I was very difficult to treat. The meds were not helping.
Speaker 2:Up to that point, the paranoia and the psychosis were making it where I was very rude to everyone I was interacting with, even if they were trying to help me. So in session with my mom and dad, with the psychiatrist there, he'd seen me rude to my mom and dad. He'd hear me being rude to him. His staff didn't like the way that I was talking with the secretary. I was very rude to her and she didn't like that. So, yeah, I get why he stopped seeing me as a patient. Didn't like it.
Speaker 2:I do also want to say playing devil's advocate here for a minute or just talking other side of things Psychiatrists, much like people like, let's say, working in a jail or a prison, should expect certain things.
Speaker 2:And if you're going to work with people who don't have it all together, particularly folks with serious mental illness, you should expect individuals who are going to be rude and not understanding or caring about what's going on around them. So I don't want to give the psychiatrist the pass that he just fired me for being difficult to treat, because that kind of comes with the territory, but I do understand him ultimately deciding that he didn't want to treat me anymore. But, to his credit, my parents contacted him while all of this was going on, because my parents knew I told them about these assassination plots. They knew how out of it I was. So they called that psychiatrist and they were like begging and pleading with him. They said look, we know our son is not your patient anymore, but you are the most recent professional to have ever interacted with him. What can we do to get our son help?
Speaker 1:That was really good for him to have that discussion with them on the situation that you were in. What did he advise them?
Speaker 2:This is what he told my mom and dad. He told my mom and dad that my best bet to get treatment given the fact that he didn't believe I would meet that very high bar of involuntary care at that time because it's not illegal to be crazy right he also understood I could not be on my own. He told my parents this I mean this is earth-shattering cosmic stuff that is fuel for all the advocates out there and people who want to make a change. Also, families who have loved ones locked up right now, or if you happen to be locked up in listening. This is what he told my parents. He said your son's best bet is to get arrested for a nonviolent, low-level offense and then, while he's in jail hopefully before he gets released a judge can find out about this and hopefully have him transferred. Before he's released from jail, hopefully he can be transferred to a hospital involuntarily where he can be stabilized and then hopefully, if he can be stabilized in a hospital, he can be released to lower level care. That's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, that definitely makes sense. Once you were in the hospital, how long did it take, with the treatment they gave you, for you to get back to a path, to where you are today?
Speaker 2:So, tony, you are asking the golden questions, man. It's no surprise to me whatsoever that your show is as popular as it is because you were asking all the right questions, man, it just is. So yeah, put concisely, which, if you've been listening to me talk up to this point, is not my brand. I do my best to be concise but, dude, there's just so much to talk about, man. So yeah, it was like this. The first hospital stay, the first of three in total over as many years about two and a half three years. The first day was three months inpatient stabilization, immediately followed by step-down care after I was no longer meeting criteria to remain inpatient. I did a year of court-involved outpatient care assisted outpatient treatment and I was taking my meds as prescribed. I had next goals already lined up that I was working towards and I was taking my meds as I say, to emphasize this exactly as prescribed. They stopped working, so I had to be brought right back again to the state hospital, another three months where I'm stabilized on a different regimen of medications and I am released again into court-involved outpatient care assisted outpatient treatment. After several months of me doing exactly what I'm supposed to do, taking my meds as prescribed going to my hearing, seeing my doctor, my social worker, my treatment team, all of that the meds stop working again after being out of the hospital for just several weeks. So I go back in for the third and final time of my hospitalization and about halfway into that hospitalization I am at that point now being given above maximum recommended dosages of antipsychotics because they're just trying to do anything to bring me back to reality and that was what they tried. So, after ruling out this is such a golden part of the story and like of the journey I want people to know, after more than 10 years of chaos due to a bunch of failed antipsychotics, I remember sitting across from the table from my psychiatrist in that hospital and she says I see her looking at this paper and she's crossing stuff off and it was this long list of antipsychotics that I had been tried over the years that all just failed. There was one thing on that list that did not have a line through it that that doctor had not crossed out. And she passes this paper to me across the table and I'm still full on psychotic, like I'm in the middle of a hospital, and so I'm sitting there and this doctor's like Eric. We've tried everything, almost everything. There is one med we haven't tried and we should try it and I'm like, what is it Like? I'm like I don't even have hope any of this is going to work, because I'm not ill, I don't need help. It's the title of his book, title of his talk.
Speaker 2:That's the life I was living at that point, full on lack of insight. I didn't understand I was ill due to the nature of my illness. The doctor says it's called Clozapine. I said oh no, I've been given that a bunch of times. And she goes no, not Clonazepam, Clozapine, I'm deal. She says okay, if you go on this, you will have to do blood draws every morning. If you stay on it, there's a chance, like if things are going well, we can start lowering the frequency of those blood draws. But for now, if you do this, you will have to do those blood draws.
Speaker 2:That was a huge sticking point, because I thought that by that point I was so full on psychotic that, like I thought that I was, you know, some sort of being that was created truly by, like divine beings, and that my blood had secrets in them that mankind shouldn't have access to all kinds of stuff like divine secrets it was. It was bad and if you ever saw a photo of me at that point, my hair was longer, I had a beard, I was a little thinner and younger. There were people who frequently would meet me in public and be like, oh, you look like Jesus. I started to think that maybe that was the case. It was rough, so I didn't want to give people access to my blood. I also thought by that point, since the Secret Service had gotten involved and everyone else was involved, I felt safe enough that if I did give my blood that either the divine secrets would be protected or it would go to like some top shelf, top security lab where people who could have access to it would do it.
Speaker 2:By the luck of the draw and by the roll of the dice, I happen to be in a weird enough psychotic state to agree to Clozapine at that particular point. So I was put on Clozapine. I started at a very low dose. I want to give a quick shout out to Team Daniel Running for Recovery, dr Rob Leitman and his wife, dr Ann Mandel, and all of the people in this group. They have a stellar reputation for managing Clozapine and here's why I'm saying this is a value. It directly relates to what I'm about to say 10 plus years of failure on psych meds. My parents losing more than a decade of their lives, me losing more than a decade of my life. Lost relationships, lost money, lost time, lost energy, lost everything for more than a decade.
Speaker 1:In your mind and in your parents' mind. You'd lost a decade. Now you've changed your medication. How did that affect you?
Speaker 2:I am put on Clozapine. About two weeks into being put on Clozapine I woke up. I'm in my hospital room, I look around and it's quiet. And I don't mean the type of quiet where I can't hear anything. I mean the type of quiet where I didn't know I had that much noise going on in my mind until the meds started to quiet stuff down. I looked around the room Everyone's getting ready for breakfast, like this guy you know. He's brushing his hair. This guy's putting on some jeans and I'm like it's eerie quiet. I wonder what's going on.
Speaker 2:And because I was still half psychotic I wasn't like a switch of coming back to reality my first thought was oh, I must not have any missions from the FBI or the CIA today, or I'd be hearing about it, which is what I thought. The noise was up to that point. I thought I had been hearing General David Petraeus. I thought I had been hearing Leon Panetta. I thought I'd been hearing the big names in my ears the whole time about this. And then I remember going to breakfast 20 minutes later and I'm looking around. It's a different type of quiet. I hear people you know normal breakfast, cafeteria stuff, cutting things, eating food, drinking stuff, putting down their cup and I'm like, what is this Like? Well, what is this feeling of like quiet in an absence of noise and calm?
Speaker 2:And later that week, into the following week, the first, I would say, major milestone towards recovery and coming back to sanity. I remember walking around the halls of that hospital, walking around outside shooting some hoops because there's a they had basketball outdoors and I'm like Eric, you've never been to Quantico, that's where the FBI trains. You've never been to Langley, that's where the CIA trains. You dropped out of high school your junior year. You don't have the skills necessary to break codes that you think that you've broken. What is this that you've been doing? In essence, I was able to start questioning myself in a way that everyone for 10 plus years was like Eric, you're out of it, like you need treatment, you need meds. And it was such a powerful experience that I now walk away trying to help as many people as possible understand this med that saved my life, that turned things around, the treatment that I got.
Speaker 2:International recommendations are after two failed antipsychotics Not failed because of untoward side effects, but they didn't manage symptoms. International guidelines slash recommendations are Clozapine is what you go to. Good luck finding a majority of treatment providers to hop onto that bandwagon because there is red tape associated with it, like the blood draws at the beginning, which, to be very clear here in the US, requiring that blood work. That is not something a lot of the rest of the developed world does. They just let doctors prescribe and if they want to order lab work at some time, they do. It is because of all of the red tape and the lab work and all of that stuff that a lot of doctors are apprehensive. They're kind of on the fence about wanting to prescribe it.
Speaker 2:And here's this thing that gave my life back in a way I never once thought, never thought possible.
Speaker 2:I went back to school within one year of being discharged. From the time I was an undergrad sophomore, all the way through the end of grad school, where I earned my master's degree, I had a flawless 4.0 GPA. This from a guy who dropped out of high school, jail addict, all of it, mental illness, and I'm not here trying to say close the penis, what's going to do that for everybody? But I think it speaks very loudly that the general consensus internationally is after two failed antipsychotics, this is what people should have, and I want your listeners to ask themselves a question how much of the 10 plus years of chaos could have been avoided if that red tape wasn't there For the people who are currently in jail or have family members in jail, incarcerated prison, currently in rehab, currently in the midst of addiction? I want people to ask themselves how much of that could be avoided if this drug that internationally is so highly regarded could be more accessible, with less barriers accessing here in the US.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Now. You went from this stellar person in high school to a decade of lost time and finding yourself. Ultimately, you did find yourself. Now there's this bridge. You've been on one side of it for 10 years. On the other side of the bridge are people that will accept you. Unfortunately, we live in a world of people that look into your past of what you've done, rather than looking at what you probably can do. How did you work with those people to ultimately get them to accept you and to help get you to where you are today?
Speaker 2:Wow yeah, so it definitely was. It was deliberate, it was intentional. I could have never known how it would unfold like this, but I was tired of running from my past. I was tired of it weighing me down and, quite frankly, I was tired of looking for acceptance from other people. I needed to be able to accept myself and myself me included, the history of serious mental illness and addiction and being jailed and dropping out of high school.
Speaker 2:So I really think that the happiness that I found finding myself on the other side of that bridge, it was just a true understanding that if I wanted to continue working in corporate America which is what I had worked most recently prior to things going really bad, the type of journey that I've been on it's not necessarily openly celebrated there Like, if anything, people want to find a way to get rid of someone with a history of serious mental illness and addiction. Put simply, I didn't want to exist in a world where I was not going to be able to accept myself, and I live in a world now where I accept myself and I can accept others and help them learn to accept themselves and they can make their own informed decisions about do they want to pursue a life where they have to run away from this for whatever reasons, or do they want to pursue a life where they can be their authentic selves and find happiness and meaning perfect.
Speaker 1:Now, where do people find you so they can check you out on your consultation and the other things that you do?
Speaker 2:wwwericwtsmithcom. That's E-R-I-C? W, as in Winston T, as in Taylor Smith, s-m-i-t-hcom. People can learn about some of the work that I've done. They can learn about specifically my consulting work. They can email me directly and I love hearing from people all around the world. All around the world, throughout the US and around the world, I love hearing from folks. Maybe you've just got some questions, some comments. Maybe you're interested in my services, and actually I do see folks internationally. I currently have clients throughout the United States, including Hawaii and Alaska, canada, australia, south Africa, jordan and the Republic of North Macedonia. If you are in any of those places or elsewhere, I am here for you, please. I look forward to hearing from you.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. This has been a great conversation, Great information. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Tony. I appreciate you inviting me to be on. It's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today. We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you their information, so one day they may be a guest on our show. One more thing we ask tell everyone everywhere about why Not Me, the world, the conversations we're having and the inspiration our guests give to everyone everywhere that you are not alone in this world.