[Clock ticking]
Boy: I remember having sad thoughts and asking myself,
"Why are you, like, acting like this?
What's wrong with you?"
♪
If you feel very uncomfortable throughout the day,
then you need, like, an answer of what is going on.
[Thunder]
♪
[Rain falling]
Woman: I couldn't make sense of the emotions.
Why am I acting this way?
And it became a very frustrating thing
whenever I'd look in the mirror and there's nothing wrong
with me on the outside, there's absolutely nothing wrong
to make sense of that pain.
When I'm mad on the inside, I'm mad on the outside.
I feel very unmotivated, disinterested.
My friends had no clue what I was going through at all.
I felt like, well, my mom didn't care
and my dad was so busy and tired and...
I had so many emotions that I had to deal with.
I was like, "Oh, I could never be depressed,
I could never be... Have anxiety problems."
I was always like, "I'll be perfectly fine."
I just didn't want to talk about it.
I just wanted to leave it alone.
It was constant sadness, and anything that I did,
I couldn't find myself to be happy.
I was being reckless with my body and, like, taking
a lot of drugs and stuff and just being careless
and not caring if I wake up.
At that age, how are you ever gonna admit,
"I can't see past tomorrow"?
♪
Woman: I think there's so many things you can say
about mental illness.
It comes out of nowhere, and then it just creeps
into your body, and you've got something
inside you, and you don't know
how to deal with it.
Narrator: Mental illness is one of the most significant
health crises in the world...
as pervasive as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease...
but it often exists in secret and is endured in isolation.
♪
It's the place where sadness leaves off
and depression begins,
where nervousness becomes anxiety,
excitement becomes mania,
and habit becomes addiction...
♪
the place where simply living becomes painful.
Greek philosopher Hippocrates called it
the "inner darkness,"
President Theodore Roosevelt the "black care,"
Poet Sylvia Plath "This dark thing that sleeps in me."
♪
Young woman: It's the overwhelming feeling
of being stuck,
like, stuck in my head, stuck in my feelings,
stuck with this persona,
like, this... person that people saw me as
and that I couldn't escape from.
I can't even imagine myself without it,
you know, when something so toxic becomes
such a part of you.
Narrator: All of us are affected by mental health challenges
in some way,
whether in our own lives
or the life of someone we know.
It is everywhere... In rural communities
and major cities,
in the workplace, schools,
even in our own homes,
often hiding in plain sight.
Young man: You could see someone walking down the hallway,
a kid on your sports team,
the most popular person in school,
the kid that everyone likes, you know,
and you would never know that that person
could be going through something themselves.
It's a silent battle that a lot and a lot of people
go through and that hasn't really
been talked about a whole lot.
Narrator: For some, it is a chronic illness.
For others, it comes and goes.
Some people can't put a name on it.
Those who can use words like "devastating,"
"hopeless," "a living hell"
to describe their pain.
All too often, they are called "nuts," "crazy,"
"out of their minds,"
labels that perpetuate stigma and isolation.
Even professionals debate what to call it...
an illness, a challenge, a disorder...
but that doesn't change the way it feels,
how it affects everyday life and relationships.
I do feel like once people find out you have
a mental illness, they just sort of treat you a certain way.
People often say, "What's wrong with you?"
instead of "What happened to you?"
No, they really don't care, like, how, like,
we feel, how I feel,
and, like, it gets to me a lot.
♪
Narrator: Mental illness is, in fact, a disease,
a complicated and controversial one
that has been a part of the human condition
for thousands of years.
While there are now hundreds of diagnoses based
on all kinds of symptoms, the experience
and the treatments are different for everyone.
♪
Man: I do believe that this is a very personalized illness.
It's hard for people to really compare one person's
experience with another.
That's often what keeps people
from getting help
because they think,
"Oh well, it's not that bad."
Well, compared to who?
Narrator: When you're suffering, it's hard to know what to do
and even harder to find help.
It affects all ages
in families both rich and poor,
healthy and dysfunctional.
It most often appears in childhood
and teenage years.
Trauma can be the trigger, from personal crises
such as divorce and neglect to environmental disasters,
racial injustice, and pandemics.
♪
Over time, the symptoms can progress and lead
to increasingly extreme behaviors
like eating disorders, self-harm,
and thoughts of suicide.
Woman: When feelings become so excessive,
where it really interferes with their everyday ability
to live, that's a... That's a challenge.
It can be at any age,
and it can be very impactful,
but it can be figured out.
You need to connect with someone who can help you,
problem-solve, listen, sort it out,
be able to work through those things.
Narrator: Intervention can help, and with the right treatments,
you can feel better...
Boy: It was just a lot of confusion in my family.
Young man: I don't talk to my parents openly about my...
Narrator: but the first and often most difficult step
is to simply start talking about it.
Girl: talk about them. I never tell anybody.
Boy: At school, they were like,
"Gabe, what is wrong with you?"
Woman: I was basically homeless because... Man: I am a gay man.
Man: On this planet right here,
we all have problems,
but that is the great thing about the human race.
Most people understand their problems,
and they work on it to get better,
but sometimes you might need just a little bit of help,
someone to help get your life back on track,
because you are the one who defines your life.
Narrator: These are the journeys of more than
20 young Americans from all over the country
and all walks of life who have struggled
with thoughts and feelings that have troubled
and at times overwhelmed them.
They share what they have learned about themselves,
their families, and the world they live in.
They speak for many of us.
They speak to all of us.
Woman: It's taken me a very, very long time
to even speak openly about it.
My roommates don't even know half of this stuff
that I'm telling you guys now,
and I'm nervous.
Like, I'm kind of shaking inside,
to even talk about it,
but I feel like if I don't talk about it now
then I'm wasting potential time where I could help somebody,
and that's all I really want to do, is, I just want...
if I can even reach two people from everything I say
or this story, then I did my part in this world.
♪
How would I describe mental illness to somebody
who has never had it?
No experience of it?
Oh, boy.
Oh, my goodness.
♪
I would want to shake their hand first of all.
Congratulations you made it that far, you know?
Nothing's wrong with you.
I don't know if you could explain it
to somebody like that.
Young man: It's person by person.
It changes with every brain.
With every set of eyes,
it's different.
Samantha: I would ask you how you were feeling.
Then I would ask you if you believe that.
Man: We don't understand how common it is,
we don't understand
how important it is
to talk about it
and be open about it,
so this is the problem that we all
deal with in secret,
and the result is that we don't deal with it well.
♪
Film narrator: The thoughts of youth
are long, long thoughts.
What dreams, what feelings shape the pattern
that we call the innocence of childhood?
♪
Insel: These are the chronic issues of early life.
About 75% of mental illness has onset before age 25.
About 50% before age 14.
So we need to respond to this with the urgency it deserves.
Boy: I started having sad thoughts
around the end of third grade.
Just like random things that just happened
throughout my day, things like
if somebody smiled at me and I didn't smile back.
I just started feeling different
from all my other friends and, like, my crowd.
Young woman: I remember as, like, a little kid I walked off
into a field to, like, pick flowers
and kind of heard, like,
my friends calling my name,
and I would turn around,
and there was really no one there.
[Voices whispering]
It was very confusing for me and kind of frightening.
♪
Woman: When it comes to mental illness,
there is nature versus nurture.
The nature side is you were born with it,
it's just in your genes,
whereas nurture says
it was all about your environment
and what you were around and what
your parents did or didn't do
or what was in your community or not,
and what we've come to understand was that
it's not an "either-or" at all.
What happens to someone impacts how their genes
are expressed,
so what genes were there in the first place
is going to play into it.
Dunning: Mental illness is really life.
♪
It encompasses all the things.
So as much as children were given
the beautiful and smart,
they also were given the challenge.
♪
Woman: I live on a Chippewa Tribe reservation,
very isolated.
We have a beautiful culture,
and we have a really good support system,
but at the same time, there's a lot of drug abuse,
a lot of alcohol abuse,
a lot of poverty.
And dealing with being profiled as an Indian,
that's very confusing for a person to grow up in.
Billie: I remember in elementary school
my friends would tease me and say that I was
a girl in a boy's body.
It was strange teasing,
like oddly specific teasing,
but also oddly accurate teasing.
Boy: My racial background, being Native American,
Black, and Mexican, when I went to this one school,
I didn't really fit in with any particular groups.
It was just because, like,
I look black, but I don't.
One of my first, like, memories of that school
was it was the first time we took the bus,
and the three of us had stepped off together,
and this girl looked at my kid brother up and down,
and she went, "What are you?"
The first thing I said was like, "He's Black
"like you and me.
Get away."
Being profiled from the get-go,
especially being, like, 9, 10,
it's pretty traumatizing, you know?
It's unfortunate, and it's scary.
♪
Woman: When he's not happy, when he's sad,
when he's struggling, he withdraws.
He sits in his room, and he refuses
to come out sometimes.
Dunning: Early intervention and early detection
for our children is about building the relationship
with them, knowing your child,
paying attention to the little nuances
that may change,
and then meet them where they are,
not where you want them to be.
Love on them, learn them,
learn about them,
take time to be with them.
That is the one thing that I have seen make
a bigger difference.
Woman: He feels like he's being a burden when he's not happy,
so we have to convince him, you know, "Let's do something,
"let's... you're not a burden.
You know, you were... You were chosen to be here."
Vinson: Their first constructs for how the world works
all happen in that home environment,
and the parents really create that environment,
um, or leave it to other forces
to... to create if they're absent.
Morgan: My mom was a single mother
raising two children at the age of 22,
and I was left wondering why my father left me
as a little girl,
wondering why we weren't good enough
for him to stay.
Woman: I didn't know how to talk to my parents
about emotions and feelings.
That wasn't normal in our household,
just coming from, um, my mother,
who was from a different culture.
In Thai culture, they don't really express
emotions a lot.
Lydia: My childhood was amazing.
I remember literally always, like,
talking to my friends like, "I'm so lucky.
I have the best family,"
like, "It's me," you know,
but my dad's an addict, and when I was
in sixth grade, he relapsed.
We all parted as a family, and my dad went away to rehab.
Xavier: My childhood was very irregular.
Every action I did and my siblings did
would just be something that we would have to think about
really before we did it, uh, so that we might not upset
my father because my father was a very different man.
Woman: I think the relationship between Dad and Xavier
started to go south
when he witnessed an argument
between Dad and I that he shouldn't have,
and it was difficult,
and he still will have flashbacks
and talk about it.
I was definitely a daddy's girl!
I loved him very, very much.
He had glioblastoma, which is a type of brain cancer,
so I didn't really have time to enjoy most things
that little kids do.
My father has been incarcerated
off and on my entire life.
He's an addict, but growing up, when he was clean,
he was an amazing father,
but when he wasn't, it was ugly.
Samantha: I was living with my father and my stepfamily
in northern Maine,
and, um...
♪
he was accused and acquitted of...
♪
Repeatedly sexually assaulting people.
We were moved out of the house and into foster care,
and then eventually, I moved with my mom.
Girl: I was in, like, third grade,
everything was great,
and that's when everything went,
like, to, like, crap.
My parents separated.
Then a few months later, they got a divorce,
and it broke my heart.
I just felt like it was my fault.
Morgan: My stepdad came into the picture,
and they were always, always fighting abusively,
so I couldn't open up about what I needed.
Everything was my fault
even if it wasn't.
Dunning: The child feels a responsibility
for something that they had no hand in,
and that is tragic.
You're just innocently in life doing what you do,
being a child.
It's not your fault.
Parents are usually doing the best they can,
listening and validating and showing and giving respect
and coming from that place of love,
but children, they're observers.
They're taking it all in.
They're learning from us.
[Child giggling]
Woman: I was with my mom.
We had pizza, and we had those little Peeps
that they have around Easter,
and as a joke I put a Peep in some sauce,
and I showed it to her, and she just flipped.
She threw the plate at me,
asked me why I would do something like that.
At that point, you know,
I kind of could tell that
maybe there was something different,
but I didn't understand.
Vinson: Why are so many kids having these issues?
Looking at things like genetics and early adversity,
whether that was parental discord or someone
in the family with substance use disorders
or someone being incarcerated, we see, you know,
these things sort of set the stage for mental illness.
[Children chattering]
Man: What if you raised a child who grew up sunny, loved,
and loving, only to watch that child slowly transform
into a mysterious stranger, shorn of affect,
dull of gaze, unresponsive to communication,
and perhaps worse?
Ron Powers.
♪
Maclayn: I remember a lot of nights where I would sit
in my bed and cry.
I always knew I was different,
but I never really knew if I...
anything was wrong with me.
Dunning: With kids, you know, they will struggle
for very long periods of time simply because they don't know
what's going on.
They may want to isolate.
They may not want to tell anyone.
They don't have the words. They don't know how.
Yeah, I did feel like I was keeping a secret
from my parents, and that was another factor
that... why I was getting upset.
You know, he would talk about his school
and what happened at school,
and it would be really minor things
that most kids could kind of just brush off,
but for him, they were really a big deal.
We tried to talk to the teachers.
"Oh, my gosh! He's great in school!
He's always smiling!"
Then we figured out, OK, he's a good...
he's a good masker.
Dunning: Children just don't want anyone to know
what's going on,
and when they start to move into adolescence,
they are already pushing back against lots of things,
and it's hard to figure out what is really
normal mood swings with teens versus
what is... is it a true mental health challenge.
Then there can be lots more things
that parents and kids are going like this about.
Man: I thought it was a good idea.
Girl: Absolutely ruin everything.
Susan, maybe your mother knows best.
Why? Why does it just naturally have to be
that parents know best?
Why can't you see things my way?
♪
Vinson: Adolescents are in the process
of discovering their identity.
As they're trying to make that transition from being
primarily identified with the family
they're coming from to their place
in the world that they're going out into.
A-T-T-A-C-K! Say it together!
Man: ♪ I've been there, despair ♪
♪ Living on a prayer ♪
♪ Been there when close friends didn't care ♪
♪ I've been there, trying to pull it out of thin air ♪
♪ I've been there, yes, I've been there ♪
♪ Maybe you feel like nobody understands ♪
Man: When I was a teenager, I was very rebellious.
I didn't think that I had any issues,
even when I was exhibiting
textbook definition of what
mental illness was.
Man: ♪ Like they don't know how they're gonna make it ♪
♪ Through another day ♪
Dunning: So it really is a fine line
between troubled and normal.
Some might ask, "Well, what is normal?"
♪
Man: We need to remember what it's like to be a teenager.
I think that a lot of adults don't remember
when they were 15 what were they going through
and what's normal and what's natural,
and then what's the part that needs
extra intervention?
Makalynn: I grew up in an area that was wealthy,
but I was from, like, the other side of the tracks,
so I didn't have, you know,
growing up, we weren't...
we didn't have money at all,
so I was constantly trying to fit in.
I lied a lot growing up just to make things seem
greater than they were.
That's when I really started to act out.
I was constantly in the principal's office
at school for skipping or for disrespecting a teacher
or principal, fighting a lot.
I think at that time in high school when everyone's
trying to figure it all out, you know, like,
I really just wanted to understand myself.
We were never taught how to work through anything
in school,
especially if you grew up in a household that
you didn't feel comfortable showing emotions.
The more you bury it, the more it's just
building up in you.
I was one of the popular kids.
I dated the star football player,
I was homecoming queen one year.
I maintained this image that I had to be perfect
at school, and I did to a certain extent,
and I just hid everything else behind closed doors.
Yaadieah: I did cheer, which was my favorite,
I played lacrosse, I did track, and I did gymnastics.
I think my teenage years were happy for the most part
but definitely a lot of insecurity just
as far as the way I looked.
Billie: I lived surrounded by a bunch of farmland,
and the people weren't very accepting,
so I never really got a chance to explore my identity
until I had moved here.
I started to wear more feminine clothes.
I started to wear makeup every day.
It was good at first, but the day I went
to school with pink hair,
my car ended up getting vandalized,
and someone wrote "Queer" on the back windshield.
♪
Alexis: At school, I tried to be
that happy-go-lucky, outgoing person,
but I dealt with a lot on the inside,
and not a lot of people knew.
I remember being too much, too loud, trying to be cool,
but you're not really cool.
I started to get bullied by people I considered
my best friends.
You know, these were the people who I thought
were gonna be by my side, you know,
living the best life ever together, you know,
and they ended up hurting me the most.
It's a really big mind game with girls I feel like.
I was an emotional teen.
I wanted to know who I was,
and I was trying to figure that out.
So where do I go,
and who do I ask?
I didn't know how to talk to my parents.
My parents didn't know how to talk to me.
I was going through so much that it just spiraled
until, you know, things just... exploded, I feel like.
♪
Yanerry: In eighth grade, I got a boyfriend,
and we dated on and off.
He showed an explicit photo of me to classmates
and his friends.
There was a lot of people talking about it.
Kids would look at me and laugh, mock me...
and so when I became a freshman,
I didn't want to be known as that girl.
I decided to change my name and go by the name Rose.
That way, people wouldn't think that it was me.
They were talking about this girl Yanerry.
Collin: You think this is how you are defined
and that's how you're gonna be looked at
for the rest of your high school career,
but it's not.
What everyone thinks about you in high school honestly
doesn't matter the second you graduate,
but as a teenager, as far as stress levels go,
I feel like it's... it's a lot different than maybe
what I could imagine it used to be.
I feel like the world that my generation is inheriting
isn't a pleasant one.
[Sirens]
Man: Destruction...
Different man: Forecasters...
Would you... who would... Shut up, man.
♪
Man: ♪ I don't really know any way to convey ♪
♪ The range of emotions I go through each day ♪
♪ Got my ideas... ♪
Lucas: I think it's a world full of toxicity
and people who don't understand others
and don't take others' well-being
and mental health and feelings into account.
Man: ♪ Stress I encounter ♪
♪ It takes its effect ♪
♪ Don't like the odds... ♪
Billie: It's important for older generations to know
that we live in a very different world than they grew up in
and what principles and values may have worked
for them at that time won't work for us now.
♪
[People screaming]
It's like running old software on a new hard drive.
It's not gonna work.
Reporter: Just how much water...
Young man: It's a world with a lot of conversations
that need to be had with adults on how they need to understand
more about the younger generations
and what we're going through.
George Stephanopoulos: 49ers quarterback knelt
instead of standing during the National Anthem...
Reporter: In the United States, new confirmed cases...
Dunning: The pandemic has really increased a lot
of people's anxiety and depression.
♪
Look at our kids.
Look at athletic events that have been taken,
graduations,
speech and drama, choir, all of those things.
They're really suffering because nothing's normal.
Vinson: The reality is
our system was ill-equipped to meet
the mental health treatment needs
of our population before 2020,
and it is not going to be better equipped
to meet the increased needs after 2020.
♪
Collin: There's a lot of pressures that come along
with being a teenager,
especially in this day and age with the social pressures
and social media.
Everyone is scared to be open
regardless of how they're feeling.
That isn't who 17-year-olds in 2019 are.
They aren't open about their feelings,
and if they are, they're looked down upon,
which is terrible.
♪
A troubling new report today spells out
what all that time on social media
is doing to our teenagers.
It also outlines what parents can do to make sure
their kids stay safe.
[Typing on cell phone]
[Cell phone chimes]
[Typing continues]
[Whoosh]
[Typing continues]
[Whoosh]
Young man: Social media itself is good and bad
for teenagers nowadays.
I feel as if though it's a good outlet to find someone
to talk to and make friends, but I also feel like
it puts a lot of pressure on kids nowadays.
It quickly becomes another form of isolation,
you know, if I'm constantly
focusing on my phone
and these different media outlets
and not engaging in the real world.
Sometimes, it's just out of control
where all they're doing is looking at social media,
and they're kind of distracted.
They're not connecting.
I don't think that they see that as a problem.
Alexis: I hate when people say, like, "Oh, the youth
"are so stuck in, you know, their technology,
and they don't even care about the world around them!"
They were born in that world.
They can't help that when they were a toddler
an iPad got thrown at them.
That's what they think what playtime is.
I actually joke a lot that Twitter kind of raised me
because I've had a Twitter since I was 13.
I'm 23, so that's 10 years of my life.
If you wanted to have a social life,
you joined social media.
Lydia: If you don't have Snapchat or Instagram,
if you don't reach the specific standard,
it can definitely feel really isolating.
Samantha: Like, on Snapchat,
like, all your friends
would be hanging out,
and then you see that you're not there
and you didn't get the invite,
and then you're like, "Well, what did I do wrong?"
♪
Um...
♪
It sucks.
On, like, Instagram they have to look a certain way
for people to think they're attractive...
[Camera shutter clicks]
to feel positive about themselves.
Collin: And when you're trying to make yourself fit
to what everyone else wants to see you as,
it's impossible.
[Cell phone chiming]
Lydia: Everybody is so fake on social media.
Like, me, like, I'm so fake.
I mean, I hate it.
I hate it, but I'm also a part of it.
I... I add into that.
Alexis: It's literally competition.
"If I'm an object, I'm gonna be the best object,"
you know, "and I'm a better object than you are,
and you're gonna know it."
That's how we lift ourselves up personally.
Collin: If you're so invested into that,
then those little, tiny things that everyone else notices,
those little, tiny blemishes that really don't matter at all
can tear you down.
These are 10 things that you can do
to be more attractive.
Fix your body language.
Ava: I think every girl is OK with being average.
[Camera shutter clicks]
It's just that other people
are not OK with it.
Ashley and I are on our way to get filler.
Like, look at that. Like, excuse me.
It kind of squints.
Anna: I think celebrities are posting all these pictures,
and, like, girls try to be someone who they're not,
and it really takes, like, a toll on people.
Makalynn: I think social media is extremely damaging
for everybody
but especially for somebody who is suffering
from mental illness.
It makes the things that people say on social media
hit a lot harder.
You take stuff, and you just overthink it,
and you make a mountain out of a molehill,
but it's a very real mountain.
Yanerry: I had this close friend who was making
fake Instagram pages about me and my ex,
saying like, "Oh," like, "you know, what a whore,"
"Who hasn't she kissed?"
I also found out that things she would do to me
she claimed that I did it to her,
and I got very paranoid.
I felt like I couldn't trust anyone.
I noticed that I was struggling in seventh grade,
so I'd say 13.
That's when I started to be called names
on social media.
It would never end.
When I told them, like, it hurts me,
they wouldn't... they don't care,
but it's not true, and, like, it gets to me.
Angel: Why?
Why would you post certain things like that?
Billie: Some people may believe it's just them
being honest.
Lucas: Watch what you say and who you say it to
because you never know what somebody's
going through and what can affect them
and how drastically it can.
♪
Ava: I felt like I was not enough,
and, like, I would think what it would be like if I wasn't there.
At first, I thought it was just me trying to get attention,
but then I realized, like, it really wasn't.
Like, I really didn't want to be there anymore.
Davidson: If you can't say something to their face,
you shouldn't text it, you shouldn't post it,
you shouldn't snap about it,
and that should be your first rule.
Vinson: A lot of the narrative around it is that it is bad
and causing people to be superficial,
and everybody's comparing each other
to their highlight reels,
and there is a component of that
for sure, but it's not all, all bad.
Dunning: In some instances, it's how kids connect
and how they do make friends,
and that friend may be in Japan,
and they might be in Miami.
There's also a lot of communities online,
people you can meet through social media that are there
just to help and make sure that people know there's
somebody there that cares about them.
♪
Billie: Being sort of dissociated
from the rest of the world
gives us that sense of comfort and sense of home.
When I was struggling, I know I used to, like, go
on, like, YouTube and watch all these videos
about, like, people who were depressed talking
about their depression,
talking about their suicidal ideations.
This is not something that is easy for me to talk about.
Lydia: And I just felt like I wasn't alone.
Woman: refused to talk about it with anybody.
Vinson: In my opinion, things like Instagram and TikTok
have really democratized who gets to have
a voice in society.
It allows young people who normally wouldn't be able
to drive a narrative to be part of telling a story.
Today, I'm going to show you the top 5 outfits
you can start wearing to get your crush to like you.
News anchor: When it comes to social media,
seemingly real people are influencing young people
from their self-esteem to what they buy.
So-called Instagram...
Angel: I feel like it has a very major impact
on the way that we act.
News anchor: The social media influencer market is
a multibillion-dollar industry.
Welcome to my first YouTube video.
Naked Heat Palette.
Angel: It influences us in our social life,
the way that we talk, the way that we act.
Reporter: Another viral TikTok trend going...
Reporter two: Seen an increase in social media threats
made towards schools across the country.
I will do whatever the top comment says,
get hit by a car, whatever.
I'll do it just for you guys if you want to see that.
Billie: It doesn't matter what people think of you
just as long as you are being yourself
and who you are and doing what makes you happy,
and I wish I could say that,
but I can't.
I care a lot what people think of me.
Social media, at this point, it sort of seems like
it's more important than your real identity.
If I wasn't on social media, I wouldn't talk
to anyone really,
so I don't really feel like I have a choice, honestly.
Davidson: I think kids really see that screen time
is a problem.
So they know that it's an addiction,
but they just don't know what to do about that,
so they just feed into it.
[Typing on cell phone]
Angel: When you're a teenager...
you're at a certain stage in your life
where you're kind of like a beginner
in whatever you're experiencing.
It's kind of like a first try at everything in life...
♪
and when something abrupt like someone you know dying
from suicide happens,
it hits like a wrecking ball.
Everyone is different.
Very different.
[Slide projector clicking]
♪
It's very difficult to understand
what to do from there.
♪
Morgan: Nobody is exempt from trauma.
We all go through it
just on various levels.
Everyone has their own problems,
everyone has their own tragedies.
Amira: A traumatic experience, it's always there.
It's just about whether it chooses
to present itself or not.
It just chills out and waits for its moment
to respond.
[Clock ticking]
[Crash]
[Crying]
[Sirens]
[Gunfire]
[Police radio chatter]
Woman: Hands up! Don't shoot!
[Alarm clock ringing]
Kennedy: There's no way for us to tell
what type of event
is gonna have what type of effect
on what type of a person.
Everybody's got their own story.
Leah: In time, I could tell my mother was a drug addict.
Seeing someone that you love
turn into a completely different person,
it's traumatizing.
I felt like she ruined who I could have been,
what I could have done,
the person that I could have become.
Living with my dad was probably a more stable situation,
but there was issues there, too,
especially when he got remarried.
You know, I was trying to express how I felt
by being miserable to live with.
I was acting out.
♪
Lydia: My dad relapsed.
He went away to rehab, and I felt like
I was losing him,
he didn't care about me anymore.
Man: Lydia knew me for most of her life as a sober father,
and then she didn't.
♪
I think she was 12.
My father committed suicide.
I had, uh, a really bad relapse
that continued as a cycle of relapses,
and she watched me struggle.
I was so depressed and angry.
So angry.
So I was like, "It's all your fault, Mom!"
She was like, "Lydia, you're so much like your dad."
And I was like, "Well, if my dad can do this,
like, so can I."
Amethyst: I found out my dad died the day after Christmas.
The year after he died,
I started kind of treating
other people pretty badly
because I didn't know
how to handle grief properly.
Anna: Ever since I was little, my dad was an alcoholic.
One time when I was little,
me and my sister were
hiding under our beds
because we were scared
of everything going on downstairs.
One of our doors in our houses was just cracked
down the whole thing because, like, my dad punching it.
It's just kind of hard to talk about.
It's just really hard.
Dunning: Family strife, it plays an incredible role.
When a child is watching a parent
do crazy stuff that
they don't understand,
they're like, "Well, what should we do?
"Should we, like, retreat, should we go to our rooms,
"should we not say anything?
Because what if it makes it worse?"
Then what?
Man: ♪ It's about time ♪
Vinson: Actually, children who are in situations
where they are exposed to domestic violence
have outcomes that are similar
to if those children themselves
were the ones that were
receiving the abuse.
So it's not always the best thing for families
to stay together or for people not to get divorced.
♪
Xavier: Cigarette smoke is a very triggering thing
from my past since I associate that with getting beat
by wooden sticks.
Yeah, that's happened.
He would hit us for seemingly no reason.
Honestly, sometimes I can't even really remember
why he did it.
There was one time we had, like, these, Oreo things,
and nobody was going to question my father
to get another one because he would've just said no.
He would hit us if he found out.
Turns out, I guess he finds a wrapper,
which he probably ate.
I guess one of us had to, like, own up to doing it,
and I think it was either my brother
or my sister who owned up to doing it
even though they really didn't,
and, uh, even after that, he still hit us all 3
for, I guess, wasting his time.
I don't know.
I'm not him.
♪
Yanerry: My ex-boyfriend in high school,
I expected him to understand that no is no,
but it... he just didn't.
♪
The meaning of love kind of just went away for me,
but then I thought this is a guy that's supposed to love me.
Maybe I shouldn't feel this way.
I was very back and forth with myself
until I was so uncomfortable that I couldn't take it anymore.
I started having sleep paralysis.
I would see him standing over me and pinning me down,
and I would hear screaming.
I became very suicidal.
♪
It can absolutely lead to a very dark place.
I may have an adolescent or a child that comes to me
who's witnessed some horrific thing,
something that no one could ever imagine,
suffered at the hand of a parent
or an auntie or an uncle or a coach or a trusted person,
even your friend.
And then someone says to them, "That's a long time ago.
You just need to get over that."
That's not how it works.
Time...
can erase a little bit of the... the pain,
but they are forever changed.
♪
Makalynn: My dad's full-blown addiction,
it was just normal, commonplace for me growing up,
but looking back now, his effect on my life
was very traumatic.
♪
So my resilience definitely surprises me.
Knowing what it means to... To hit one of these highs
or to hit one of these lows and being able to bounce back,
um, standing tall, that's amazing to me.
Insel: The people who you think have had some
of the worst experiences can use those to cope and to grow
and develop and succeed,
and others really struggle.
Vinson: You might have a hard time identifying
that something is wrong,
but there is a point at which the symptoms become
so significant that it makes it hard
to get anything done.
Dunning: The challenges of life cross
every single one of us,
but in that same breath, we can learn how to deal
with those challenges, just as you would learn
how to deal with anything.
So let's look through all of the symptoms,
and now we will go forward together
and figure out how to tame it
because it can be figured out.
[Audience laughing]
I didn't know much about mental illness.
Like, I knew it existed,
but I was very ignorant about it.
Like, people would say stuff to me like,
"Oh, he's depressed" and I'd be like,
"Why? is his Wi-Fi not working?"
[Laughter]
The thing is I had to figure out
what was going on with me, OK,
because this is not an illness where
you just pop a couple of pills and you're OK
in a week, you know?
This thing stays with you, all right?
So I do a lot of reading up...
Yaadieah: I came from around D.C.,
where I had people of different ethnicities,
different languages.
I didn't really feel like I stood out,
but when I first got to college,
I felt like a sore thumb.
Everyone was white.
It was just something
I wasn't really comfortable with.
It slowly started getting worse and worse
over the weeks.
I would just get very anxious,
I wouldn't go to class,
I stopped going out with my roommate.
I just stopped going out of my room sort of at all.
I don't really think there's a good way you can
explain that to someone.
♪
Leah: I didn't know that you could put a name
to how I was feeling
when I didn't want to go to school.
Lucas: Anything that was not part of my set plan in my head
of how my morning was gonna go,
I wouldn't do it.
Samantha: I thought it was just, "Oh, I'm a little nervous.
Oh, I'm a little sad,"
and then you feel such intense, deep emotions,
and... you know, you realize it's more than that.
We all have a little anxiety here and there.
Some might ask "What is normal?"
When anxiety becomes bigger than you are,
we have a problem.
♪
Maclayn: If I didn't participate in class when other kids
were raising their hands, I'd get anxious
about how, like, it would, like, make me look.
Anna: I don't sleep over at people's houses.
I like just being near my mom.
I just like always know where she has to be,
always know where she is.
Like, I track her on my phone.
I think it was around 13 or 14,
you know, when everything started happening.
It just came out of nowhere.
I was scared a lot.
I would literally stay awake for 4 days at a time.
That's day and night, no joke.
Dunning: It may manifest itself in physical symptoms,
where you might have headache, you might have tummy ache,
you might have body ache.
Thinking about going to school was, like,
I would get physically ill.
My hands would shake, or my whole body would shake,
and I couldn't stop the shaking.
Samantha: I got hives in social studies class
in ninth grade,
and I went to the nurse, and she's like,
"You're just having a panic attack."
And I was like, "What?"
I have had, um, issues
with anxiety and panic attacks
since elementary school.
Leah: It was a combination of having to move with my dad,
being bullied by a teacher,
and then being left alone a lot,
all kind of culminated to the point
where I was just... I was a nervous wreck.
When you get to that point where, you know, you're
in a panic attack and you're like,
"How do I make this stop?"
[School bell ringing]
Dunning: It can be repetitive thoughts.
In your brain, it gets caught on a loop,
and it just goes over and over and over
until it wears people out.
Anna: If you're, like, about to take a test, you would think
the end of the world was coming.
"I'm gonna fail this,
"I'm never gonna get into college or anything,
I'm never gonna have a good life."
Lucas: I'm like, "I didn't do the homework.
I can't take that test."
I couldn't just do my best. I had to do perfect.
Dunning: "If I choose this, what if I don't choose that?
"Well, if I choose this, well, what if that's
"not the right decision?
"Wonder what the teacher's thinking of me.
"I wonder if she's gonna call on me.
"Ooh. my mom's home.
"I didn't put the toothpaste back just right.
Is that gonna be OK?"
That's anxiety.
♪
Davidson: What is it that you're nervous about?
Sometimes, they'll say, "I'm just generally anxious."
When you're generally anxious,
what does that feel like?
It felt like this force that was just pushing on me
constantly whenever something was wrong.
You become so afraid of the outside world
that you just stay in where you are safe.
Anxiety, uh, has a number of symptoms.
One of the ones that can be most disabling
is avoidance.
So if I know a situation makes me feel anxious,
I just don't go into situations like that,
and that can have really negative implications
for school or for interacting with other people.
♪
Lucas: I was a good student in middle school.
I did my work, stayed out of trouble.
I was a good kid.
As, Bs, never had an issue,
but in high school if I was 30 seconds late,
a minute late, if something was out of place when I woke up,
like a strand of hair was this way
and I wanted it that way,
I'd just lock myself in my room and say, "I can't go."
And it was always a constant battle
between me and my parents.
And my parents were always there.
"Hey. Do you want to go do this?"
"Say, your friend texted me and asked me if you want to
go over to their house."
And I'd be like, "I don't want to do anything today.
I'm just gonna sit inside" on my computer
with what I could control,
and when my dad first started bringing up
the whole anxiety thing, I would always
just shut it down right away.
I'd be like, "I don't have anxiety."
Got to the point where I ended up in truancy court
my sophomore year with, I think,
about, like, 60-something days absent.
It was bad.
Davidson: Sometimes, a kid has a real change in their mood
and their personality.
Not being themselves and not being the kid
who we're used to seeing could be something as simple
as just having a really bad day,
or it could be something much more intense.
They need to have some sort of caring adult
that they can connect to because that's the first big step
to getting help.
♪
Lucas: I always thought anxiety was just
a small, little thing that you could feel
when you're nervous about something.
I didn't realize that it can be part
of a way bigger picture.
Fernandes: Every single day is a battle.
On some days I love my life, and on others,
I just can't get out of bed.
I shut down emotionally,
worry about things that are not likely to happen,
and I'm tortured and paralyzed by my own thoughts.
It's like you know how to swim,
yet you're drowning, but you don't die.
Audience member: Ooh!
[Typing on keyboard]
Woman: When I was little, someone asked me
what I wanted to be when I grew up,
and I said, "Small."
If you develop an eating disorder
when you are not thin to begin with,
you are a success story.
So when I evaporated,
of course, everyone congratulated me
on getting healthy.
Girls at school who never spoke to me before
stopped me in the hallway to ask how I did it.
I say, "I am sick."
They say, "No, you're an inspiration."
♪
How could I not fall in love with my illness?
♪
Billie: I remember our bathroom had a scale in it,
and one day, I was curious and decided to step
on the scale and see the number,
and when I saw the number,
I really didn't like it,
and I started weighing myself
every day, trying to see
the number go down.
I'd go upwards of 4 or 5 days without eating.
It's this feeling of guilt whenever anything would go
into my body that's meant to fuel me,
meant to heal me or help me.
[Indistinct chatter]
Vinson: Eating disorders really run a spectrum.
So you have some eating disorders where kids
are not eating enough,
you have some where they're eating too much,
but there's a way that
they may be using food,
to help them feel better
because of other things
that are going on.
Yaadieah: Growing up I was always fixated on my body image,
even from a really young age.
At college, I was sort of eating for comfort,
and then I would get upset at how much I ate,
feel ashamed, and I would have to find a way
to get rid of it, so purging
was just sort of the next step.
Purging just gets a little bit difficult to hide,
so I would just exercise to burn off
that same amount of calories.
♪
I would wake up in the middle of the night
when my roommate was sleeping, and I would start working out
because she was starting to get worried about how much
I was exercising.
♪
Billie: A few months ago, I was in my English class,
and I hadn't eaten anything all morning,
and I was sitting at my desk, and I started to feel like
I was going to pass out,
but I was too embarrassed to pass out in front
of my whole class,
so I groggily got up out of my desk
and somehow walked to the bathroom
and then passed out in the very back stall.
♪
I wanted to just sort of shrink up and freeze
and be smaller and not be noticed by people.
Yaadieah: I lost about 30 pounds in, like, a month and a half,
and my friend just sort of like pulled me
to the side and had, like, an intervention.
She was telling me how much, like, weight I lost
and how worried she was about me,
and, like, the whole time I was like, "What is
this girl talking about?"
Because I was just so drained.
I had no energy to really think properly.
My thoughts were scattered,
I was always crying or upset or emotional
at something.
I could feel my body, sort of, like, deteriorating
and wasting away.
Vinson: It doesn't necessarily come with them being thin
or what society may think kids are trying to get to
with having eating disorders.
For some, it is about control that they're
trying to exert in some way.
Insel: When my daughter was a teenager,
she had anorexia, and I couldn't see it.
So why couldn't I see that my daughter
was dying of anorexia?
♪
Partly because it doesn't come packaged that way.
Anorexia is all about perfectionism.
And she was superb in every dimension.
And as a parent, I was completely missing the fact
that what she was striving so hard to do
was gonna kill her unless she got help for it.
I have treated a lot of people with anorexia nervosa.
I knew what that looked like,
and I should have known better,
but with my own daughter, I missed it
until she was the one who stood up and said,
"I need help."
Yaadieah: I spend a lot of time in the grocery store
when I go.
It's overwhelming.
I have to check the labels for everything.
I also feel like people are watching me,
everyone's, you know, watching my grocery cart.
It's just a very overwhelming experience.
Well, you don't have to do drugs and alcohol,
but you do have to eat,
and you have to eat every day,
so food is not really something that I can escape.
Woman: Often I have been gripped by the terrifying fist
of a sadness so complete
it shut out the sun entirely like an eclipse.
I had landed on the other side of myself,
a stranger to me.
Jewel.
♪
Isabel: I needed to decide what I needed to do,
so I left.
3 kids and 4 suitcases.
♪
Xavier: When my parents got divorced,
it was an upsetting thing for me.
I kind of became distant from my mother.
I started developing the personality
that people are just dumb.
I don't see that I have to care for other people.
I don't like physical touch much anymore.
I don't trust a lot of people.
And I get intrusive thoughts that make me upset.
It just kind of downward spirals into an even worse mood.
And then I just kind of shut down.
Isabel: That defeated feeling is so vastly different
than the kid that I know.
This is the kid who didn't want to bring home a report card
'cause he had a 99 as his lowest grade.
And that's when I know that's depression speaking.
♪
Vinson: People's experiences of depression
can manifest with feeling sad.
People often feel tired, their energy goes down.
And sometimes it is interpreted as them
being oppositional or disrespectful,
and I see it happen a lot in children and adolescents.
♪
Kennedy: Whether it's exactly like everyone else,
probably not,
you can't ascribe the same characteristics
for every person
because everyone's got variations on the same.
Just waking up
and hating everything,
yourself, your life, everything.
The feeling is being pulled into, like, quicksand.
There's always something pulling you down
and holding you in that dark spot that you're in.
♪
Samantha: It physically pains me.
You feel like you're being stabbed right in the chest.
You feel like a void.
It hurts.
I want to crawl up in a ball and just sob.
Billie: It feels like you want to cry, you have to cry,
but then when you try to cry and release it,
there's nothing there.
Kevin: You just feel like black and white,
all or nothing, thinking about the world
and how everything is doomed
and everything's a waste of time.
You're never really happy,
and you're always just upset and don't feel like you.
Ava: You don't want to go anywhere besides your bed.
And your mind is, like, just dark.
I was feeling so, like, lost in, like, my thoughts.
I had no idea what was going on.
Dunning: You can't console them.
They can't concentrate, they can't think,
so... so they hide.
Alexis: I just didn't want to leave my room
because that was where I was alone,
where, you know, I could let all my emotions out
if I wanted to.
I was trying to figure things out,
but you're still in it.
♪
It's honestly the worst feeling you could ever feel.
It's not a... it's... you feel like
you're never gonna come out of that.
When you... when your self-worth
and the way you look at yourself is non-existent,
um, that's... that's miserable.
[Clicking]
Angry, that's what it was.
I was angry a lot as a kid.
The depression coupled with anger,
just bouncing back and forth.
I just became so angry,
and I didn't let myself feel sad.
It was all anger.
I'd create drama in my friend group
because I needed something to distract myself with.
♪
Vinson: People do not realize that irritability and anger
are sometimes the emotions that depressed people
really lead with more so than being sad.
♪
Samantha: There was a boy who I had social studies with,
and we went to a party together,
nothing happened,
and then he told the whole school every...
Something happened.
And I couldn't take it.
[Chuckles]
I actually went to his house with a baseball bat.
But he wasn't home.
But yeah.
Dunning: Depression in junior high and high school,
that anger really starts to come out.
It's hard to figure out
what is really the normal mood swings with teens
versus what is the actual...
Is it a true mental health challenge?
I lived in this one-bedroom apartment
with my mother and my sister,
and I literally locked myself
in a very kind of large closet just to be away.
I'd sit there and I would just cry in a closet.
And then I'd go to school.
You know, you put on a face, a facade.
You're happy, you're bubbly.
And then you eat lunch alone in the bathroom.
Kennedy: For self-preservation, you don't want people
to know the ugly truth behind door number 3,
so you're doing your best to distract them
in all kinds of manipulative ways.
Morgan: I was about 14 or 15 years old, I think,
is when my mental health issues really started to hit.
I definitely maintained that everything is fine,
like, "I'm happy" image at school,
but I just kept all these painful feelings from everybody.
Because all you're thinking about is yourself.
You think you have all your friends,
but you really feel that you can't even talk
to your friends about any of this.
So that feeling of desperation,
that feeling of loneliness,
that no one understands, started there.
I couldn't see a future for myself.
I just couldn't imagine it.
Maclayn: I was struggling,
and I didn't really want to tell anybody,
but then it just got too overwhelming for me,
and I just would, like, break down every night.
Even my mom, for example, was just like,
"Just move on."
I went over to her house, and we watched a movie,
and it was fine, but I was, like, really depressed,
and she's like, "So did that cheer you up?
Are you feeling better?" And I'm like, "No.
I'm still [beep] sad."
Sometimes you grieve for the person you used to be,
and that just makes you so much more depressed.
It's a painful, downward spiral every time.
♪
Dunning: How hard it is for you to get out of bed
and just be awake and alive?
I'm asking you to do one step further.
You are worthy of love.
You have value.
So seek it out, find it.
♪
Loving who you are starts with you.
♪
Yanerry: Have a conversation with yourself about it.
That it could help you feel more comfortable
to speak to other people.
Align with yourself first,
and then align with someone...
your parent or a teacher,
a trusted person.
And it could be a friend.
The people that are in your life truly want to know.
Collin: Finding your person
that can help you through times like that
is extremely important.
And once you start talking, then you'll realize
that that's your person
and that they can help you through these struggles
and that you aren't alone.
Just hold on, you know,
give yourself time and talk about it.
♪
Woman: I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful
as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races
to swallow me into my own madness again.
♪
Nicole Lyons.
♪
Amethyst: Signs that something was wrong
started a little bit before my dad died,
but they didn't really kick into overdrive
until about a year later.
[Rock music playing on headphones]
I tended to be really hyper and energetic.
♪ Ahh ♪
♪
Amethyst: It often ends up making me lose
any sense of impulse control,
then ends up in full yelling matches with my stepmom.
And then everything would just kind of crash...
[Cheers and applause]
and I would get into a more depressive state.
♪
Makalynn: There's no threshold for me.
There's no limit.
When I haven't been to sleep in 3 days
and, you know, nobody else
is wanting to hang out with me anymore
because I'm just being too much,
then that's... that's where it becomes a problem.
[Thunder]
I engage in just reckless sexual behaviors.
I'll feel so restless that one time I drove
in the middle of the night to Pittsburgh
just to turn around
just because I needed to go do that.
♪
Dunning: Mania.
We're going really fast,
pressured speech, thinking grandiose thoughts.
[Fireworks popping]
We have this grandiosity that we can do anything.
So who would not want to feel like that?
Vinson: When they are manic, people don't have good insight.
So the people around them can see that something is different,
but the person themselves might have a hard time
identifying that something is wrong.
♪
Kevin: When you're manic,
you don't really feel like you have a problem.
There was a lot of tangential thinking,
a lot of rapid speaking,
a lot of jumping from topic to topic.
But at the time, I didn't have the knowledge base
to understand that.
Vinson: Their mind is moving too fast
for them to actually complete anything.
♪
And usually after a manic episode,
there is going to be a fall into depression.
And It's almost enjoyable for a little bit.
But then there are also always feelings of defeat,
where I cannot force myself to get out of bed
and do what I need to do.
And I can't deal with the world.
Constructive criticism automatically turns
into a deep-seated angry insult towards me.
Looking back when I was a kid,
I would get so upset and so frustrated,
and crying and screaming wouldn't help.
So I resorted to aggression in a lot of ways.
♪
Amethyst: I can overreact if something sets me off the wrong way.
Sometimes I would slam some of my things on the floor.
I would often slam doors shut
because I needed some sort of physical release.
It was almost like I was watching everything I did
in third person.
I couldn't think at all before I said or did something.
♪
Things got to be a bit too much,
so my stepmom tried the last thing
that she thought possible.
She decided to send me to a Christian boarding school,
thinking that maybe if I gained any faith in God,
that it would help fix my behavior.
♪
The boarding school was very tolerant of me at first,
but I had the worst episode that I'd had in a while,
and I was thrashing around
and throwing things pretty violently.
♪
So they decided that I had to leave the school.
Since my stepmom had moved to New York,
I ended up living with my biological mom and brother.
When she first got here, um, things were all right
for about, you know, the first 3 or 4 weeks,
and then the wheels kind of came off.
[Laughs]
A lot of screaming, especially at bedtime,
to the degree that I was afraid that the neighbors
were gonna get pissed off or concerned.
Amethyst: People who go through this kind of thing,
they don't want to,
and they would never wish it upon anybody.
It's just something that we certainly can't help.
Melanie: This is a brain chemical issue.
This is an outburst caused by her brain.
It's not her doing it just to be an obnoxious teenager.
It's beyond her ability to control.
Amethyst: With my manic episodes, it would be nighttime,
and I would be sent to go to bed,
and I would be doing all sorts of artsy things.
♪
I even started cutting up some of my old clothes and bedsheets.
For a little while, she had this notion of being
like a fashion designer.
She would cut her clothing, she would cut the bedding.
Not cool. Not cool at all.
Kevin: You have these highs where you feel like,
I'm in tune with all my creative powers,
and I would sit down and I would work on a painting,
and I'd kind of be transported into this time and space
where time and space didn't really exist.
I'd just focus on the art.
Painting, drawing, comics,
anything that has to do with expressing yourself,
I'm all for.
I love making music, videos.
♪ How I come up, but now that I got... ♪
But there's also that depression that sets in,
that crash that happens after the mania.
And this all happens over and over.
♪
Makalynn: I was just hyperactive all the time as a kid.
I used the phrase, "There's a war going on in my brain."
[Crying]
That was the only way that I could make sense
of what was happening.
Aah!
Makalynn: I would act in a way that I knew
was inappropriate or unnecessary,
but I couldn't control those feelings.
And then towards the end of middle school,
I found drugs and alcohol,
and I was able to, like, silence the... the war in my brain.
I was able mute that.
[Dripping]
Justin: We all deal with things in different ways.
And we are all introduced to different things.
So maybe it was an initial choice.
Let's be honest.
Maybe the first usage.
Maybe it wasn't your choice.
But that continual usage
becomes a coping method.
♪
Dunning: So maybe you start drinking,
or maybe you start smoking weed.
That's how it begins.
♪
Self-medicating can look like prescription drugs,
exercise, even addiction to porn,
anything that is out of balance
of what your life would look like without it,
because you're trying so hard to figure out
how to fix what you may not even know you're trying to fix.
Billie: It originally started with just,
like, taking a sip or two just, like, walking by,
and then it turned into, like, half a bottle
of whiskey from our pantry.
Samantha: I stayed inside,
but I could go out if I had smoked weed.
Yanerry: My friends were smoking, like, marijuana,
and when they told me that it just brings you
a place to pure happiness,
I was completely open with trying it.
Davidson: The two big things that a lot of our kids
are struggling with are marijuana
and electronic e-cigarettes and things like that.
And whether that's to mask or hide
a mental health issue
or that is the mental health issue,
you're not always sure.
Leah: My best friend, we were both,
like, depressed and anxious.
We tried smoking weed.
We tried doing Xanax.
And our classmate had cocaine,
and we're like, "Let's try it!"
The fact that I told myself I never wanted to be my mother,
and then here I was, on my way to being my mother.
But when you're at that stage, you don't care.
Justin: It was my freshman year of high school.
I lost my best friend,
and then after he passed away,
um, I started to experiment with drugs and alcohol.
It's the easiest thing to cope and deal with
your, uh, pain and problems,
but it's just putting a Band-Aid
on a gunshot wound, basically.
I just remember it as being, like, my first sign
of mental health symptoms looking back.
I started doing drugs in seventh grade.
I was self-medicating from the overwhelming feeling
of being stuck.
It's like all your feelings are, like, stirred up in this pot,
and you're just, like, sitting in it,
and you can't get out.
And when I was high, I didn't... I didn't feel that.
I didn't care.
People who are experiencing distress
are going to look for ways to feel relief.
What people choose is going to depend on
what's available to them, what's been modeled to them,
and what from their own experience works for them.
And sometimes things work short-term,
uh, but not long-term.
And those are the things that we'll often refer to
as maladaptive coping mechanisms.
Makalynn: In middle school, I started drinking
and using drugs.
That was the... the major relief that I found,
um, from my own head.
It felt like it took away all my emotion
for a second, and, like, when I would think
about a sad thought, two seconds later,
be like, "Wait, what was I thinking about?"
Like, you know?
As if someone took me
and put me in a different person's body
who was just happy.
Vinson: Often there's this sort of narrative,
"Stop that," "Don't do that," "It's bad," "Just say no."
Well, if the child still has the symptom
and you're not giving them something else
to help them with that symptom,
they're gonna go back to what they believe works for them.
Dunning: Why would you not want to take care of something
that is making your life a living hell?
It's like a state of, like, "Oh, my gosh, I don't...
"I don't have to think about that.
"I don't have to do that.
I can... I can be at peace in my brain."
What a gift!
[Rain falling]
Until it becomes a challenge.
♪
Man: Young people all across the country
have been swept into addiction.
Woman: 50% of teens have misused a drug.
Woman 2: especially young people are gaining access
in their parents' cabinet...
Woman 3: Many young heroin users start
With opiate painkillers like Vicodin.
Woman 4: Teens and young adults dying from an opioid...
Woman 5: The U.S. is in an ongoing crisis.
Lydia: When I was in, like, eighth grade,
I had started taking pills every day.
And it was...
it was really bad.
Any pill I saw, it's like a pull,
a physical thing where you just, like, go for it,
You don't even think about,
"Oh, I want to take these pills right now."
It's just you take it, you put it in your hand,
you pop them in your mouth, you know?
Kennedy: People with addiction are chasing
what is an obsession.
You are not in control of your own thinking.
And it's a terrifying concept
because how do you get out of it?
You can't think your way out of it
using the same thinking that got yourself into it.
♪
Davidson: I've had substance abuse issues
when I was an early teenager,
and I'm pretty open about that.
I smoked pot for the first time when I was 10.
And when I was 13,
I was shooting up heroin almost daily.
Part of it was social pressures,
part of it was also not just feeling OK
in my own skin and wanting to feel OK.
♪
Justin: But there comes a point where things stop working.
I tried cocaine, ecstasy.
I didn't leave my apartment for, like, two weeks.
I got fired from a really good job.
And I constantly blamed other people,
the employers, but the whole time I was in denial
about my addiction
and had this onset that was brewing.
Makalynn: Drugs and alcohol definitely helped me
mask the symptoms.
But after a good 3 months of silence,
aggression once again reared its ugly head.
It evolved to taking whatever pill I could find
in the medicine cabinet, stealing my mom's liquor,
trying to reach that state of oblivion 24/7.
♪
Julie: I was in my teenage years.
My husband was 10 years older than me.
He had his own mental illness
and issues going on.
One day I found him.
He had hung himself in our backyard.
My world was yanked from underneath me.
It was very hard.
And even many years later...
♪
You know, the healing still continues.
After my husband committed suicide,
that's when I met James
and started another phase of my life.
I got pregnant again,
but, you know, relationship challenges.
♪
We split up.
And things got bad again.
I wanted to feel better,
so I tried a bunch of different street drugs...
ketamine, cocaine, crack.
♪
It was just like this overwhelming feeling
of... [inhales] everything was OK.
That's when it grabbed a hold of me.
As a young mother, I lost my home,
I lost my job, I lost myself.
And my kids suffered a lot.
"This isn't my mom."
You know, "What happened to my mom?"
"Where's my mom?"
You know?
"I want my mom."
♪
Lydia: I always felt like I needed to hide something.
Whenever somebody would be like, "Lydia, can I talk to you?"
My heart would start racing. I'd be like,
"[Beep]. They found out."
Like, "They found this, that, that."
And, like, I had so much that I was hiding from everybody.
I think everyone thinks, uh, "Not my kid,"
you know, "This won't happen to my kid,"
Lydia: The first time they ever found out,
they found empty pill bottles in my bag.
I think they just hoped
that I was just testing things out.
They grounded me, and they took my phone away.
It didn't matter how many consequences I got,
nothing was enough to stop me from taking what I wanted.
♪
My life was gonna end one way,
and that was being addicted to drugs,
so why not start now?
[Thunder]
Davidson: I wish somebody was there to help me
with the struggles that I was having.
I feel like I had a point of view that kids needed
to understand that you can get through it
and get to the other side of it and be OK.
There's people that can help you
to get through whatever it is
that's making you feel the way you're feeling right now.
And we'll take it one step at a time,
and it's not gonna be easy,
and it's gonna be messy at times,
and that's OK,
because once you're on the other side of it,
you're gonna realize how much stronger you are as a person.
Man: ♪ I've been in the back of a squad car ♪
♪ Handcuffs digging in my wrists not far from ♪
♪ Feeling suicidal ♪
♪ My life up and down like a seesaw ♪ [Siren]
♪ Late at night I asked God for ♪
♪ A response, but it's like a dropped call ♪
♪ Or one placed on hold ♪
♪ My heart pumps cold, blood boils... ♪
Kevin: I went to art school as an undergrad.
And I had, like, a semester left,
and I just wanted to not have to focus on school
and all the pressure I was under.
And I remember I stayed up for several days,
wandering around the city, kind of going on long walks.
♪
Man: We talked every Saturday.
And on this particular phone call he said,
"Dad, Dad, food doesn't taste good."
I said, "What?" "I don't want to talk about it.
I don't want to talk about it."
Kevin: And I believe I took some homeless people out
to get breakfast one morning.
Pete: And then I called back and he said,
"Dad, Dad, I think I took some homeless people
to breakfast this morning at McDonald's."
And I thought, "OK?"
And he said, "I don't want to talk about it."
And then he called back again, and he said,
"Dad, I'm having trouble knowing reality,
what's real and not, am I dreaming or not."
♪
Yanerry: It started out as me hearing my friends say my name,
and then I noticed the more sad that I was getting
over the years, the worse it kind of got.
It went from just saying my name to a woman
just screaming at the top of her lungs.
Then I was alone in my bedroom,
and I just saw, like, a shadow standing in the corner.
I was wide awake, but I actually saw it.
Very terrifying.
♪
Vinson: Psychosis is when someone has a break with reality.
It's hard for you to tell what is generated by your brain
versus what is actually in real life.
So you may have people who are experiencing things
like hearing voices or seeing things,
and it's so distressing to them and alarming to them that,
uh, they may be reacting to those voices
or to what they're seeing.
Dunning: Typically we see it later in an adolescent's life,
maybe 17, 18, 19, 20,
responding to external stimuli
that... that doesn't exist for you,
but it does for them.
♪
Justin: I was 22 years old,
and I experimented with crystal meth.
I'd walk the alleys in Miami Beach.
I started to see things that weren't there.
I became very paranoid, delusional about people
following me, people out to kill me.
My family got involved.
♪
And they decided I should go to rehab.
And I stopped doing drugs.
I felt better.
But the symptoms came back again.
This time, I thought my family was in trouble
in New Jersey,
and I told them they had to be careful
because the mafia was out to get them,
the terrorists...
[Gunshots]
Al-Qaeda.
When there's no drugs or alcohol present
and those symptoms come back again,
that's how you can tell if somebody
has a serious mental health issue.
♪
Yanerry: They are 3 different shadows for me.
There's one shadow guy.
He's just like a tall man in all black,
and he kind of just stands in the corner and stares at me.
♪
And there's one of them on his hands and knees
and kind of just crawls around on the ceiling
or on the walls.
And then there's one shadow
where I can see in my peripheral view,
but every time I go to look at him, he just runs away.
♪
Then I started to see shadows in school.
They run by me
or a shadow passes through the walls and stuff.
I would bring it up to my friends,
"Do you guys see that over there?"
And they're like, "What? What are you talking about?"
And that's when I was like, "Oh, you know what? Never mind."
That was my breaking point.
So, I kept it a secret most of my life.
♪
Pete: For 6 months, Kevin seemed fine.
And then all of a sudden, he got in the car one day
and he was driving, and Kevin didn't know
whether he was awake or dreaming.
So to test it, he took his hands off the wheel,
and he closed his eyes.
I did sort of a Jesus-take-the-wheel thing
where I let go of the steering wheel,
and I ended up crashing into a parked car.
I kind of was just doing it.
It... it made sense at the time.
Justin: I mean, imagine if you couldn't tell the difference
between what was really happening in your life
and what was happening in your mind.
You'd feel that everything you knew was a lie
and that you'd been lied to your whole life,
and that you found some new information that
out of nowhere, you could trust for some reason.
And then you're trying to explain this to the people
that you have in your life.
And they distance themselves farther and farther from you
because of your behaviors.
♪
Vinson: I think one of the biggest misunderstandings
about psychotic symptoms is that people think
that if you have them, you must look crazy all the time.
There are people who may still have symptoms
but are able to function,
who find coping ways to deal with those things
and interact with other people.
♪
Yanerry: I was very scared of it at first,
but after a while,
it became a part of my everyday life.
Because I see it, it's my truth.
It's very much real to me.
♪
We are getting a look at the damage caused
by a man yesterday who climbed on the roof of a business
and went berserk.
This was the scene on...
Lucas: If I ever saw somebody acting out, acting angry...
Reporter: He does suffer from mental illness.
I would be like, "Oh, that person's crazy.
"That person's losing their mind.
They don't know what they're doing."
I wasn't any, you know, different than any, um,
I hate to say this, but normal person
that thinks that negative way about mental illness.
Back in high school, I had a friend
who had some psychiatric issues,
and I made fun of her,
and I drew in her yearbook a picture of her
wearing a straitjacket,
and I made light of her situation.
I tell people all the time, kids are cruel sometimes,
and I was cruel with them.
Reporter: take a toll on individuals, families,
communities, and society as a whole.
Reporter 2: who is battling his personal demons
is also battling his neighbors,
and they say enough is enough.
Kennedy: There's something particular
about a mental illness that frightens people.
If we walk by a person on the street
who is in active psychosis, we turn the other way.
And if we walked by someone who fell over
and is bleeding, we'd call 911.
This is the most clear-cut case of a double standard
in the way that we treat people.
Billie: It is naturally human nature to be afraid
of what we don't understand
because that's just what we are.
We take comfort in the things we know.
The stigma comes from a legitimate fear
that if other people know that this illness is present,
they will treat you differently, ostracize you.
They will not include you.
Kevin: I think stigma is kind of like covering your ears
or your eyes and not wanting to realize that
mental illness could possibly affect you
or your family members or your loved ones.
That if you got a mental illness,
you're gonna be crazy for the rest of your life.
It's like the self-fulfilling prophecy as well.
If someone is constantly telling you
you're this, you're that,
then you kind of start to believe it.
Alexis: You're like, "Yeah,
I wouldn't want to be around me either."
Like, I'm an emotional wreck, you know?
You don't see that kind of shame with most other medical illnesses.
I didn't really want to talk about my feelings,
because I didn't want people to look at me
in a different light.
You want to, like, hide
and just not be by anybody and just be alone.
If I were to hide this or to be ashamed
or to not talk to people about this,
it would be festering inside of me
and it would eat at my soul
if I weren't able to share it with other people.
Billie: You leave people to make these assumptions
about those that suffer with mental illness
rather than letting us actually speak our story and say,
"Hey, this is how these symptoms actually affect a human."
Everyone is different.
Everyone is unique in their own ways.
No one ever understands what someone went through
or how their feelings are.
And once you really get that thought in your head,
it's hard to sit there and be so cruel.
♪
Yanerry: I know you're scared,
and I know the fear of being judged is a fear
that I wouldn't want my worst enemy to feel.
But you should learn to really love yourself
and accept it, because you can spend your whole life
worrying about it.
When you look back, you just wish
you could have accepted it
and lived your life as close to your normal as possible.
Woman: There was a very fine pain,
like the swift and fleeting burn
of a drop of hot candle wax.
The chaos in my head
spun itself into a silk of silence.
Caroline Kettlewell.
♪
Billie: I felt so empty and so unmotivated
that I didn't want to live,
but I didn't want to die either,
so I just didn't care.
But the act of cutting
reminded me that I was here today.
♪
I had a knife laying around,
and I was playing with it,
and I, um, decided to see how sharp it is on myself.
And I kept doing it.
♪
What sane person would think that hurting themselves
would stop the pain?
♪
Vinson: So self-harm is something that is often misunderstood.
Normally it falls into one of two categories.
Um, and getting somebody's attention
is not one of those two.
Uh, the first is that they feel numb
and they just want to feel something.
And the second is someone
who feels overwhelming negative emotions,
like anger or sadness or anxiety.
It allows them to feel something else other than that.
I learned it in a book that I read.
Um, once I started, I couldn't stop.
Yanerry: I watched a movie that had self-harm,
and I kind of, uh, wanted to try it.
I was like, "Oh, well, this is a way to, like,
get everything out."
It doesn't make you feel better.
It's just...
relief as you could say.
Just doing it...
just gets a weight off your shoulders and stuff.
Makalynn: It was a little bit before eighth grade
I started cutting myself.
You know when you shake up a pop bottle
and you open the lid up a little bit
and that fizz comes out, that's kind of what,
you know, hurting myself did.
Leah: I'd just cut myself or burn myself or bite myself
so that, um, I wouldn't feel all this pain
that I felt inside of myself.
Alexis: I was just scratching and scratching and scratching
until I would ultimately bleed.
I hated who I was, and I hated how I felt
other people viewed me,
so that was the damage I did to myself.
I actually kept a hammer in my room
and, um, I would hit myself in the legs with a hammer,
you know, because a bruise was a lot easier to explain
to my mom or to a teacher at school
than a cut on the inside of my wrist.
One of the things that I thought would take away
from the anxiety, like going up to something
and just punching it as hard as I could.
It didn't really help, it just hurt the [beep].
Vinson: Self-harm isn't done with the intention
of someone ending their life.
It indicates that there are very limited,
adaptive coping mechanisms
for dealing with negative emotions
or for dealing with hard times.
I don't want to die, but, like,
I want to feel some type of pain or whatever.
I don't really remember.
But then I did it right in my bed, like, crying,
thinking about what these people said to me
on social media and how they don't care.
♪
Leah: It's addicting to get that instant relief
from the pain.
But at the same time, you are harming yourself.
And God forbid something really bad could happen to you
just trying to get those few seconds of no pain.
It had, um, gotten worse,
and that I, um, was, like, doing it
on my arms and legs and stomach now.
Leah: I was cutting on my leg
'cause I was ashamed of what I was doing.
And you get gauze, and you wrap your arm up,
and you wrap your leg up,
and you wear sweaters in the summertime.
And nobody asks.
And it's weird.
Leah: I don't remember my dad asking me about the cutting.
I don't think that he wanted to talk about it.
Samantha: Why is nobody questioning it?
Dunning: People cut because they want to feel better.
So I will ask you, "What was that feeling
that you were trying to get to?"
Then we'll have a great discussion,
and we can be more fruitful in getting
to what's really going on.
At the end of the day, it's really not worth it
because you're left with scars
and your pain is still there.
Morgan: I think self-harming is more than
just cutting yourself.
Activities we do daily that are just more socially
acceptable like drinking, smoking, not sleeping enough,
not eating enough,
these are all self-destructive behaviors
but they're just more socially acceptable.
Amira: It's hard whenever you have to balance things
like work and school and other people even.
Anything can trigger, you know,
your... whatever you've got going on, really.
And if you're already upset,
if you're already in an unstable head space,
it can trigger so much more, you know?
Kennedy: I think we all can see whether these illnesses
are causing us to be in situations that, you know,
are not where we want to be.
Julie: I didn't know what was going on,
I just wanted it to stop.
I didn't see any reason to even try to be sane.
If I take one pill,
if I take one sip of a drink, it's over.
And all the sudden, you're in that cycle of denial,
where you really are not in touch with reality.
You're not seeing things clearly.
I was shutting away my friends and the people who loved me.
I felt like I had a disease, you know,
and I couldn't help myself.
It's gonna eventually come to the time where it's over
and I just stop caring.
Kennedy: You have an illness that lies to you,
that tells you you're the one that's gotten yourself
in this situation.
As if you would wake up in any given day
and decide to jeopardize your career,
jeopardize your relationship with your family.
No human being would willingly put themselves in a place
where they could be castigated, criticized,
demeaned, and marginalized.
You are hijacked by your brain illness,
and then it's really not hard to see where this goes.
Yaadieah: I knew my day was gonna be bad.
I was having a hard time just talking to anyone.
I wasn't talking to my friends.
And I also felt like I was a burden,
everyone would honestly be better off
if I just wasn't here.
My mother was never home.
I'd wonder if I just killed myself and she just came home to me dead.
Billie: I was already under suicide watch by my parents.
I skipped my meds for a couple days
so I could build some up
and then took all of the meds that I had,
and...
I laid in bed and waited for the meds to kick in.
♪
Mary: Maclayn went to school.
Then we got a call from the counselor
that he had really talked about,
"I don't have a purpose here, I'm done,"
and just kept saying the words, "I'm done, I'm done."
I had thoughts of like wanting to end my life
and that, like, I wasn't meant to be on this Earth.
Mary: He never said the word "suicide."
Joe: But when he starts asking those questions,
I mean... At 9.
You just... you just want to crawl in a corner
and cry yourself.
It was terrible. We don't know what to do.
♪
Angel: You may not know this,
but you mean a lot to the people around you.
Your family, your friends, your coworkers, your teammates,
all those people care about you in some sort of way.
You need to understand that your life matters.
Often, if you can just prevent somebody
from making an attempt,
you can also not only save their lives for that moment,
but they may not make another one.
Davidson: I've had kids that leave my office,
and I'll say to them,
"Hey, um, can you make me a promise?
"I need you to promise to me
"that you're not gonna hurt yourself tonight,
and that you're gonna come check in with me tomorrow."
And that might be the one thing that they hang on to
that makes them get through the night.
♪
As much as it's just words, it means a lot to them.
That's the first step.
♪
Isabel: I was looking to get him help,
but before that could ever happen,
he had voiced suicidal ideation.
What happened?
♪
Your kid doesn't want to live.
Second grade.
♪
At second grade, you should be full of life,
you should be riding your bike
or busting your butt on a skateboard,
not wanting to end your life.
You have a lot of life.
Alexis: It was just too much to bear.
I have two younger brothers.
I wrote them good-bye letters,
just apologizing for being so emotional,
being such a burden, "I'm sorry for leaving."
And then...
[Sighs]
when I... I put my letters in their room,
I couldn't go through with it.
I couldn't do it,
because I was so worried they would find me first.
That's literally the only reason I'm here.
Justin: You matter.
You matter.
You may not realize it right now,
but your struggles are for a reason.
There are so many ways out,
and suicide is not one of them.
Well, it was actually on social media.
These boys didn't care how I felt,
they just wanted me to feel guilty,
and they kept pushing, pushing till, like,
I, like, couldn't deal with it anymore.
I actually was, like, really scared,
but I actually tried to hurt myself.
♪
Yanerry: I overdosed on Ibuprofen.
My stepfather had, I guess, searched online
that people can't overdose on ibuprofen,
so no one came to help me.
I was by myself,
and I remember lying on the floor.
And I was just like begging God to take me.
♪
And then I saw, like, a shadow standing
in the corner, but I wasn't scared.
I actually felt comfort from the shadow.
Even if it wasn't real,
it kind of made me feel like someone was there for me.
♪
Morgan: I just took basically the whole bottle
of my migraine medication.
I didn't make a huge deal out of it,
and then I just went to sleep,
and the next thing I know, I woke up
in the hospital, my eyes like opening up really slow,
seeing my mom's face,
"What did you do? What did you do?"
And then I just went back to sleep.
And I was honestly pissed.
I just want kids to know that it's just...
You're never alone
and that there's always gonna be someone who cares about you
and that you're gonna get through this.
Morgan: After that, two years was rock bottom.
I was in a very abusive relationship.
My parents wouldn't give me any space.
I was running out of the house, I was crying,
my mom, she was chasing me.
♪
And I just threw myself in the middle of the road.
[Crash]
My mom saw the whole thing, and I was hit by a car.
Windshield was shattered.
Then my body was like whomp, whomp, whomp.
And I think that was like a breaking point, snap,
my biggest snapping point.
Lydia: So there was barely any joy in my life,
and when it was, it was like momentary,
it was very short-lived joy.
And then it ended, and I was like, "Well, [beep],
"I am just like... I'm just gonna pop these pills,
and if I die, I die."
Erick: Watching your kid struggle like this
and really not knowing if they're gonna make it,
uh, it's the most terrifying thing I've ever known.
♪
Pete: Then all of a sudden, I became that parent.
You sit there and watch this person slipping away from you
and you feel so helpless.
You don't get interested in mental health
because... it's... it's not like the ski club, you know?
You only get involved because you get dragged into it.
This is not a calling I ever wanted,
and, uh, then once you get into it,
I can't believe you don't feel a responsibility
to do something about it.
Lives are being lost.
♪
[Man vocalizing]
Dunning: If you're still in the storm and you don't know
where to go next, hold your hand up,
reach out.
Reach out.
There will be brighter days.
I know, you're like, "You don't know me.
You have no idea of my journey, you have no idea."
You're right, I don't. You're right, I don't.
But I do know about lots of other kids' journeys.
They are very different than yours, I'm sure of that.
But what I know is that you're worth it.
You have value.
You are worthy of love.
You are worthy of being alive.
You're fighting this fight
that you truly have no idea
whether you're going to win or not.
You're beyond courageous, you're beyond courageous,
and you're stronger than you know,
so keep the fight, stay strong in your resolve,
because you're worth it.
♪
Justin: There's a whole life out there just waiting for you.
Announcer: Next time...
Billie: I think I don't actually give my therapist enough credit.
Makalynn: I know now that medication is necessary.
Man: You think you can love it out of them,
that will fix it.
No, it doesn't.
Insel: People do overcome having a mental illness.
I am bipolar. This is OK.
Maclayn: I'm just me.
Announcer: Next time on
"Hiding in Plain Sight."
[Kevin "Earleybird" Earley's "Convey" playing]
♪
Earley: ♪ I don't really know any way to convey ♪
♪ The range of emotions I go through each day ♪
♪ Got my ideas, but I've been known to stray ♪
♪ Consequences for my actions I pay ♪
♪ Try to be accountable for all that I say ♪
♪ Handle my business and make time to play ♪
♪ Options and choices I carefully weigh ♪
♪ Mold my ambition like handfuls of clay ♪
♪ Stress I encounter, it takes its effect ♪
♪ Don't like the odds, but I still place my bets ♪
♪ Wandering lost without a safety net ♪
♪ Play Russian roulette with rusty bayonets ♪
♪ I've been in the hold... ♪
Announcer: Learn more about
the "Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness" film
and explore mental health resources
at pbs.org/plainsight.
Also join the conversation online
with #PlainSightPBS.
To order "Hiding in Plain Sight:
Youth Mental Illness,"
on DVD or Blu Ray, visit shopPBS
or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
This program is also available
with PBS Passport
and on Amazon Prime Video.
Earley: ♪ Get misconstrued when I take your advice ♪
♪ My rage is an agent of change and I'd like ♪
♪ To not speak, but I can't always says something nice ♪
♪ When I offer even the slightest critique ♪
♪ I'm attacked and crucified ♪
♪ By thoughts that are weak ♪
♪ Tried for so long to maintain my mystique ♪
♪ But the people I meet treat me like I speak Greek ♪
♪ I don't know how often I can reiterate ♪
♪ The same ideas that I've been trying to communicate ♪
♪ Unsuccessfully I wrestle with the human race ♪
♪ In a way that seems doomed, I don't want to lose face ♪
Chorus: ♪ Can't convey ♪
♪ Words today ♪
♪ Can't convey ♪
♪ Words today ♪
♪
♪ Can't convey ♪
♪ Words today ♪
♪ Can't convey ♪
♪ Words today ♪