Jeff Long Of Teens4TeensHelp.org: How Our Family Navigates Life With A Child With A Mental Illness

Yitzi Weiner

12 months ago

An Interview With Stephanie Greer

Limit expectations and comparisons, then learn, read, ask questions, get involved, do the work yourself. Show your child and yourself that you are all in and taking care of yourself too.

Living with and caring for a child with mental illness presents a unique set of challenges, triumphs, and insights. In a world where mental health is increasingly at the forefront of social discussions, the need for awareness, support, and understanding is more crucial than ever. Our families are on the front lines, experiencing the everyday realities that come with this journey. As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Long.

Kathy is a licensed acupuncturist and has been in practice for over 25 years. She and Jeff have 2 children, a UC Davis graduate and a student at Cal State Sacramento.

She believes in the ripple effect and knows that by improving the life of one person, you impact many, and has seen this firsthand in her medical practice.

She also loves working outside, spending time with the family animals and the ladies in book club.

Jeff is a film and video producer and director. He has helped many Fortune 500 companies market, sell, and explain their products and services. He has taught at Columbia College of Hollywood, written a book, A Parent’s Guide to Anorexia, and recently started the nonprofit Teens4TeensHelp.org with his wife Kathy. Jeff agrees with the Mark Twain quote — “The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day when you discover why.” Helping teens and families heal from mental health issues is his why.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! We really appreciate the courage it takes to publicly share your story. Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your childhood backstory?

Kathy grew up in Williamsport, a small town in Pennsylvania PA known to many as the home of little league baseball. It was an uneventful childhood in a rural setting. Fast forward, she ended up moving to Los Angeles, going to school to study Traditional Chinese Medicine and has had a private Acupuncture practice for over 28 years.

My husband, Jeff, also grew up in the Midwest, his father was a university professor, with a focus on? /child psychology, his mother was a stay-at-home mom, also in a family of four. It seemed like a typical middle-class family. He was a video director/producer for years until our family mental health crisis.

Our daughter, Kara, was diagnosed in ninth9th grade with anorexia and required a residential treatment program. Up to that point she was showing signs of depression. She was withdrawn and not engaged with friends at school. She was wearing all black and answering in one- word sentences. Kara’s grandfather was a child psychologist and when we asked him for advice, he felt that because her grades were good this behavior was normal teenage angst. We found a therapist for her and that is when her eating disorder got out of control.

I was a stay-at-home mom and Jeff worked from a home office. We were engaged with our kids, ate dinner together every night and had a unique, supportive neighborhood community. We felt like a very normal nuclear family.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

So, the quotes that were relevantmost relevant quotes for us are was, “Recovery is not a straight line” And “Not my circus, not my monkey.”

The second quote sounds very harsh at first, but it is really important for parents to understand that they did not cause their child’s mental illness and they also cannot fix it. At first, we tried everything we could think of to make her our daughter want to choose recovery and learned how helpless we were and how all our desire, love, tools, and efforts could not change her mind. It was very difficult to process and to learn that at the most basic level we could not directly help her. We read several books and found support groups for parents to be extremely helpful. We learned that we were not alone, what other parents did, how to let go of shame, guilt, and stigma among other things. We also ended up with our own therapy.

We also saw that recovery is never a straight line, it goes up and down like the stock market and hopefully over time

you can see the overall trend is up. However, that mayke take time and it’s frightening every time there’s a step back,

one step back two steps forward.

In the end it was her decision to put in the effort needed to manage her symptoms. We were there alongside her every step of the way, offering love and support, but we could not make her choose her recovery — that was up to her.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Can you share with us the moment you realized your family’s journey was going to be different due to your child’s mental illness, and how did this realization transform your approach to family life and parenting?

This began with arguments at the table when she refused to eat and we could see she was vanishing. The WTF moment came when our daughter’s physician said she hads anorexia, and her heartbeat was down to 32 beats per minute and that she immediately had to go into a residential program!

We were shocked and knew nothing about anorexia and eating disorders and were thrown into the chaos of finding the best treatment program we could afford. All of this was just days before a rare family trip back east for Thanksgiving. This upended everything, separated the family for the holiday, some staying, and some going. It had a major impact on all of us. We were all just trying to understand and grasp the magnitude of this. Why was our daughter hell bent on self-destruction? We were aware that our family was in new territory and possibly changed forever. We were also aware that, like this Thanksgiving, many holiday traditions are centered around food and it was clear that this was about to change for the foreseeable future, and also perhaps forever. After the shock of it all, we learned to pivot and put the focus on being together rather than a meal.

Was there a turning point for you when things started to change for the better? Can you please share a story?

When our daughter finally started to start to care about some of the other teens in her sixth in her 6th treatment center, t. This was when we could see that she started to care about her own life. She, however, told us it was a day outside at her fifth 5th treatment center when she just was enjoying the sun and nature and thought to herself, “this is nice out here, I’ve tried everything else, maybe I could try to see what would happen if I tried to recover.”

That was the beginning. Then at the end of her last treatment center stay, she agreed to speak with her treatment center at a high school assembly. This was huge and it was the beginning of her really stepping into her recovery. Then a year later, that school specifically asked for her to come back and speak again. When she did, afterwards a young man came up to her and asked if he could give her a hug. He said that the previous year he was feeling suicidal and after hearing her talk he reached out for help instead. She came home elated that everything she had been through was worth something to someone.

She had made a big impact and we understood in an instant that stories of recovery can save lives. We also knew the value of peer groups, that teens hearing from their peers about what they were experiencing was a game changer.

Navigating mental health challenges can be taxing for the entire family. Could you discuss the support systems that have been most effective for you and your child? Who are some of the important people in your life who have been on this journey with you? How have they either helped you or made things harder?

Support groups are extremely important, therapists, doctors, and family all kept us together and going and there were times when we didn’t know if any of us would make it through together. It was definitely peer support for us and our child that was the most impactful thing for all of us.

Our daughter found a group of youth who were in recovery from any number of issues, my husband found a parent group thatwho had children with eating disorders and I found a parent group that was affiliated with the one our daughter went to, called A Light of Hope.

We also got a rescue dog who ended up not only being a support for our daughter, but a cherished member of the family and even the neighborhood. Our parents and family were very supportive in an unimposing way. They didn’t understand the nuances of what we were going through, but they were always there for non-judgmental support.

We quickly learned to step away from relationships that were challenging or unsupportive. We just did not have the bandwidth to spend time with people who felt toxic or draining. It is safe to say we were not socializing or on social media at all during this time.

What does a typical day in your life look like, and how do you adapt daily routines to accommodate the needs of your child while also ensuring the well-being of the rest of the family?

There was nothing typical about our days for four4 years. Iit was a cascade of residential treatment centers, hospitals, therapy, then IOP (intensive outpatient program) and POP (partial outpatient program), independent high school, and support groups. Also, for parents, there was reading, online research and many questions to professionals.

We became subject experts and learned that the professionals often only knew about their individual part of the

disease or process and seldom did anyone know or explain the big picture or long-term prognosis. I often wonder if they don’t because it could feel overwhelming or hopeless to some parents.

One year we drove over 50,000 miles to all the places and weekend events! It was all consuming and mostly focused on our daughter. We tried to make things as normal as possible for our son, but it wasn’t. It was exhausting and as parents we tried to do it all, but we reached our own breaking points. Eventually we realized it was necessary to take care of ourselves, join support groups and demonstrate self-care behavior and healthy boundaries that would help us and that our children could see and learn from.

What are 5 things you learned from your journey that you think other people navigating life with a child with mental illness would benefit from knowing?

1.Recovery is not a straight line and relapse is normal and expected. Be there, love and support, do not judge.

2. Peer support for everyone is a vital component to recovery.

3. Limit expectations and comparisons, then learn, read, ask questions, get involved, do the work yourself. Show your child and yourself that you are all in and taking care of yourself too.

4. Meet your child where they are at. Help them discover what they care about in life, animals, music, future plans.

5. Think out of the box for everything — treatment, school, social connections. We even did goat yoga as an event, our daughter loved it, but my husband was not thrilled with the goat’s inability to honor his yoga mat.

Stigma surrounding mental illness can often lead to misconceptions and isolation. How has your family confronted and worked to overcome the stigma associated with mental illness?

By talking about it, by getting involved with others who are working to reduce stigma. By writing a book, A Parent’s Guide to Anorexia and then creating the nonprofit, Teens4TeensHelp.

Despite the challenges, families often find moments of triumph and resilience. Can you share a particularly proud moment or a breakthrough that your family has experienced in this journey?

For our daughter it was overcoming her social anxiety and sharing her experience at a high school which resulted in her saving another teen’s life.

For us, the parents, it was when we received a grant from the State of California which allowed us to launch the non profit organization, Teens4TeensHelp. The follow up to that was when another teen who had been inspired by our site and many videos got through her treatment and then called us to share her story and join our youth board.

Are there any books, podcasts, or other resources that have helped you understand or manage your condition better?

The book, Decoding Anorexia, by Carrie Arnold, Brene Brown’s podcast, National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) (spell out) website and resources.

We don’t know if this is of any useIf this might be useful, the following , it is a writing my husband, who was compelled to do in the mist of our chaos that shed’s light on the entire process discussed above.

L.O.V.E.

You asked me what love is?
Well, this year my daughter was diagnosed with depression,
anxiety, anorexia, OCD, and self-harm. These are words you do not
want to hear and like a dangerous gang of murders you don’t want
them together. It was like the wheels of her Childhood all fell off the
cart at once and our family was thrown into a tumbling world of
out of control chaos. A storm of epic proportion was upon us.
You may be thinking what does that have to do with love?
Well just about everything, see love is like a ruler, it measures you,
your level of caring, your connectivity, your soul.
I remember attempting to hold my daughter’s arm together as I drove
her to the ER after a suicide attempt thinking this can’t be happening,
I love her too much. But it was happening and would again.
No matter how much I loved her, she was like a colander. I could
keep pouring the love in, but it would all go out the bottom and
she would always be empty.
I learned that love didn’t matter. For a while my wife and son and I huddled
together holding on to our love for our family and our sister/daughter. It didn’t matter. She hated herself, she hated her life.
Love didn’t matter.
As a parent you can’t help blaming yourself, what did I do to cause this? Was it
something I said, something I did, something someone else did?
At the very least I contributed the DNA. I thought that love mattered, in this case it did not.
It was like living with a thousand broken hearts, there was a hole in my chest.
It felt like a cartoon cannon had just blasted me and I could reach right through
my body.
Love doesn’t matter, Love hurts. It really hurts.
Then I notice that Love is a freaking four-letter word
L.o.v.e. — lost, overwhelmed, very, emotional.
Love doesn’t matter, Love hurts, Love is a four-letter word.
The pain was overwhelming. I saw us all go through it, and it was too much to bear. We started to drift away from each other and go to corners in our house and lives. Most marriages don’t make it through something like this, that’s what we saw in the family groups at the residential programs, and there were several.
Then my wife’s mother died. They didn’t have a good relationship their entire lives, so I was surprised by the depth of love she had for her and how much she hurt from the loss and unfinished relationship. Love hides in surprising places.
Love doesn’t matter, Love hurts, Love is a four-letter word, and Love hides.
Then I saw the help from others, simple gestures of kindness, support and love from the therapists, the residential program’s cook, and even the group assistants. The change wasn’t great for my daughter, but it stirred my soul.
These people gave gentle love to these broken children, this island of misfit toys and their terrified parents….humm. Maybe I wanted to be one of those people who helped others in need. Maybe that’s the only true value in life, to help others…the rest of it is simply taking up space, running around, making money, and looking for meaning.
When people would do or say the slightest nice thing, a hug, a card, or a meal I would be surprised by their love and easily moved to tears. How could they care, how could they love us?
Perhaps Love can heal?
I couldn’t do anything to help my daughter, my wife, and my family. I realized that I was powerless…. wow, powerless.
I was brought up to believe if you thought it, you could create it. Me and my power of love, we were powerless.
Then I realized that perhaps I was looking at this Shakespearean tragedy all wrong.
Maybe this was an opportunity to learn, maybe Love is a teacher?
Love heals, Love teaches.
Maybe love is a journey, and the lesson is to learn to fully love yourself regardless of your circumstances, then you can love others and be like Johnny Appleseed and go viral?
Co-dependency aside, we are all on our own journeys. We all get a life and the people in our lives. They are our teachers, our guides, and obstacles to overcome. Perhaps Love is a journey?
Love heals, Love teaches, Love is a journey.
Then my daughter started a grease fire in the kitchen as I was driving away from the house. Everyone else was down a big hill. I was terrified by the screams of “HELP! HELP!” and saw the smoke pouring out of every window. She used the fire extinguisher and when I got to her, the flames were out. She thought I would be angry, but I was so grateful that she wasn’t harmed. I thought only of her. A house is just wood and nails with stuff in it. I am glad we didn’t lose it, but my concern was for her. Turns out Love is a gift.
Love heals, Love teaches, Love is a journey, Love is a gift.
Then my good friend of 30 years suddenly ended his life. I didn’t see it coming, no one did. He had hidden his depression for years until it finally overcame him. After some serious grieving I realized how grateful I was for knowing him and sharing the time we did have together.
Maybe Love is eternal?
Love heals, Love teaches, Love is a journey, Love is a gift, Love is eternal.
The more I looked at love I discovered that Love is this giant force that moves through everything. Like wind, fire, and water it shapes the landscape of our soul. It feels like a giant river with many currents, if you swim against it, you go nowhere and experience pain. If you flow with it, giving your love to others, you float merrily down the stream of life.
So, Love heals, Love teaches, Love is a journey, Love is a gift, Love is eternal, and Love is a force.
Turns out, Love is. Love just is.

-J. Long

Thank you for your time and thoughtful answers. I know many people will gain so much from hearing this.

About The Interviewer: Stephanie Greer, PhD is the Co-founder and CEO of Akin Mental Health — a company dedicated to guiding families on their journey supporting a loved one with mental health challenges like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and severe depression. Stephanie is passionate about this topic from her own personal experience growing up with a mother who struggled with bipolar 1 disorder and found a path forward to overcome the obstacles and live well. Stephanie’s professional experience includes a doctorate in neuroscience as well as design research roles at Hopelab and Apple. Stephanie brings this personal passion together with her world-class science and technology background to support families across the US in their personal journeys supporting loved ones with mental illness. To learn more about Akin Mental Health and join our community, visit us at akinmh.com.

Jeff Long Of Teens4TeensHelp.org: How Our Family Navigates Life With A Child With A Mental Illness was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.