Jack Cooper - Guelph, ON Musician

This website acts as a hybrid business/personal site so I don’t often know what is appropriate to share or reveal. I think it is important to me to be as authentic as possible with people I meet in either a social or a business context. So I want to write a few journal entries on my background, my roots, what shapes me as a person and as a musician.

First thing I want to share is that I am part of the 20% of Canadians who have experienced a mental illness during my lifetime (that’s 1 in 5 for those of you stumped by percentages). I am part of the 5% ( 1 in 20) of the ‘household population’ (?) affected by anxiety disorders. Numbers don’t convey the deep mistrust and misunderstanding of those who have experienced mental illness. The prevalent attitude by many is that mental illness signifies some kind of moral deficiency or personal shortcoming rather than an illness brought on by genetic and environmental factors. People who are depressed really should develop a better attitude. People with anxiety disorders need to relax, do yoga or some deep breathing. If you were lucky enough to be mentally ill in the seventies, you were subjected to all sorts of wackos trying to ascribe psychological origins for your aberrant personality. Thank god for the nineties and prozac!

My personal belief is that most mental illness stems from a combination of genetics and environment. You may be genetically predisposed to develop mental disorders, but may only develop in certain environments. My father’s side of the family exhibits an array of anxiety disorders. I had no idea that anyone else in my family had similar problems to me until I started receiving treatment in my early thirties. Some of my family has received treatment for their disorders. Some like my father, who likely suffered from anxiety disorders, never sought help or treatment. So genetically, I inherited a tendency to develop mental illness. My family’s move from my hometown in New York to Toronto triggered a set of full-blown anxiety disorders. As a whole, our family was much more vulnerable due to isolation from family and friends we had known for years, and the financial strain of dealing with my dad’s new business. Personally, I left a very stimulating music program in New York that meant everything in the world to me and found nothing comparable in the Toronto school system.

I’m not a pharmaceutical advocate and I am open to all philosophies and approaches to healing and self-improvement, but I am also a pragmatist by nature. So even if you told me that drugs don’t cure mental disorders but only address certain symptoms, I think that that’s a helluva lot better than living in misery for forty or fifty years. Even if it shaves a few years off my life. Out of all the therapeutic approaches, cognitive therapy makes the most sense to me. With depression and anxiety or anxiety-related disorders, it’s your thought processes that are fucked up. Cognitive therapy and its brethren gives those thought processes a name, tags them, sends them into a forest and tries to shoot them. But drugs are evolving as well. Newer drugs are working better and on the whole producing fewer side effects. Side effects like having no sex drive can be relaxing for a bit, particularly if sexual obsessiveness is a symptom, but can be really a drag after a while. After ten years on Prozac I felt like a fat, neutered cat. My current medication has only one noticeable side effect. I get severe brain shocks if I miss more than a day’s medication. Ever eat ice cream real fast and get a ‘brain freeze’? A brain shock is kinda like that except there is no ice cream involved and the brain freezes keep recurring. So I am usually careful not to miss more than a day.

I never did really well with counseling when I was young and looking for treatment. I read too many seventies books with theories about what to do about ‘nervous personalities’. They had all sorts of kooky names like that for mental illness back then. If you want to learn all you need to know about the seventies and the wacky self-help movement, read Tom Wolfe’s essay, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening”. When I finally convinced my family doctor at the time that deep breathing wouldn’t make my life significantly better, I was referred to an honest-to-god psychiatrist. If you don’t work in the medical industry, there’s something you should know about psychiatrists. They perform a specific function, and listening isn’t it. Unless listening falls under the category of making an initial diagnosis. There are really only two flavours of mental illness in the medical profession: The trivial ones, like regular depression and anxiety disorders, and the big tamales like schizophrenia and manic-depression (or whatever they call it these days). I was very grateful to talk to my psychiatrist for a while because he was writing a prescription for something that suddenly made me feel a lot less anti-social and gave me back an appetite for food I hadn’t had for years. But after a while I realized the relationship was one-sided. He was getting bored with me, because I was treatable and starting to get kinda naggy about the side effects. I saw another counselor through work, an affable man who was pleasant to talk with but wasn’t too big on encouraging shaking up the status quo. The next and final counselor I saw was great. He was a real shit-kicker and helped me prepare for some real changes I needed to make in my life. I honestly haven’t felt the need to see another counselor since then.