Reality Check – Jayde Nelson (Sharing Lived Experience)

Ashley: I'm Dr. Ashley Wiess, I'm a Child Adolescent Psychiatrist. And I'm Serena Chaudhry, I'm a Clinical Social Worker. And we are the co founders of Epic NOLA, which is the Early Psychosis Intervention Clinic in New Orleans, and also the co founders of CALM, Clear Answers to Louisiana Mental Health.

Serena: Good afternoon. Good afternoon and welcome to today's episode of reality check. I'm Serena Chaudry, and I'm here with Dr. Ashley Wiess and our guest today, Jade Nelson. And we're going to talk to Jade about her experience through psychosis and into recovery and talk to her a little bit about the innovative entrepreneurial work she's doing in the context of her recovery.

Jayde: Thank you for having me.

Ashley: When you were introducing her, I was like, what are you going to say she's here for? Because she's does so many things.

Serena: You're this familiar face and voice in calm social. People may recognize you from the roundtable. People may recognize you from an up, there's an upcoming roundtable with you.

Serena: You've been on our social. Your poetry

Ashley: during In My Mind.

Jayde: Yes. Yes. Some different ventures. Hard to choose one.

Serena: Well, we, I just want to start by saying we appreciate you and your willingness to talk to us in many different contexts and just your spirit is super inspiring and we're excited for our listeners to hear from you today.

Serena: So if you could start just by talking a little bit about your diagnosis of psychosis and your journey to recovery.

Jayde: It started off with me just having repetitive, intrusive thoughts over the span of, over the span of a week's time. One day, it started off okay. I had just gotten home in my nice apartment. I was feeling good. I was feeling, just feeling okay. I had just gone through a very, somewhat bad breakup, and I was trying to just soak it all in.

Jayde: I had heard about, I had heard about psychotic episodes. I've seen my sister go through psychotic episodes, and I myself just could not fathom that I was having an episode. So In my hospitalization time, I was just still in denial about the fact that I had schizophrenia. I couldn't accept it. I couldn't, I just It was so in denial to the fact that I'm in this same place that my sister once was, and it just, it just hit me.

Jayde: And granted, it was a very strenuous process. It's a very tedious process because you do have to try different medications. I still persevered in the midst of adversity and was able to accept my diagnosis to live a healthy and fulfilling lifestyle. So there's a little bit about that.

Ashley: What's so much like in a week, like one week going from doing your life to then being hospitalized.

Ashley: That's so fast. I just wonder, will you share what it's like? When you say intrusive thought, and I think sometimes people don't maybe don't quite understand what that means or versus a hallucination, but like what the experience. What was like of having what you call intrusive thoughts?

Jayde: You are being followed, seeing things out of the blue that was not there. And it can be anything as little as a bug on the floor. Or sometimes it's even a person and my recollection of the experience, it, I just remember the entire week, but we know that with psychosis, it can't, it's not an overnight process.

Jayde: It was just hearing and seeing things are not there. And sometimes I, and in my last episode, it was tactile. I can also feel a touch and no one was there. It's quite scary, to say the least, and I was able to just slowly start to come to terms with what was going on upon my hospitalization.

Serena: You're such an old soul and you're so wise. And so, of course you're 24 and this is the age group, right? The age range in which 16 to 25 when people often have their first episode of psychosis, girls and young women sometimes later. But. Upon having that, you named a couple of things that I imagine might sound familiar to some of our listeners who've experienced this.

Serena: You talked about a stressor precipitating the psychotic episode, a bad breakdown. I think we've heard, we hear that a lot in clinic from people, like something at this age being. extremely stressful and causing that. So I just wanted to name that because I think it's important for our listeners in terms of relating and seeing that there are these different responses that one has.

Serena: Have insight, but also perhaps an understandable denial of what that insight is telling them.

Jayde: Yes. That, that's literally, that's literally the perfect way to describe it because oftentimes when we see any, oftentimes when we see anything traumatic happen to our loved ones, whether it's physical, whether it's mental, we are very, I would like to speak for myself.

Jayde: Okay. And then once you accept. Just some coming to your treatment team, going to groups, staying on top of things, and even more so, asking for help when needed. Advocating for yourself.

Ashley: How long do you feel like it took you, then, the process to actually to become an advocate for yourself? That's a, that's like a major, I think, developmental milestone for all of us is to be able to know yourself enough that you can then advocate for yourself to others.

Jayde: It didn't happen in January, didn't happen in February. Long answer short, it took me about a year. And it took me some time because when you're in the process of recovery, it's about not only trusting the people around you, which is my treatment team, maybe my family, and some people have experienced like not trusting their family with this illness, but it's also trusting yourself enough to Make justifiable decisions and part of making those justifiable decisions, it may look like, it may look like saying, Hey, Dr.

Jayde: And then utilizing your resources in the correct way. So many people have access to great resources, but you have to utilize in the correct way. So if that was me going to therapy, what that would have looked like for me is 15 minutes prior to therapy is. Writing down questions to ask my therapist, um, writing down thoughts to, to, for my doctor to receive answers for them, because so many times we think that we know our ego can feel so inflated once we get better that we don't think that.

Serena: I so appreciate you being honest about that because I think that that's real for a lot of people.

Serena: Right? There's illness and diagnosis and the journey from that to treatment and really truly engaging in treatment is, can be long and hard and you're battling, I think in many ways you're talking about societal stigma and also self stigma, like working towards that acceptance.

Jayde: Yes, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Jade.

Jayde: It's not anything that's gonna be linear. Some days it may feel like 100%, some days it may feel like 80, but consistency and actively showing up for yourself is where it matters the most.

Ashley: Yeah, I was just thinking when you were, I think I, Serena and I, and even the team, like, we experience where like when people start getting, that's when like insurance wants to stop paying for visits.

Ashley: Yes. You can't do that as a clinician unless you really know them and you know them really well. Yes. And it's so important, and that's definitely something that, like, it's definitely something that our healthcare system needs to hear, is like, that that's the time where, like, wellness happens. That's the time where health happens.

Ashley: Where you're not just putting out fires.

Jayde: Which also we Building with the fire has demolished

Jayde: Yes. I was just in church last Sunday and my pastor was saying, do not rush the grieving process. Do not make anyone make you feel like you have to rush the grieving process because losing anything, including your mind, it's grief. It's grief that's going to come with that. The loss of anything is going to bring on, it's going to manifest, manifest itself into grief.

Jayde: So when it presents itself at your door or in the moments where you feel like you were doing okay or when you're working and writing something down and something reminds you of a time where you went through something traumatic or something that brought pain and sorrow, those are the times where you need to pause and actively go through those motions.

Ashley: you have a lot of good metaphors. Thank you. I just pictured myself, like, going through the water.

Serena: Right? I know. Those are great. And maybe we can use that metaphor is this transition to talking. Or expanding the conversation. I don't want to let go of this, but expanding the conversation to include what you're doing now as you're going through this and creating this online presence and working to be an influencer, to advise influencers.

Serena: Tell us about your current creative project and what you're doing.

Jayde: So I figured, If I was able to get myself at a place where I can actively reach the youth, teach them words of wisdom, whether it's just in passing or whether it's just me saying, Hey, we do number two again. You started with the wrong question.

Jayde: It's very just important to me. And then also with my book, Socially Savvy, Becoming the Ultimate Influencer, I realized that influence is not the mark that you only leave on social media, but it's also the mark that you leave on people's lives. So I feel like my social media presence, it is very strong.

Jayde: So many times the world tells us to conform to a certain thing, to be a certain way, to look a certain way, but I think that the true confidence and joy comes from when you can just say, this is me. This is who I'm gonna be silly today and you still get rewarded for it. Yeah. So that's what kind of was the basis for Socially Savvy.

Ashley: I bet they're obsessed with you. I can just see it.

Serena: I know.

Serena: And it's so awesome to think sort of full circle and coming in thinking about youth and the importance of supporting them, educating them and right, holding the space for them to Be solid on their journey or strong on their journey, and I love that you've done that so in referencing your ebook I was reading that one of your proven strategies is to target audience under And we've got this thing going for us, calm, clear answers to Louisiana mental health.

Serena: And I am curious as an influencer, if you think we have, how's calm doing with targeting audience understanding?

Jayde: Getting the audience engaged is a great tip for it, in my opinion, marketing terms, because the more comments you get, The more you apply to them quickly, it tells the Instagram algorithm, okay, this post is hot. Let's make it pop. Let's push it out on the For You page. In terms of grasping audience attention and staying very informative and also providing a great sense of community.

Jayde: When I look through the comments and scrolling through the comments, you guys are actively replying to everyone. You guys are actively engaging like with some of my followers. I know like on one of the videos we did together, You guys are just, they're like, goofing around and stuff and you guys are actively, like, communicating, like, I really appreciate that level of influence, where it's just, it's community based.

Serena (2): That's great feedback. Do you have any suggestions for us?

Jayde: If I can be honest, I think that the only thing that I would suggest is just honestly just Just keep going. Just stay consistent because honestly, learning the algorithm is a hard thing, especially when it changes so much.

Jayde: Me personally, I would just try out like different times to post. I know that there's a tool on Instagram where you go into the settings, you look at where you got the most engagement, and then where you see where you got the most engagement is. Posting something a little bit different at that time. So, granted, you got the most engagement on that post, I would just recommend maybe switching it up.

Serena: For sure.

Jayde: Yeah, yeah. Doing something silly or just engage, just engaging a little bit more in terms of just staying on brand, but also just letting people know that, hey, we're not just a clinic that prides ourselves on.

Jayde: Getting people more than an amazing treatment, but we also can have fun too, which I have seen that plenty of times, so.

Ashley: But, that's usually the part we have to dampen. Not because it's not great, but it's okay. We have to show at least like a little bit of seriousness.

Jayde: Yeah, I understand. I understand. Yeah,

Serena: in marketing terms, what I love about this moment is what I think it really captures what happens at Epic, our clinic, and within the Calm Campaign, it's right, it's full circle learning.

Jayde: Thank you guys. Thank you so much

Ashley: Everybody should check out your book. You want to give everybody your instagram handle?

Jayde: That era of Instagram. So that's like where I'm taking things with Authentically Jade, and I'm gonna get the page monotonized.

Serena: Listen for Jade and for the future episodes, check her out on the Calm YouTube channel. She makes some beautiful statements.

Serena: and powerful appearances. Thank you, Jade. We appreciate you guys for having me. Until next time. Thanks for taking the time to get your reality check. And remember, psychosis is real. So is recovery.

Ashley: If you have enjoyed this episode or found it useful, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and check out the website calm NOLA.

Ashley: org.