Ross, In His Own Words

[music playing]

Ross Szabo: My childhood was great. I loved being the youngest in my family. You know, I got along with my brothers really well. We did camping trips and had birthday parties and scavenger hunts.

It was the summer before my junior year of high school. I would sleep for an hour a night and my mind was just constantly racing. It was like a TV screen. The channels were just flipping, and flipping, and flipping, and flipping. I just reached these euphoric highs where I felt like I was on top of the world, where nothing could stop me, nothing could bring me down. And then I would have this depression, the lowest of the low. So it was just this kind of monstrosity of ever-changing emotions.

I got to the psychiatrist at 16, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But the diagnosis is never the endpoint, it's always the beginning. I was taking the medication and going to therapy, but I wasn't changing anything else outside my life. I started drinking really young, because drinking was a quick, effective thing to shut my mind up. The symptoms did start to get worse, and it started with explosive anger-- breaking my knuckles, punching walls, or breaking my nose. I was thinking about suicide and death 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

But I think the worst times were even further after that. I was abusing alcohol in a way that was dangerous to my life. It came to a head where one night I'd passed out for 22 hours. I said, all right, you're either going to continue doing this and you're going to die, or you're going to have to change something. What I really had to change was that I hated myself. I made sure that I stopped drinking alcohol, I stopped smoking cigarettes, stopped smoking weed.

I replaced the alcohol with talking to my friends and expressing myself, but also by exercising, reading, and doing things I enjoyed. I became the director of outreach at the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign, and I ran the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign for eight years. I joined the Peace Corps in 2010 and then I started a company that develops mental health curriculum for kids.

If I could talk to myself before the diagnosis and before the onslaught of emotions, I think I would want that guy to know that it was OK to go through it, that it took strength to talk about those emotions and not hide them. Because I think the hiding of it is what almost killed me. I'm very lucky-- I'm very lucky to be alive.