Transcript

Sebastian: My name is Sebastian. I'm currently a student at Syracuse University. I'm a jazz guitar major. I started playing guitar in fourth grade. At one point I was writing this paper. I chose my topic as the effect that music has on developing brains. The week before I was scheduled to move in at Syracuse University, I went shopping with my mom to buy dorm supplies. While we were shopping I was having very vivid visual and auditory hallucinations. I remember feeling like anytime we walked by somebody I felt like they were giving me a weird look and for some reason I thought they were like all scheming something behind my back. Like at one point I even heard a voice in the other aisle directed at me saying, they're not your friends and that freaked me out a little bit 'cause I was like, who's this? Like who's talking to me right now? And then I ran into the other aisle and there was nobody there. My mom like kind of caught on that like there was something up that day.

Sebastian's mother: So my name is Tereb and Sebastian's mother is Tereb, a single mom. Sebastian is the youngest of three. He wanted to live on campus and we were just making all the arrangements. He was just acting strange.

Sebastian: My condition was just got worse and worse as the days went on.

Sebastian's mother: He was really concerned about if the car was bugged, if the phones were bugged, and we were having these conversations. I still didn't make anything of it.

Sebastian: I thought that my immediate family was plotting to kill me, I thought my friends were all also trying to kill me. This happened right at that breaking point between high school and college. I think it was a combination of many things, mainly the sleep deprivation and also at the time I was experimenting with a few illicit substances. You could probably do a direct correlation with my ability to play guitar and how bad the psychosis was. And at one point, I thought we need to get to an emergency room. So when I first checked into the hospital, I remember being very skeptical of the people around me. And that's the first time, the first of four hospitalizations. I didn't start to get better until group therapy. And that helped a ton. It was the communication that I had with the other patients there. We kind of used reason and logic differentiating what was real and what was probably a hallucination and then slowly but surely started putting the pieces together and the recovery began.

Sebastian's mother: There was a breakthrough by then he was already meeting regularly with with a psychologist from OnTrack and having that system in place by the time he was released from the hospital, it made a huge difference on how effective the treatment would be.

Sebastian: OnTrack, they were super helpful when I got out of the hospital, getting me back on my feet, like they helped me get a job.

"OnTrack [was] super helpful when I got out of the hospital, getting me back on my feet, like they helped me get a job."

Sebastian's mother: It's really important to go through... the program with your child, understand the program, benefit from the program.

"It's really important to go through... the program with your child, understand the program, benefit from the program."

Sebastian: After I had already bounced back and I was ready to start up classes. By then it was the middle of the school semester. Nobody that I had any classes with knew me or what I had just been through. I remember the first guitar lesson I had with my new guitar teacher. He like asked me and he was like what happened? I haven't heard from you in a while. I was supposed to see you in the fall." And I was like,"Oh yeah, I had a little bit of psychosis." And he was like, "Wow, that's heavy."

Initially everybody's like, "What?" And that's probably because it's so unusual for someone to talk so openly. But I didn't hold anything back. Like I told everybody pretty much the whole truth.

Sebastian's mother: I began to think that his openness to talk about this was actually making people feel so comfortable and like okay with it. Turns out that everybody had a story to share about someone in their family or themselves. The word crisis means change, right? And we're always going through some kind of change. This healing that he has experienced has been the healing of our entire family.

"This healing that [Sebastian] has experienced has been the healing of our entire family."

Sebastian: Guitar as a coping mechanism is just great. It'll just be there every time, you know? Kind of zone out of whatever's going on around me. My brain is just on the fretboard. If there's anything going on, like I'm focused here. I'm thinking which shapes go good together, you know? Certain scale shapes, certain chord shapes. If you're not feeling 100%, you know, like tell somebody. It's okay to talk about this.

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