Jennifer Marshall: Mental Illness and the Power of Story.
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2018
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jennifer Marshall's (https://www.jennifermarshall.me/) life was going exactly as planned. Then, she turned 26 and everything changed.
Marshall found herself unable to control her thoughts, spinning and struggling with reality. She was hospitalized and sent home to take some time and get some sleep. But, it would take yet a second hospitalization shortly after to reveal the fact that this was not about being overtired. It was about mental illness and how it would redefine Marshall's world in a profound way, from that moment forward.
She was soon after diagnosed with bipolar. It was a lot for her and her family to take in, but instead of burying the conversation, she embraced it and even began to share her experiences publicly, first anonymously, then under her own name at Jennifermarshall.me (http://jennifermarshall.me/), and then widely on the front page of The Washington Post, Oprah Magazine, national TV and from the TEDx stage.
Realizing the power of sharing her story, she co-founded and is now Executive Director of This Is My Brave, Inc., (http://thisismybrave.org/) a global storytelling initiative for people to share their stories of overcoming mental illness through creative expression at live events around the world, and online.
We explore this powerful journey, along with how she and her husband explored the decision to become parents, build a family and work to remove the stigma from mental illness in this week's episode.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | My guest today, Jennifer Marshall, who's kind of going about her life incredibly accomplished, |
| 0:08.6 | fiercely motivated, type of person who would show up and immediately become super important |
| 0:14.4 | in any organization project endeavor that she decided to commit herself to rose up the ranks |
| 0:20.0 | in business until one day in her late 20s something changed in a very quick and profound way. |
| 0:27.2 | And she started to realize she was struggling to connect with reality. She found herself soon |
| 0:33.1 | after hospitalized and pretty much sent home saying, you need to catch up on your sleep. |
| 0:38.0 | But a couple of weeks later, she was back in the hospital. That said in motion, |
| 0:42.1 | a diagnosis that led her into a world of understanding that from that moment forward, |
| 0:48.2 | her mental health, her life, her relationships, her work, her identity as a human being of value |
| 0:55.8 | who could contribute as a wife, as a mom, would be forever changing and then flux and have to be |
| 1:02.9 | reexamined. As she came to serve her own peace with this, she also decided she had to share |
| 1:10.0 | her story and not just her story, but she wanted to create a platform for others who were living |
| 1:15.9 | with mental health struggles to be able to stand in their own story and do it publicly and remove |
| 1:21.5 | the stigma and the shame. And this led to the creation of an organization called This Is My Brave, |
| 1:27.1 | which creates events all over the country now where people can stand up and own their own struggle |
| 1:33.1 | and have it normalized and be embraced for who they are regardless of what they deal with on a |
| 1:38.2 | day-to-day basis. And also from that has emerged a really beautiful and powerful documentary. |
| 1:44.2 | I'm really excited to be able to sit down and dive deep with my guest this week. Jennifer Marshall |
| 1:52.0 | and I am Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. |
| 2:03.0 | Alex's work trip was looking like a busy one, so they needed to know exactly what they'd be getting, |
| 2:08.3 | like the choice of over 800 locations, to skip the commute and relax with a tasty dinner |
| 2:13.2 | night before. Plus if plans change they could rest easy, knowing they can cancel their flex rate |
... |
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