This transcript is generated by AI

Daniel (01:07)
Okay, everyone. Now I'm very pleased to introduce to you all, Azi Jankovic. So she can tell you a bit about her story here at ICI stories. So Azi, to start us off, could you give us a brief introduction of who you are, where you're from and your background, etc.

Azi (01:25)
My name is Azi Jankovic. I am turning 45 this year. I'm the mother of four children between the ages of eight and 21. I am originally from Southern California. And it was in my early and mid teens that I was first introduced into the field of mental health by way of my general doctor with a depression diagnosis, and then my first psychiatrist with a bipolar diagnosis at age 17 in the year 1998. And it's been quite a journey since. I spent over two decades trying to be an A plus compliant patient, at which point about three years ago, I opened my eyes to the cold hard fact that that was not working and I needed to find another way. So I delved into the research as deep and as wide as I could possibly go and I went searching for solutions.

Daniel (02:22)
So let's just, let's go start right at the beginning. Okay. Let's like wind it all back to, to how you were before you went to the mental health system. So tell us a bit about how Azi was right at the beginning before that.

Azi (02:38)
Being 15 years old and a young woman, I felt a lot of pressure to look a certain way. This was the 90s. This is the era of the Kate Moss, anorexic, vegan. It was the era of the fat-free foods in the grocery store where we thought that eating fat-free was really going to set us free from those extra pounds. When I forayed into dieting as a young teen, truly that is when my mental health issues started to spiral and before that point I got out of bed in the morning with a fair amount of motivation to go to school and see my friends and learn. I loved school. I was very academic and right about that age of dieting, all of the depression symptoms started setting in and everything

Daniel (03:27)
So everything changed. What was it that led you into the mental health system?

Azi (03:33)
I think what ended up happening right around the age of 15, I was getting really into dark poetry and I was having trouble getting out of bed in the morning going to school. My parents could see really clearly that I was not the same young teenager that I had been. And I was very moody, I would cry a lot. There was also a lot going on in my life. A lot of pressures on young teens in those days. And still today, it was a very, very difficult age with friends and relationships and even within my own family. My older brother was struggling with addiction and I was dealing with the secondary trauma of all of that and you know in the the 90s Daniel it wasn't so in fashion to go to the therapist there was still a lot of stigma

Daniel (04:16)
Mm-hmm.

Azi (04:24)
I have a lot of sympathy for any mother who tried to raise their children in the pre-Google era because it was that much harder to find answers to their questions. I think my parents were just genuinely baffled by my situation. They didn't know what to do and they took me to the doctor. At that doctor's appointment, I sat in the waiting room. I will always remember filling out the BDI, the Beck Depression Inventory, 21-question survey and it's on a scale with numbers and I intentionally fudged my answers so that I wouldn't worry my mom too much. was really afraid if she knew that I was having suicidal thoughts that it would make her feel worse. I was literally managing the emotions of people around me automatically. And I think that also spoke to the way that I was a very empathetic child and how that in turn was not necessarily a good thing for my mental health. But in any case, I filled it out, went into the appointment, met with Dr. Benjamin and very sweet lady who had been trained to give me the answers that she gave me. And she tallied up the numbers and she told me that I had this condition called moderate depression, was moderate clinical depression and it was just an imbalance in my neurotransmitters. It was a chemical imbalance, she told me, and I would be okay because there's this brand new miracle drug on the market by Eli Lilly called Prozac and if I just take 20 milligrams every day in the next three to six weeks, I should be back on my feet again and that was the doorway that opened to the world of psychiatry for me.

Daniel (06:07)
And so tell me, Azi, how did you feel about this you've been to the doctor, you've filled out this form, you've been given a diagnosis for moderate depression. How did you feel about the diagnosis and the treatment?

Azi (06:20)
They looked at about an inch of a hundred foot long problem. And it was a very superficial analysis. That being said, somebody in a white coat with an M and a D after their name says something to me and gives me hope and gives me a pill, hey, let's see what we can do here. I will say that my it was a very classic case where my emotions were blunted the emotions I didn't want to face the pain was blunted but my ability to feel connection and pleasure and joy was and was also blunted and So I entered a new phase of my life where I was literally Crying out and and and frantically desperately seeking to feel something, which is a really dangerous place to be for a teenager.

Daniel (07:12)
And did you get any relief from the medication at all?

Azi (07:21)
They're not medication because they don't cure anything. They are drugs and they deal with symptoms. So the symptom that was addressed by the Prozac was my exhaustion and the motivation. So suddenly, instead of feeling totally dreadful in the morning, like I couldn't get up out of bed, couldn't function, couldn't do anything, didn't want to do anything, I had this newfound energy. And at first, it gave me energy to be productive. And so I was able to straddle two worlds. I was able to straddle this world of self-medicating. so I was able to do that to calm down and have energy to exercise vigorously. So I got very into biking. I was president of my class and I would plan the school prom and then go to the school prom and take psychedelics. But at the end of the day I had really swept a lot of pain under the rug. I was still doing these extreme diets, still going to bed hungry at night, and I did not know this at the time, but my brain was

Daniel (08:29)
So yeah, I was getting from that, you the intensity in which you were living, it wasn't sustainable, right? You you just couldn't be doing all of these things. So yeah, just tell us a bit about that transition from the initial, like you've got a bit of a kind of perk, a bit of sort of energy at the beginning to it becoming, it's kind of the wheels coming off and you crashing down.

Azi (08:54)
It definitely started getting in the way of my friendships and relationships in high school, 11th grade, 12th grade. I would over schedule all the time on a weekend night. I would make plans with five people because I literally wanted to do everything and be everywhere. It was this unquenchable energy that I had. And by senior year, I was doing really extreme One afternoon in April of 1998, I went skateboarding. I was not a skateboarder, but I decided to go skateboarding with friends and go down a pretty nice-sized hill. At which point, 30 seconds into my first skateboarding ride, I fractured my left foot. And it was a compound fracture. And I was taken to the hospital to have surgery there... where pins put into my foot and I was told to rest. Now it was my left foot and not my right foot. So as much as I couldn't skateboard or bike I could still drive. I remember I got really into weightlifting, doing pushups, anything I could do around that leg to just get my energy out because there was so much of it. And I would still party. You know, when you're in high school, they call it partying. It's really self-medicating, alcohol, cannabis. know, meanwhile, still trying to get good grades, still off to college with my scholarship. And by the end of senior year, I won an academic award at graduation, I graduated and got that cast off and got on an international flight. And it was actually on that international flight, 30,000 feet in the air that my whole entire life came crashing down.

And what happened was as soon as we got up to our flight elevation to fly 10 hours away to Europe, my foot where there was still metal from the compound fracture inside of my foot started aching and pounding and swelling. One day turned into about seven days of not sleeping. And I would nod off here and there, but I was in such excruciating pain, no amount of ibuprofen or melatonin was going to fix this problem. And I eventually got myself kicked off of that trip. It was a teen trip. I was smoking cigarettes on purpose to get caught. I mean, I wanted to smoke because I felt the urge, but I also think it was a cry for attention. I was, I wanted to get kicked off. I knew I needed help. They saw that I needed help. They kicked me off the trip. In the morning was taken to a doctor in California, my first psychiatrist ever. And within the first 15 minutes of that appointment, he listened to my rate of speech, which was very rapid. I was making all kinds of associations that to him made no sense. And he very quickly diagnosed me with bipolar.

He told me that I had bipolar 1, which he explained was a lifelong brain disorder, but not to worry because the three medications he was about to prescribe me would do the trick and I could go on to live  a functional life. ⁓ That was a very rude awakening and needless to say, those three drugs did not work. They backfired. I felt worse than I'd ever felt before in my life times 100. I wound up having to withdraw from my freshman year of college and give up that scholarship. I was unable to stay awake for more than five hours a day on most days in the first semester of freshman year.

I gained about 20 pounds. I mean, I stopped weighing myself at a certain point, but I gained 20 pounds. I couldn't remember anything from my tests. So I went from an A student to an F student.

I had trouble connecting socially, so my relationships really, really suffered and I was in really one of the darkest points of my life by January of 1999. you know, Laura, Laura points out in her book this is Laura Delano's book, Unshrunk. 

Daniel (13:03)
Wow.

Azi (13:10)
She points out that lithium, Prozac, none of the drugs that I was prescribed had ever been tested on minors. They had never been tested long term and they had never been tested in conjunction with one another. And yet this psychiatrist put me on them, told me it was a lifelong prescription and did not even blink in the process.

Daniel (13:33)
Wow. So how long did it take this psychiatrist to diagnose you with bipolar?

Azi (13:40)
It was the first 15 minutes of our appointment that he told me I had this brain disorder. And ⁓ we went back to him a couple times, I think for follow ups. He was very expensive. remember in the late 90s, he was charging $300 an hour. It didn't seem right to me that, you know, how is it that if someone's getting diagnosed with cancer or any other health issue, the doctor is looking under the hood. They're looking inside the body. They're taking a scan. They're taking blood. They're doing something. They're gathering evidence. But in this case, it was almost like he had magical powers. And that was very, very scary to me.

Daniel (14:23)
I mean, up, up until the point when you were taking the Prozac were you open with your friends about what you were taking or did you keep it a secret?

Azi (14:30)
I had chosen friends that were also self-medicating, that also had been through traumas. You know, we were the kids who like weren't cheering for the football team because we just didn't care. I had chosen the kids that were outside of the mainstream who couldn't necessarily connect to like the normal day-to-day things that a lot of high school kids at the time could.

Daniel (15:02)
And what about your family? Were your family very trusting of the doctors and sort of saying, you know, follow what the doctor says or, you know, were they kind of reluctantly going along?

Azi (15:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You know, it's funny, my husband and I both come from very conventional medical families. My grandfather was a cardiologist and my mom thought very highly of medical doctors. She has since come around to be critical just in the same way that I am. We've all had our eyes opened up by this experience.

Daniel (15:34)
Mm-hmm. Okay. So going forward to, you know, you've, you've been diagnosed with bipolar, you've been given lithium and it's causing all these kind of problems at college. What happened next?

Azi (15:53)
Wow, that was a tough semester. It was really, really tough. And what happened next was that in January of 1999, I moved back with my parents, which was very disappointing. I was so ready to be off at university and it felt like a huge loss to be back in the home where I grew up. And at the time, my older brother was a personal trainer and he was a bodybuilder and he was very into working out and like many enthusiasts in that space he said to me get in the best shape of your life and everything else will fall into place. So at the same time my college roommate had been observing my behaviors and my mood go down and down and down she said you know I think these drugs are really messing you up you should probably just flush them in the flush them down the toilet.

So I did that and I always tell people not to do that. In hindsight, it was very dangerous. I had no clue how dangerous it was at the time. know, going off of prescription drugs is a personal choice, but it should definitely be done as you are well aware in the right way. So in any case, I did that and flushed them down the drain and I got into the gym with my older brother and he wanted to help me lose those 20 pounds that I had gained. So I went on a program with him, a 12 week program to get in the best shape of my life. And I really loved the high that I experienced in the gym. It helped me with the symptoms of depression. And so I started working out two times a day and that became my new extreme behavior. ⁓

So I got as into working out and school as possible because my plan was that if I could get into the best physical shape of my life, I could feel better. And then if I got good grades, I could move out of my parents' house again. So my whole life became focused on fitness and academics, which in hindsight was a really great then post college, met my now husband of 22 years, met him graduation weekend from college. We dated that year, we were married a year later, and we actually did a year sabbatical. It was like a honeymoon slash learning, year of learning. We went to Jerusalem in 2003 after our wedding. And when I got there, I'll tell you, there was, I mean, there were terror attacks happening down the street from my house. I experienced anxiety for the first time in Jerusalem and it was pretty profound.

Daniel (18:31)
Mm-hmm.

Azi (18:35)
I was experiencing anxiety and I also felt pregnant. And so that was challenging. I was told by a psychiatrist to go on anti-anxiety meds. I did not listen to him at the time. I had some sort of intuition, like if it didn't work in the past, I'm not going to do it again. And I stayed inside my house a lot that year. I really, really struggled with this fear of terror attacks.

Daniel (18:51)
Mm-hmm.

Azi (19:00)
But after we moved back home, after the year was over, I I really powered through my 20s. I was dealing with depression. I was dealing with low energy. I was dealing with depression, but I pushed myself through it. Went to grad school. I had two more kids. Looking back, I was so focused on creating this like image of perfection. Like I had it all together on the outside and you know, I wasn't actually suffering that I hid my past from even my closest friends. So even my best friends at the time did not know that I'd ever been diagnosed with bipolar.

Daniel (19:40)
Mm-hmm.

Azi (19:41)
...Or half of the things that I'd been through. And I remember having a real fear of loss, like, you know, hanging out with friends and being vulnerable and sharing things, and then you go home at night and you lay in bed and question every single thing you said, and did I say the right thing, and maybe they're not gonna like me anymore. And I really struggled with, so by the time I was 32, everything once again came crashing down. This time my second psychotic break and this one landed me in a psychiatric ward against my will, by way of the police department.

Daniel (20:15)
Oh, wow And  to the extent you're comfortable talking about this, just tell us what what precipitated this, this, this stay in a psych ward.

Azi (20:17)
Yeah. So what precipitated this was again, burning the candle at both ends. I was 32, my youngest of three was two years old. And I was working. I was an education specialist at the time. I was commuting and I was also going back to school to get my doctoral degree that year. And I had six hour classes. I had hundreds of pages of reading every week. And I thought I had to be on the dean's list and a straight A student. mean, was literally looking back. It's so ridiculous. I was trying to get an A++ in every area of my life. I was really worried I wouldn't be able to keep up with my responsibilities or my friends or that I'd let someone down. I mean, I had a lot of like attachment issues going on. So anyway, went and got the Ritalin prescription and suddenly I was like, I felt like a superhero. I could stay up for 20 hours a day. I could, you know, it's like the opposite of depression. I could stay up for 20 hours a day. I got on the dean's list and you know, I was able to stay in shape because I no longer needed to eat food. I was taking stimulants all day. Got my homework done and then some. Went to work, took on new clients. I  was doing way too much and...

Daniel (21:47)
Yeah.

Azi (21:48)
...In October of that year, late October, we had a death in our family, not my immediate family, but a close relative of my husband and it was a very stressful family situation and...

Daniel (22:03)
Mm-hmm.

Azi (22:05)
that was it. That was the tipping point. It was too much. And I started missing out on sleep and my husband knew there was something wrong. He took me to the triage at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and I got really upset with him because I didn't want to go to a hospital. So I left and went with a friend. I went with a really good girlfriend. I knew I just needed to sleep. But when I got to her house, it was really hard for me to relax and calm down. In any case, I was in the guest room of her home and I went to go take a hot shower. And while I was in the shower, I picked up a glass, like a glass bottle of oil. was like an oil diffuser. And I picked it up and I dropped it and the glass shattered. Well, the moment that the glass shattered was the exact moment my husband had come to her house to check on me. He obviously couldn't speak to me through two doors. So he called a mental health helpline in LA. And we didn't know this at the time, but when you called the helpline, they actually would just dispatch the police. So...

Azi (23:14)
The police came knocking on the door, banging down the doors, and I was so scared that I didn't know what to do. I started praying under my breath and they thought I was talking to like, I don't know, invisible. They thought I was hallucinating. And so they handcuffed me I remember at one point I didn't want to walk. They just dragged me. I ended up with bruises. I have pictures actually, bruises on my body and scrape marks on my feet because I didn't want to walk so they just dragged me down the driveway and put me in the back seat of a police car and at the time I was wearing a beanie, okay, so I was wearing like a sweater beanie and my hair was sopping wet in my face and I wanted to move my hair aside because it was really itchy but my hands were behind my back so I had this moment where I realized, ⁓ I was really good at stretching as a kid and dance, very flexible, maybe I could just move my hands out from underneath and fix my hair and let them know and it'll be fine. So I took my hands out and I out from underneath and I moved my hair over and I tapped really gently on the window of the police car and I, excuse me officers, and they looked at me and they picked up their walkie talkies and made some kind of like a call.

Within a minute there are flashing lights and suddenly there's an ambulance. They take me out of the back seat of the cop car and they put me one arm on each side on a gurney. So I'm now handcuffed with one hand on each side of a gurney. And this woman looks at me, this medic, she has short spiky hair, I'll always remember her face. And she said, I'm so sorry I have to do this. I don't really think you need this, but I'm under orders. And she shot me with Haldol in the butt.

Daniel (25:00)
which is ... a very strong anti-psychotic

Azi (25:04)
...Very strong antipsychotic. I woke up the next morning feeling brain dead. Worst hangover of my life and this is coming from someone who experimented with drugs as a teen. Okay, it was horrendous and I crawled down the hallway because I could barely move. I was drooling. I could barely talk to a payphone. And I called, I managed to stand up and call the one friend whose number I had memorized. And it was my girlfriend, Laura, whose house I'd been at the night before. And she explained to me what had happened because I had no idea how I got there or what had happened. And I mean, it was the nightmare just began. It such a nightmare being in that hospital. And I say that in quotes, that is not a place of healing. It is a place of really re traumatizing people who do not need to be in that environment.

Daniel (25:56)
Really, it's almost it's pretty much indistinguishable from being treated like a dangerous criminal, isn't it? You know,

Azi (26:03)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I I developed a lot of sympathy for dangerous criminals. And, you know, I think so many human beings are traumatized in our day and age and yet not aware of the skills or not given the support to deal with it. This saga goes on and on. I was in that hospital for three days and I got out and whatever drugs they had put me on were giving me severe gastrointestinal issues. So some of my symptoms came back, hallucinations and voices and things like that. And I was then taken to another hospital. It was in LA. I was taken to UCLA by some well-meaning friends who just didn't know what to do with me.

Azi (26:51)
Looking back, I needed a strong drug to go to sleep. I needed calm people. I needed a relaxing environment and I needed a strong drug to go to sleep. As much as I see the downside of prescription drugs by way of psychiatry, for me, at the time, they could have had a place short term just to get some sleep, but no one really knew that at the time. And so I wound up in the triage in the ER at UCLA, and I remember seeing a dead body in the hallway. There was a body in a body bag. And it was just emblematic of the re-traumatization that I was going through. And I picked up a prayer book to say Psalms. And when I was sitting and saying Psalms, apparently that scared the staff. And so they sent a security guard to like watch over me to make sure I wouldn't, I don't know, commune with the spirits or something. So I was now being supervised by a very harsh, scary looking orderly in the hospital, like a security guard. And they sent me to another mental institution and this one was pretty bad too.  it was a dual diagnosis facility. It's called, it's in Torrance, California, Delamo Hospital in Torrance, California. most of the people in there were in recovery from hard drugs. I was like, I mean, we're talking heroin, cocaine, anything and everything in between. And I was sexually harassed. I was grabbed at by a male patient. My female roommate actually beat me up in the middle of the night. She had had a delusion that I was her attacker. And so she in the middle of the night, I just started getting railed on and had to scream for help, had to push her off me. She then proceeded to go in the hallways and like throw all of the pictures off the walls. Fortunately, they weren't actually framed with glass because that kind of thing happens all the time in places like this. So in any case, it was not a pleasant experience. I came out feeling worse than I felt when I went in and I got moved over to UCLA. So the third psych ward I was in was UCLA in LA. And UCLA is different. It's clinical. It feels like a hospital but I will say that there the nurse who took me in there was like very caring very loving very compassionate They do teach some skills They have like a CBT class that they have and they have art therapy and there's a few therapeutic aspects to that experience but by and large it was just a place to be safe, I suppose They still force drug you you know, they make you stand in line and and they give you the little pills in the plastic container and you have to swallow them and then lift up your tongue and show them that you swallowed. And a lot of what they gave me were antipsychotics to make me sleep and essentially knock me out morning, noon, and night. I went in November 18, 2012. I got out I think December 6th or 12th. I don't remember the exact date. And I went home and then it was like the next phase of recovery started...

Daniel (30:19)
It's, I'm just taking it all in. It's, it's, it's like, I mean, it, really is a nightmare. It's like you just walked open the door into a completely different reality, right? It's, you know, it's, and then you are, you, you put on this almost like this conveyor belt where it's, it's a one size fits all solution and they don't really engage with you as an individual. And I mean, did anyone really try to get to the bottom of what had happened to you and, and ask you about it during that time?

Azi (30:51)
No one mentioned anything to me about how Ritalin could have caused this. I felt very much like they were trying to keep me there, nothing was enough to convince them that I was fine. And you know, now I understand that even people without any real symptoms can go to a psych ward and leave on the other side and have symptoms because they'll be treated like someone who does. It's just this sort of, it's like a mill. And I could not do any right by these people. Ever since I started sharing my story, I now get calls from people in crises all the time. I got a call from a mother today of a 30-year-old woman who's in the hospital, and she said, well, they're going to start helping her tomorrow. And I said, well, what exactly are they doing to help her?

Daniel (31:34)
Mm-hmm.

Azi (31:44)
...And she had no idea. And I know better at this point. What are they doing? They're putting you in a circle to talk about your feelings for two minutes twice a day, and then they're bringing in puppies, and then they're drugging you. They're forced drugging you. it is not, by and large, most of these places are not helpful. I don't know what else to say beyond that. It's really a sad state that people had to be so afraid of me. That people are so afraid of someone who's manic or who's depressed or who's suicidal. And that fear in and of itself just feeds the problem.

Daniel (32:14)
Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's everything once you've been labeled as a mental patient, whatever you do is, is interpreted through through that lens and pathologized. Yeah, it's very difficult. Okay, so tell us, Azi so what happened after after this, after you've been through this experience, and you come out the other

Azi (32:37)
Absolutely. I don't know how, but I somehow managed to stay in grad school. It was the one thing that I stuck with. I wasn't working, I was now officially disabled from what had happened to me and that was 2012. So 2013, 14, 15, all I did was grad school. I was working on my doctorate and functioning in the home where I could with my kids. My husband helped out a lot, family helped out a lot. had babysitters and the community helped. And then what happened was one of the most surprising twists of events in this entire journey, which was that when I began telling my close friends, they really empathized. And rather than abandoning me or leaving me like I thought they would or distancing themselves from me, they all came closer to me, sharing with me their own mental health struggles. The struggles of their siblings or their parents or their relatives, every single one of my friends had a point of connection...

Daniel (34:00)
Mm-hmm.

Azi (34:01)
...to the mental health world. And rather than losing my friends, we all became closer. And it was this like unbelievable wake up call to the power of honesty and vulnerability. And that really opened a new chapter of my life.

Daniel (34:15)
Mm-hmm, so you managed to get out of this institution. Surely by this time you're starting to have, to really reconsider your relationship with the mental health system and do some real thinking about what that means for you.

Azi (34:40)
You would think so. You'd think I'd learned my lesson by then. But I was again scared because what the psychiatrist say is if you don't take lithium and if you don't take Seroquel and if you don't do what you're supposed to do as a bipolar person, you're going to get manic again. And it actually was not until 2022 that I started realizing this is not working. I was developing prediabetes. I was having all sorts of different symptoms and I started discovering that this was related and so I began to taper off of I think it was like seven different drugs I was on by that time and the tapering process went too quickly, and I ended up manic again and I ended up going to another psychiatric institution. I was in and out a couple of times in the summer of 2022 and that place was a little bit different. I liked it better because they had an outdoor area where you could spend time and play soccer or just kind of sit.

And first I was in the locked ward that wasn't so pleasant, but then I was in the unlocked ward and they also had, you know, they had like puppy therapy and art therapy and different groups. those were all positive things, but it was still psych ward. And I was seeing people coming out of like electroconvulsive therapy drooling and like people really suffering from all of the drugs that they were being forced to take over there. And so by the end of that experience, when I...

Daniel (36:11)
Mm-hmm.

Azi (36:21)
...came out my husband and I said to each other like this is it we're doing anything like we will do anything for this not to happen again my kids were so traumatized having watched me just go through so many ups and downs by way of this experience and we just decided to do whatever we could and so the first piece was let's get the best doctor bipolar doctor in the country...

Daniel (36:47)
Mm-hmm.

Azi Jankovic (36:48)
...and we turned to someone who was supposedly the best and that turned out to be an absolute ~ this is someone who walks around with a shirt that says, love psychopharmacology. And when I would go to him complaining about my symptoms of anxiety, he would tell me to take more Seroquel. He had me at one point on 300 milligrams of Seroquel in the morning, which meant I couldn't drive, I couldn't speak, I couldn't work. I was drunk from the time I woke up in the morning and it was an absolute nightmare. At one point he prescribed some additional drug for me. Every time I go back and he was really expensive too, which was just a nightmare. Every time I go back to him he would add another drug and if I had a side effect he'd say come back for another appointment and it would be the same thing over and over again. And by the time he put me on like, I don't know, the third or fourth different variation, my general doctor noticed a problem. So even though I was going to a private psychiatrist and paying out of pocket, my prescriptions all go through a system and so my general doctor saw the prescription and she said the drug he just prescribed you is actually contraindicated for the other three things that you're taking.

Daniel (38:00)
Mm-hmm.

Azi (38:07)
And so I sent him a text message on WhatsApp. I'll never forget this. I sent this doctor, the psychiatrist, a text message. My general doctor says, I shouldn't be taking this with that. And he texted me back, said, you're a difficult patient and I'm firing you as a patient and I'm charging you for all of my time you wasted texting me. Now.

Daniel (38:29)
Unbelievable.

Azi (38:31)
I should have sued the guy. mean, if I hadn't blocked him on WhatsApp, I could probably dig up these texts and sue him today. He is so negligent. And you know what's so interesting too, Daniel, is that years later, you know, last year, actually, so I guess it was two years later, I went back to the gym to, you know, work on my brain health and get my muscles in shape and, know, and get into that. And he was there, wearing his I love psychopharmacology shirt. Meanwhile, this guy is morbidly obese has zero conception of the fact that mental health is not a combination of pills I'm only turning to people by way of my health in regards to my health who are walking the walk. People who genuinely exude health and he's not one of those people. He's someone who believes—and I don't know how after all these years because I'm really curious how many people he's helped or healed—who genuinely believes that the brain is just an empty envelope to be tweaked with pharmaceuticals. And he nearly really, really hurt me. I mean, he hurt me, but it could have been a lot worse if my doctor hadn't caught his mistake. So that was a nightmare. And I think after that point, what happened was I went to another psychiatrist to taper off and she was better. She wanted to know more about my life, you know, took more of like a biopsychosocial approach, kind of looking more at my lifestyle and my relationships and my friendships.

After helping me taper off of all these drugs, she says to me, maybe we should revisit the lithium, was like, what notes have you been taking for the past six months? Because I told you that lithium ruined my life when I was in college, and then again a few years ago. And it was like, she didn't even have the capacity to allow a human being to be angry about things that should legitimately make all of us angry.

That was the moment I took the power back into my hands and I said, you don't see me, you don't hear me, you don't know me, you don't understand me, and you don't have solutions for me. And now it's my turn and I'm now the CEO of my mental health and that's it.

Daniel (40:56)
You kind of broken up with conventional the conventional mental health system. And now you must journey to find an alternative path. Tell us about this alternative path.

Azi (41:02)
Yep. I had been reading so much in the personal development space and psychology space. I had acquired a lot of skills. I had acquired skills in therapy, CBT, DBT. I was already relying on a lot of what I had learned. And I decided to keep learning. So I sought out mentors. I started podcasting. I started reaching out to mentors in the field of psychiatry, experts in psychology, anyone who I thought who could help me. I would reach out and I would interview them for my podcast and then I would ask them for personal advice. And that led me down a path. mean, I got to interview Dr. Edith Eager, who's a Holocaust survivor and a world-renowned trauma therapist. I was invited to her home, and I got to spend time with her there and interview her multiple times and work with her. And that gave me a piece of what I needed by way of the psychology and the skills and the philosophies that I could really rely on. another turning point was interviewing Dr. Ellen Bora, who is a holistic psychiatrist. And she pointed me in the direction of Dr. Chris Palmer...

Daniel (42:19)
Mm-hmm.

Azi (42:19)
...who wrote a book in 2023 called Brain Energy. and realized I had been deprived, my brain had been deprived of essential fats since the time I was like 11 years old. And I decided to try out this ketogenic therapy I was so scared to try it. I thought I would be hungry for the rest of my life. But the first day of just having a breakfast with a lot of dietary fat, I felt a calm and a peace that I hadn't felt in decades. I suddenly felt okay. I wasn't craving sugar. I wasn't hungry. I wasn't battling with food cravings and diet mindset. was like something just put me at ease. ⁓ So that was 2023 and I've been implementing those tools now for two years. And I've just learned honestly to pace myself. I think coming out with my whole story and being my honest self in the world has given me so much freedom and permission. I'm no longer afraid of losing relationships or I'm no longer afraid of people finding out anything about me because everything's already out on the table. And because I understand now that bipolar was never a chemical imbalance, it was never a dopamine issue per se, it was really a stress induced issue. had a lot to do with my brain metabolism because of what I wasn't eating. And now that I am understand that I see that there's never a reason to be ashamed of mental health issues because you know the mind is attached to the brain and the brain is a part of the body and what goes on in our body is so complex and just like someone can have like gastrointestinal issues, you can have issues in your brain and they can be addressed. And there's an entire industry out there that wants us to believe that we're beyond help and that the only thing can help us is the pill for every ill. But it is not that way. We are empowered. We have the knowledge and the tools at our fingertips. And really, I reclaim my mental health and I believe that anybody can.

Daniel (44:41)
You've told your fascinating story, the whole trajectory. But just going back in time to the Azi, when you were a teenage girl and first having these problems, what would you say to that teenage girl now and what would you recommend they do instead?

Azi (45:02)
I would tell that girl that she is so on point with her critique of society and that all of the organizations that are posing to be in her interest are actually working against her and that all of those, you know, quote unquote, health guidelines telling her to eat fat free are wrong and that there is a better way and that her brain is made of fat and that she needs to eat healthy dietary fat in order for her brain to function, that she can focus on reducing inflammation in her system, learn some stress reduction practices, stop caring about what anybody thinks because everyone is struggling on some level and everyone is pretending and that's why she feels like she's swimming in the shallow end because she is. And she's gonna get through it. So stay focused, focus on your mind, your body, spirit, love yourself as much as you can. There is nothing wrong with you. What you are feeling and experiencing is a normal response to a very abnormal situation.

Daniel (46:16)
Okay. Well, I think that's everything. I just want to say to you, Azi Jankovic, thank you so much for sharing your story with ICI stories. And I will look forward to hearing more of what you're going to do in the future. Thank you.

Azi (46:33)
Daniel, it is my pleasure, my honor, and thank you for your time and your listening heart and all of the incredible work that you're doing with Inner Compass.