Pop Culture Confidential

Episode 11: Project UROK – Destigmatizing mental illness through comedy and community.

Guest: Jenny Jaffe Funny, fearless and passionate are just a few of the words that describe Jenny Jaffe, comedy writer and founder of Project UROK - a nonprofit organization that is creating honest and frank videos for teenagers who are struggling with mental health issues, made by people who have been there before.Their message - You are not alone, you are okay! These include actor and writer Wil Wheaton (Stand by Me, Star Trek, The Big Bang Theory) who shares his struggles with mental illness and depression, Mara Wilson who came to fame as a child actress in Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire shares her struggle with anxiety, as well as gossip reporter Perez Hilton who struggled with panic attacks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duration:: 24m
Broadcast on:: 11 Sep 2015
Audio Format:: other

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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A while back a video came up in my Twitter feed, a testimonial by Will Wheaton, the actor who starred in Stephen King Stand By Me, Star Trek The Next Generation, and The Big Bang Theory. But Wheaton wasn't talking about his acting, he was talking about his struggles with mental health issues, a raw, open, and brave account of his most personal struggle. He made this film for Project You Are Ok, a non-profit initiative founded by comedian Jenny Jaffe that aims to help teens deal with depression, suicidal thoughts, and destigmatizing mental health issues. My name is Will Wheaton, I am an actor, writer, and producer. I have generalized anxiety disorder and I have chronic depression. Things are going to be alright. You are not the only person in the world who has anxiety. You're not the only person in the world who has depression. You're not the only person in the world who has thoughts of self-harm. There are people who want to help you, there are people who have spent their entire lives helping people like you and me and all of the people that you're seeing in this video. And you're not alone, you are ok. For the 25 year old you are ok founder Jenny Jaffe, this is very personal. In her own testimonial she talks about having mental health issues already at the age of 10. Years of therapy and medication helped, as well as performing and writing comedy. She does stand up and has worked at the Colbert Report, MTV, VH1, The Onion, and College Humor. But her biggest achievement yet is founding You Are Ok. Among other things, the site is a growing collection of video testimonials and experiences from teens sharing their stories, as well as comedians and actors from Wheaton to Perez Hilton to Mara Wilson, funny, heartwarming and very personal contributions of their past or current struggle with mental health issues. Jenny Jaffe has a message for teens struggling with these issues. No matter what you're going through, you are not alone. Thank you so much Jenny Jaffe for joining me. Thank you so much. You're a young comedian right in the middle of everything. You have these big things happening. You're at huge institutions like The Onion. What happened to make you start this foundation? The reason I got into comedy in the first place as you pointed out is because I was dealing with these pretty significant struggles with my mental illness. So it always sort of been in the back of my mind that the reason I was doing this was because I wanted to help reach out to teens and help them feel okay and safe the same way that comedy had sort of inadvertently done that for me. And I started sort of conceiving of Project You Are Ok in the abstract, but what really happened was I ended up writing an article for a website, ExoJane, and the article dealt with my experience in exposure therapy for my fear of vomit that stemmed from my OCD. And I was really scared to write this article because it was just I'd never even touched on in anything I'd written. I'd never really even touched on anything I'd been through. And I was really nervous about the response because I'd been at college humor for a while, I've been in comedy for a while, I've heard a lot of pretty terrible internet comments directed at me and this is something that's so personal and can still feel pretty raw. Why were they these internet comments in terms of your comedy or in terms of? Oh, I mean in terms of comedy, I mean being a woman in comedy or a woman on the internet means you're very rarely hearing actual comments about what you're doing and you're more likely hearing comments about how you look while doing them or you know just more general statements about women not being funny. So in this sort of harsh internet world that you were in, you decide to write an incredibly personal article. Right and I was really nervous and I remember my boyfriend was actually moving into a new apartment the day it came out and I remember sitting in the moving van sort of staring at my phone and I knew this article was about to come out and I was so nervous and I knew that the comment section on these exo Jane pieces can get pretty heated and I didn't know you know what the reception was going to be in. And in this article you describe your diagnosis, what you had which was, well so I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, OCD and depression all of which have sort of been more prevalent at various points. How did you make it through your teens? Well, I'm incredibly lucky and I think that's the number one thing that I have to be very upfront about is that I was just afforded the opportunity to, I had a family that was understanding of what I was going through, my mom's a social worker so I have mental health professionals in my family, so there wasn't a stigma coming from my family about it. I had the resources to go to therapy, there were therapists in my neighborhood and I was able to afford going to them and I was, and I really just threw myself into loving comedy. So it was a combination of this sort of like unbelievable luck I had being in the circumstances I was in and the fact that I had just really found something that felt like a reason to stay alive. What could a bad day look like for you? When I was sort of right in mid-high school, I was having probably like three full-blown panic attacks a day and if you've ever had a panic attack you know that that just feels like dying. It is the experience you have of dying, it's what it feels like. So it was like two or three full-blown panic attacks a day and then this sort of like just morose zombie state the rest of the time like anticipating either when these would happen or just sort of wondering like what is the point of continuing to live like this and I had really terrible OCD. I was very afraid of germs, of touching things other people had touched of. One symptom a lot of people don't realize is actually the root of OCD is that you get a lot of intrusive thoughts so you have these sort of like upsetting or violent disturbing thoughts that you wouldn't you know that feel unnatural to you and then the wanting to keep order in the world around you wanting to make sure that things are clean is sort of like can be a way of trying to take back control and you know I was washing my hands constantly and I would take my temperature it was really compulsive about taking my temperature and making sure it was always the same. Living inside my head was just a really bad place to be I was very... How was the interaction with other kids at school? Well non-existent during that point. When I wasn't in class I was usually either at a doctor's appointment or you know again I had a very supportive mom and she'd come pick me up because I just really couldn't be there. I was I was barely going to school for a while in there and had to drop a bunch of classes and make up a bunch of work later and yeah it was kind of a miracle I ended up graduating on time actually that really didn't seem like a possibility and I was very suicidal and really didn't think that I was going to make it to graduation either in terms of like the school work I was doing or just in terms of continuing to be alive through graduation and you know again this was not the first time I'd been suicidal so I knew intellectually that there was a light at the end of the tunnel but in the moment it really did not feel that way and it just wasn't a way to live and it went on for a couple years like that and what ended up getting me through was just the thought of you know I was I was very emotional when John Stewart left The Daily Show because I used to just think like if I could just make it to the next episode of The Daily Show. What other comedy did you find? What outlet did you find? I got really into listening to stand up then too and the first person who I ever heard talk about OCD in a way that resonated with me and I'd never I'd heard a lot of doctors tell me about OCD and tell me about my symptoms and what was going on with me but I'd never heard up here or another person who was struggling with it talk about it and this was before YouTube and I heard Maria Bamford do a bit about her OCD and the way she described it it was the first time I'd ever heard somebody say what their symptoms were and I sort of knew that you know having OCD meant you were really clean but I was like okay but these sort of weird violent intrusive thoughts like surely that's just because I'm a bad person or I'm because there's something really deeply wrong with me that's not worth fixing and when I heard her talk about it as well I was pretty shocked and I sort of started thinking okay so this is this is all part of the OCD and then I remember I just like cried with relief the first time somebody put a checklist of OCD symptoms in front of me and I realized I these weren't disparate parts of me that weren't making sense it was all part of the same mental illness that I was dealing with you were mentioning Maria Bamford I'm thinking I mean I don't mean to generalize but there's a lot of great great comedians who have talked about very personal things of course comedy has the power to destigmatize a lot and such but it's incredible to me when you're explaining your symptoms and how you're feeling and what a nightmare things were for you that you still would get up and do stand up yeah it's true that a lot of comedians have struggled with mental illness and and I think it's an industry where people tend to be fairly open about it because comedy sort of about bringing things that can be difficult to the forefront and facing them with humor and I read Stephen Fry's memoir and that time as well and he's you know a big hero of mine and he's bipolar yeah and you know that's not the same struggle I was having but it was a relief to think that somebody who I admired so much could have come through something like that and still be doing comedy and I took a great deal of comfort in that. Welcome to the project you're okay YouTube page I am project you're okay founder Jenny Jaffee we have all of our videos. Hey everybody I am Perez Hilton and I am okay and you are okay as well I mean just saying that makes me feel better because I had been suffering from anxiety lately severely in the past I've also dealt with depression. My name is Naomi Calhoun and I am a student I was diagnosed with depression at the age of 17 and I've experienced social anxiety and things of the like. My name is Jake Plunkett and I'm a producer for NBC so you wouldn't know this by looking at me in the street or knowing me but I am a recovering male anorexic. What is the idea behind you are okay? One of the precursors to starting project you are okay is that they were I think of the past year there have been about six suicides at the local high school. Oh no. From kids at the local high school and a lot of the rhetoric has been about while we're putting a lot of pressure on these students to succeed academically like it's a very high achieving area. I'm from Silicon Valley so everybody is sort of looking at their parents and the people around them and going gosh these people are starting Twitter and Google and Facebook and what have I done and what am I ever going to do and I think there's some value to that but I and I think that is a big part of you know that's a part of what's happening but I think an even bigger problem is that then when people come up against problems and especially if people come up against problems that are difficult to talk about there's not a source of support for that because everybody is so interested in keeping things looking nice. And how are you gearing it towards teens? What I realized is everything out there is still very academic and still very clinical and I think that and it's something that I remember dealing with which is just that you can have as many PhDs and psychiatrists and wonderful therapists tell you what you're going through is not unusual like there are other people dealing with this as possible and trust me I went to probably I've seen more mental health professionals in my life than most most people but it still feels like this thing that they're removed from and it's like well that's very easy for you to say you're not the one dealing with it and if they are then they typically won't share their personal life with you and that's it can just be really isolating and also as a teenager you don't believe on some level that adults will ever understand what you're going through because everything you're going through feels like this novel thing. Who are some of the people that have contributed and have resonated the most with the teams? Well Mara's video probably has done the best. Mara Wilson she was an actress from Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire yeah and she is I mean one of my favorite people on the planet but also she's someone who everybody sort of in my demographic grew up watching and it almost feels like having a friend talk to you about it. My name is Mara Wilson I am a writer, performer and storyteller I've basically been an anxious person all my life, I have suffered from anxiety, I have obsessive compulsive disorder, I've dealt with depression, I've been dealing with it for a very long time for most of my life I was an anxious kid and I'm still kind of an anxious adult. I wish somebody had told me that it's okay to be anxious, that you don't have to fight it, that in fact fighting it is the thing that makes it worse, that pushing it away is really what it is, it's the fear of fear and that also not that it's okay but that it's not a romantic thing. You don't have to be depressed, you don't have to suffer with it, you can get help, you can reach out. Also sort of on the flip side of that being anxious and fighting that anxiety is actually just going to make it worse. I wish that I had fought my depression and not fought my anxiety as much. When you face anxiety, when you realize what it is, when you understand that it's just this false alarm in your body, then you can work with it, then you can overcome it. People with mental illness are, and again, I don't know how this is in other countries but certainly here in the US are marginalized and I think that marginalization can intersect with so many other ways people are marginalized and the story of dealing with mental health and poverty or mental health and race, those are not stories that I have personal experience with so I want to help provide a platform for those stories to be told because I don't think they're told. So how do you get financing, is it donations? We're a donation-based organization but we're also starting to do some partnered merchandising with an organization out of Canada called Wear Your Label and so where they're going to be selling Project EuroK merchandise, it's actually debuting at Fashion Week next week, New York Fashion Week and part of the proceeds from all those sales come to fund Project EuroK. We also are applying for grants and that sort of thing, seeking bigger donations but we've been run just purely on donations from people for whom this project resonates and people who tell us, "This is something I wish I'd had or I wish my child had or I want my children to have." Yeah. The Internet can be such a nasty place, do you guys, I mean, when you have so many incredible kids sharing their stories on your site, how do you sort of monitor? Oh yeah, no it's said, this has been one of our big directives from the beginning. When you have a very vulnerable person, especially a vulnerable child, putting themselves out there to say, "This is my story and being brave and they might be getting a lot of abuse for it at home or they might be getting teased for at school and hearing somebody and they put themselves out there in this brave way and then to hear somebody say something really harmful and triggering, like kill yourself, that can be terrible and that happens." And it was important to me that that never happened with Project EuroK. So that's why we have very specific instructions. If somebody wants to do a EuroK video, there's a lot of legal language around it too. We ask that you upload it on private and then send it to us, we'll upload it to our channel. So we are keeping track of all the comments that come through on Project EuroK videos. We also have mental health professionals on our board in a nice bit of sort of, I guess, like life-coming full circle. They're actually from the Children's Health Council in Palo Alto, which is where I got treatment when I was first diagnosed. And if we're really concerned about something, we're going to run it up the ladder. If somebody's saying, "This isn't an immediate thing," we have sort of our stock answers, but we also have a lot of resources at our disposal if we cannot provide mental health treatment. But if somebody writes us and says, "I am in, for example, I'm in Austin, Texas, and I'm feeling like I'm going to do something, I'm going to self-harm," we can either send that to the mental health professionals and say like, "Is there a way we should respond to this?" or we can sort of send, "Okay, well, we just looked it up. There is the center near you that you can call, and that'll help you find a local resource." We have a lot of resources on our website to help people find cheap and free treatment near them, along with hotline numbers, crisis chat numbers, places you can text. Have you gotten any reactions since you started from teens that have surprised you? I got a private message on Instagram last night, on my personal Instagram, which I was surprised by just saying like, "I just want you to know," it was from a girl in Spain, and she was saying, "I just want you to know that your project has made me feel supported, and I haven't talked to anybody about this, and I'm glad, thank you for creating this." When we see things like that, that's sort of when I feel really good about what we've done. So I'm in Sweden, so people can come and listen and watch and contribute from here as well? Absolutely, I just, whoever clicks on the site, I want them to see their story represented through someone, and that's really important to me, because nobody, no two people have exactly the same experience. And how are you today? I'm great, thank you so much for asking that. I'm pretty, my new thing since I've been doing your okay is that when I'm having a really bad day, and I still get panic attacks, and I still have days where it's difficult to get out of bed, but they're fewer and farther between, and my new thing is that I like to tweet it. I just posted it online, and I've got a little bit of a following now, and you just never know who's going to see that and go, "Hey, you know what? Me too." This is also, this is my day too, and I think that it can also be helpful to be like, "I am running this organization, I'm," you're open, doing a lot of, "Yeah, I'm doing a lot of things I'm really proud of," and things still are not, it's all perfect every day. That's no one's reality, no one is ever all happy. Thank you so much for joining me, Jenny, and for talking about this. Thank you so much. For more information on the initiative, go to www.projecturok.org. That's with LettersProjectUROK.org. Thank you so much to Jenny Jaffee, and thank you for listening. Tell us what you think about Pop Culture Confidential or anything else. What is a Twitter with #PODPopCulture or on Facebook or Instagram? We'd love to hear from you. This show was edited by Mua Loshon, music by Callboy, produced by Renee Vitichte, and myself, Christina Yerling-Biro. Thank you for listening. See you next week. Hello, podcast fans. It is I, Bruce Volanche. For over 25 years, I worked on the Academy Awards, so you didn't have to. In that time, I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly felt. And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win, why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work. This is the Oscars, what were they thinking? Available wherever you get podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]