Reality Check – Rachel Star Withers

Welcome to the Reality Check. Psychosis is real. So is Recovery podcast. I'm Dr. Ashley Weiss. I'm a child adolescent psychiatrist. And I'm Serena Chaudry. 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.

Hi, we're so excited to have you here today. I'll start by introducing myself. I'm Serena Chaudry. And I'm Ashley and we're with the Early Psychosis Intervention Clinic in New Orleans and clear answers to Louisiana Mental Health and the co-host of our podcast. Reality Check Psychosis is Real. So is recovery, and we're super excited to have you Rachel, here today.

Can you do a little introduction? Yeah. Hey,

what's up? My name is Rachel Star. I have schizophrenia. I actually had it since I was a little kid. I grew up hallucinating and I wasn't diagnosed until my early twenties though. As far as what do I do for work, it's slightly interesting. I have a stuntwoman and producer for TV shows and movies, and then I also host a podcast called Inside Schizophrenia, where we break down pretty much anything you wanna know about schizophrenia.

I know. So you host this podcast, co-host a podcast, and you've got many, many, many episodes recorded and lots of followers. What inspired you to come on our podcast today? Oh, I love podcasters.

No, I love talking about especially severe mental illnesses because they're very much overlooked. Today's you always hear about mental health.

Mental health, and yet. Schizophrenia, bipolar. Other ones like that usually aren't lumped in with mental health, so I think it's important just to talk about and get it out there more.

Well, so Arc, a podcast is framed around, right? Psychosis is real, so is recovery. So I'd like to start with a question around recovery, and I'm curious, what does recovery mean to

you?

So I'm gonna throw you under the bus. I personally don't like the term recovery because we've been told that before. So throw us under and drag us. Okay. Because it makes you sound like, okay, you're trying to get back to a beginning point. And the truth is, with schizophrenia, there's a very good chance that you're not, I think the goal is schizophrenia, is to learn how to manage it in your life because your schizophrenia can get worse and you have another psychotic episode and you wind up inpatient.

That was just your schizophrenia, so that's why I don't like to say recovery. I wanna say stable management. So as far as how did I get stable management, you know it, it's every single day using a variety of managing techniques and my medication. I have a therapist I see weekly, and then of course a psychiatrist and all of those things together.

Are what helped me to manage, do I slip up? Yeah, that's a lot of, that's out of my control, but having this network of support is what helps me stay stable.

Yeah. That's cool. And I think, uh, we went around and about of using that word and had certain reasons, but I think it's, it's cool that. Or I think it's important that everyone sort of owns their own way of talking about their own illness and their own state.

Like in like, or without, you know, schizophrenia. Whether it be something else I feel like I have to jump into, I. Jump away from schizophrenia and tell me about a stunt woman situation.

Yeah. Many years ago when the Internets were young, as in YouTube, it just started. I had this idea to play this massive paintball game with people in swimsuits.

I thought it would be funny and I couldn't find anyone to do it but me. So I filmed it and I put it up on YouTube and I started coming up with these stupid stunts and a TV show. Found them. Whacked out. Sports was the first one I was on and show after show, so I've got to do a lot of different shows.

Movies, I was in Black Panther all across the board. A shock fight on Tuby you could check out. It's fun to me. It is a business though, I'd say. It's not all fun and games. I'd say it's like 10% fun and 90% work when it comes to anything in the movie or TV industry.

That's so wild.

Have you gotten hurt doing these stunts?

I have to, no, no. With stunt safety is number one. If you're someone who gets hurt a lot, you're a liability. So no, safety is always the first thing you learn the correct way to fall. I've been set on fire multiple times. There's a specific way you do that.

Wow. So like, yeah, that's like super brave. I.

Anyone can do it.

You just have to learn the safe, correct way.

Right. Given it's wild. I've never met a STEM person before, so I'm curious, what have you learned from this part

of your career? I learned as far as for me, the past, well, since Covid, everything of course in the world changed and entertainment changed a lot. I learned that I like being more in control.

I like to be the one who comes up with the storylines. So that's kind of been the big movement with me over the past few years is creating my own stuff. I'm working on a TV show right now. Hopefully we'll get filming at some point.

That's really fun. How have you have people that are sort of. Nervous to like jump into work and they might have just graduated and to deal with, you know, starting mental health treatment and everything else.

So how has that been for you, like managing your mental wellness, mental health, and then this like very complicated career path?

Well, one thing I've always had, regardless of what I was doing, was a part-time job. I like part-time jobs for one. Entertainment isn't steady, it's, you know, buy the project so you can be working really well and then the project's over.

Now you have nothing. You hope you get something else. But I've always tried to have part-time jobs because even when my head was bad, that was at least getting me out of the house. I used to work at gyms just doing cleaning because it was something that was easy for me. It got me out of the house interacting with people.

I think anyone, whether you're talking about severe mental illness, like you need to be getting out of the house, whether that's volunteer work, whether if you wanna go to local dog shelter and help them with the dogs, just doing something to get you out of the house and interacting with people As far as the job thing.

Start small, you know, don't. It might not be the best idea to jump in full-time at a place. I would say try part-time first and kind of see, okay, how, how am I doing? Do you do better at a desk or do you do better moving around? I do better moving around. I have a very hard time sitting at a desk for, you know, more than a few hours.

I.

Yeah. Well, I, that's super inspiring and I think helpful for our young patients to hear. I'm curious what you would recommend as a first step, right? Like there, there's someone who's been thinking about wanting to get that part-time job, but is having a hard time taking, you know, this first step to move in that direction.

Well just make sure you think of the logistics. So for instance, how am I gonna get there? If you had a place you can walk to, that might be really good because think about with schizophrenia. One of the symptoms is we tend to go inside of ourselves. So I always say anything that gets you out of that shell, all right.

If you're able to drive, and that's fine. I'd say pick something you're interested in. It doesn't matter if you're like, Rachel, I love eating a good snow cone in the summer. Go, go play at the snow cone shop. I think especially young ones, when they come out of college, they think, oh, I have to get this really big, important job.

But they're managing something very, very serious. A serious mental disorder. So start small. You can

always build up. Yeah. We, I, I feel like when people, especially coming out of college, we have so many overachievers by nature, like by nature. Free schizophrenia. They've had that kind of temperament and that this really like throws their whole expectations of themselves off.

And when they can't go back to like 20 hours a week in college, they feel like it's a character flaw. And, and then the nervousness, so. Like, we're always trying to help people realize that starting small or starting part-time, like it doesn't mean anything about you and your abilities. Like it's a choice.

Like

when I went to college, I have a bachelor's in. Entertainment management. I had a full scholarship, so I took the maximum number of credits. By the end of my college career, I was barely being able to handle the minimum, so it was a huge slide down and I should have taken less. But to maintain my scholarship, I had to take, you know.

To be full-time and I was struggling really hard with that. Not because the classes were hard, I, entertainment management, it was not a hard degree. It's not like science or math or something. Very easy degree, but I'd get lost finding the classroom. I had electroconvulsive therapy and I had to relearn how to read and write for a while, so I could only write with like, because my hands would shake and stuff.

I'd have to use like giant markers. So it was very difficult to finish college for me. It took me an extra, I think year and a half, but I finished and you know, at the time I felt so bad that like it took me longer. Looking back, I'm like, that was freaking amazing. Like the stuff I went through, like, what the hell?

Who has to go through that in college? And I still graduated. That's amazing. Yeah. The classes were easy though, so it's not nothing medical.

You did it. Yeah.

I would've failed so quickly if it had been math.

Well, you don't have, I was, oh, no, I do. You've like, you've achieved these milestones, so to speak, right?

You, mm-hmm. How have you asked for help? Have you asked for help along the way, and if so, what does.

Yes. So I have to be very open about my struggles with schizophrenia. One reason I have a therapist I meet with every week is she helps me more so with the day-to-day life. Like, okay, tell me what's been happening in your life, and if I have something big coming up visiting family members.

She kind of helps me prep mentally. Just little things like that. She's amazing with, and I know it sounds you're like rich, you got a college degree, you have this great career. I also live at home with my parents. I cannot live alone. That's just the reality of it. I can live alone for about two weeks, and then I start getting really weird.

I start to close myself off and go inside myself. So I'm very lucky that my parents are my main support system, so. Does it sound cool to say you're almost 40 living in your parents' basement? No, of course not. But that, that's the reality for me is that I cannot live alone. My dad's wonderful that if he hasn't like seen me around the house, you know, it's 2:00 PM or whatever, he comes and checks on me, you know, makes me kind of answer some questions to see how coherent I am, and that's just something that.

I need, and I've never felt comfortable having a roommate do that kind of stuff. Like I just felt like I was, yeah, too, too personal. So the roommate situation didn't work when I, I had that. It definitely had to be my parents and yeah, they're my main rock and very wonderful.

That's awesome. How did you guys get to that place where, you know, like your dad can check in with you, I guess, you know, just thinking about the, it is an important relationship and an important.

If you know, if you have family that you can grow a relationship with, I imagine it wasn't always, you know, flowers and roses, but I'd just love to hear a little bit about. Your path with your relationship with your family to get to this point where you can be comfortable and open and honest about what you need, which is awesome.

And especially like I understand like you can have amazing family and support system, but if they don't have enough rooms in their house, they may be not be able to help you in that way. So believe me, like I know. That it's wonderful that it's very like privileged that I'm able to even do that to live with my parents.

So as far as our relationship, it has grown over the years. I think the big turning point for me was just over and over. I couldn't live alone and I, I would just get so weird and it kind of just came out of desperation of, I, I have no other choice. And my parents have just always been amazing, and they were like, Hey, we got this.

And I don't wanna say it's expected now, but yeah, they're aware that I don't really have anything on the horizon of being able to go move out unless, let's say I met someone and got married. That'd really be the only situation, probably, or assisted living kind of thing.

I wanna circle back to disclosure.

You were talking about how you're really open about your diagnosis, and I'm curious how you've managed that in work settings, in relationships. Because I think, and the reason I ask is right, 'cause a lot of the people in our clinic are uncertain if they are in a work situation and they're having a hard time showing up on time, do say something so.

If your schizophrenia is going to affect your work in any way, you need to go to hr. It's unfortunate when you work for like a small company though, where there is no hr, right? So you just have a boss. For me, I know that no matter what, it will affect my work. For one, I can't, I cannot handle cash. I can't.

I can't pass 10, and I start doing weird counting things. I can't explain it, so anything with numbers I can't do. Times I worked the front desk, I would let them know upfront, Hey, here's the deal. And I would say, I have schizophrenia. And for the most part it hasn't been a problem because of the way I address it.

I think, you know, if you address it as you're kind of scared and timid, you know, I have this thing, you know, I, whereas, hey, I have schizophrenia. It's gonna be da da, and they're kind like, oh, honestly, I feel like I, shell shock them. So they don't know how to react. So they're just like, okay.

Yeah, I, that's how I see it. I will say that, of course you need to be careful because there's a lot of jobs where that. They're gonna hear that and they're gonna wanna fire you, or they're gonna find you to be a liability. It could be as simple as also letting other people know around you. If you have a child and the other parents find out, they may be like, well, I don't want my child to go to your house if, you know, I can't trust my child under your care.

So as far as telling people, it's a very personal decision, and I'd even say like a case by case basis.

It's, I, I appreciate you sharing that. I think that's really helpful to hear directly, right, from someone who's had mostly a positive experience.

Yeah, mostly, I mean, I, when I'm starting to go downhill, my words slur so it can sound like I'm drunk, I.

So I'm always telling them upfront about that because yeah, if I, I come in and my words are starting to slur for one, I need people to lemme know because I won't realize it. So that helps me. I always have like a coworker be like, kind of keep an eye on me, one that I trust. I had one amazing coworker, she always check my time sheets.

Because you had to add up your hours and Lord knows what I've been adding up. So she always did it for me. She was just, I felt comfortable with her. She was totally cool about it. I don't even think she knew I had schizophrenia. I think she just knew. I think I always usually will say a brain disorder.

Mm-hmm. And then people are like, oh, okay.

Yeah. So there are a couple things that stand out to me in terms of the work you've been doing in addition to being a stunt woman. One was the book that you wrote. It's been a minute now, but the little Broken star.

Yeah, so that was the first version and then actually it was, I have a comic line based that, that was the evolution of that.

That was a horrible 20 years ago, trying to make it an Amazon, but now, yeah, it's actually a comic book series. The adventures of, and the first one starts with Little Star and deals with schizophrenia. The second one deals with depression and third.

Awesome. What inspired you Just to start on that.

I was at an event with my mom and we were, it was like a mental health event and we were walking around and looking at all these books and stuff, and my mom's like, Rachel, you need to write a book.

And at the time I was still learn relearning how to read and write, and I'm like, I kind of was snotty. I was like, yeah, well that would be nice if I was able to write better. And she's like, well then make it a kid's book. And that's what kind of set me off on, oh. Okay, so I made that first very crude kids book and it evolved into a comic line series.

Have you always been interested in comics because like Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

Stunt, yeah. Super human stuff. Yes.

I grew up on Power Rangers, so I even went to Adult Power Ranger Bootcamp, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Yeah. What do you have to, I mean, I feel like we're jumping all over the plate, but there's gotta be a lot of like physical preparation to do stunts. Huh?

You, you go to classes, so you learn how to do everything. Um, it's just like any other job you wanna do. You have to go through training. So yeah, you learn the correct ways to fall to, to jump.

I specialize in fire and fighting.

Oh. So those are my

two things I'm good at.

That's interesting. So cool. Okay, so I, in wrapping up, I did wanna ask you one thing about Michelle Hammer. Yeah. I, who is friend of Calm and someone you've interviewed on your podcast.

Yeah. I've known Michelle many years actually.

Yeah, we're good friends. I talked her today, I'll say Amazing. Today's her birthday.

Oh, happy birthday. Um, you both are powerful, strong voices advocates. Women, women in this journey of stabilization, and I'm just curious where you see yourselves going with this. What is there, what collaborative efforts are there currently between you two and or others who have lived experience, or what are other ways to continue breaking stigma around these diagnoses?

No, Michelle's awesome. She runs schizophrenic, NYC, and she's just really cool, an amazing artist. And these past few years I've been able to watch her like grow in her different campaigns. So I was able, I think we filmed a TikTok or whatever once, but me and her together really haven't done too much. I was part of a comedy show that she put on, so I went up to New York and I got to perform at this comedy show, which was.

Amazing. If you think about a person with severe schizophrenia, what she did and was able to like host this show and bring together all these other comedians who had schizophrenia, who know there were so many. Yeah. Like it was incredible. And I've loved to see over these is just how she's evolved. As far as just collaborating with other people, you find so many online.

I get messages daily with people with schizophrenia and they'll say, Hey, you wanna check out this song I wrote? Or You wanna look at this drawing? I did. I've met another person with schizophrenia who, they're an animator, which of course fits with my comics. So we've talked about a lot of different things.

There's just so many connections that are

possible to make. What do we need to be doing as people that support people with lived experience or people that provide care ways to like, or an opportunity to empower yourself with our psychosis awareness project, we've had a lot of people that are at our clinic like kind of.

Use it and use the events to like to speak and tell her story and everything else. So I guess, what else do we need to be doing to fight, not only fight stigma, but encouraging people to seek help early and to be open about communicating about some things like that. It might not just be depression and anxiety.

Like what do we need to do better?

I always say this, if there was like a panel, the perfect panel would be a person with lived experience, a caregiver, and then a medical professional, because each of them have a different view. Mm-hmm. And each of them can reach out to a different audience member, especially when it comes to the medical professionals.

A lot of them. Do not take people with schizophrenia seriously. I've had some very bad run-ins with psychiatrists over the years when I was at speaking events and different things who said some pretty shocking stuff to me because they thought it was a waste of their time that they had to come and listen to someone's schizophrenia.

One psychiatrist meant it as a compliment. He came up and said, you speak so well. All the schizophrenic I treat are retards. And I was like, I was floored and I just walked away ignoring the fact of the word usage. I was just like, what you treat people and this is how you refer to them. Yeah. And sometimes the truth was that a lot of people like that.

It doesn't matter what I say or what my parents say, or other caregivers, it's not gonna reach them. But if you have another doctor say, Hey, you need to look at these people differently, let me tell you why that's gonna reach those people. And that's just what you need as far as breaking stigma. If there's a mother in the audience who's worried about her child and you're out there listing the symptoms, she's gonna be thinking, oh my gosh, I've been seeing this.

My child went to college, and now they're acting erratic. Maybe they're having some type of problem. Most people have no idea that schizophrenia comes out usually at college age. They just have no idea. So you see these different symptoms, but they don't know what to look for, and they don't a lot of times think it's that serious.

Yeah, that's the interesting balance is of being supportive. We really make a lot of effort for our clinic to be warm and inviting and comfortable for people that have never had to go see and shrink before, but it's serious and striking that balance, which you described really well, of maintaining seriousness, but also the realness and the life part and like living life and during life.

It's also, I'd say, important on breaking the stigma is showcasing people with lived experience from different backgrounds. For those listening, I'm a white woman. My experience has been a lot different than one of my friends who is a black male. We both have schizophrenia, we have the same symptoms. He's had multiple issues with correctional facilities and things like that.

And if you were to look at us, technically we're the same. But he has been treated a lot different than me. He's also a bigger guy, so they see him and he's acting erratic. Mm-hmm. They're going to act more aggressive towards him than a female usually who's acting erratic. Not always, but knowing that people are treated differently, and especially wherever you're located, that's going to important.

Whoever your main people are in your community that is visiting the clinic, how do you reach out to those different demographics around. Totally and very true here in New Orleans. It'll help me if I see someone that I can relate to be like, okay, wow. If I hear her talk or him talk, I'll be like, I've been scared to go to the doctor because of that exact reason.

Okay, let me know. How did this person get over it? What did this person do Then to become so stable and well, like they made it work so I can too.

Oh, I hate to wrap up, but we have to wrap up. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom and your honesty. What was the show you were talking about? I wanna go check it out. I know I could go to your website, but since you're right in front of me, you were

talking about, oh, it's a movie called Shock Fight is streaming on Tuby right now.

Cool. And I'll go ahead and give you the teaser line. You have one minute to kill the person in front of you. You know what we're doing tonight. Oh yeah. Not killing each other, but watching it. Yeah. So it's big of it. Like saw times, fight club. Oh God. So it's a very high energy, I wanna say like a bloody good time.

That's awesome. And the fun fact is that I play a character name schizo, which was very important to me. Yeah. Because one thing is that usually if you have a schizophrenic in a movie, they're going to be the bad guy or they're going to be like the artistic. A super good guy, right? She's just like everybody else.

Honestly. She's boring. She's

just like everybody else. We'll check it out tonight. Thank you so much, Rachel Star. Everybody should check out her. So character.

And if you look closely, you'll see Michelle Hammer actually does pop up in that movie. Oh yes. She has a little cameo there. Have a few of my people in the mental health community film some clips for me to put on there.

Cool.

Stay in touch. We're gonna reach out through our social and have more collaboration with you. That would be awesome.

No problem. Sounds great.

Alright, take care. Have a great day. Alright, have a good day. Bye. Until next time, thanks for taking the time to get your reality check and remember, psychosis is real, so is recovery.

If you have enjoyed this episode or found it useful, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from. And check out the website, calmnola.org.