Autobiography

I first began playing guitar at 19. I was a patient in the psych ward of Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina, Minnesota. I admitted myself after a year of intense social anxiety and suicidal strategies. What I didn’t know was that I was experiencing the blooming of bipolar disorder. I felt a long, long way from the young man who was a member of a Minnesota state tournament championship hockey team just two years earlier. I was also ashamed and scared to go back to Hamline University in St. Paul where I was a student.

While at the hospital, my older brother Garth brought me his acoustic guitar to keep me company. I discovered I was able to pick out the melody of “Scarborough Fair” on the high E string -- a small moment, yet a seismic occurrence – like flint, spark and flame. In the terrifying refuge of this psych ward, scattered yet essential parts of myself connected, and a new possibility arose.

After leaving the hospital, I took a few months off from school and did little else but learn the guitar while living with my Dad at his house in South Minneapolis. When I went back to Hamline I helped form a band where I wrote songs and played rhythm guitar. My story would be triumphantly short if music could have been my sole healing agent. A year after I’d first been in the hospital I’d made a deliberate suicide attempt when my symptoms has worsened. I’d been misdiagnosed as having depression and had been prescribed an anti-depressant that was lethal. This was pre-Prozac days. I awoke from a 48-hour coma to the traumatized eyes of my family two days after Thanksgiving.

I was released from the Hennepin County Medical Center psych ward again with the depression diagnosis. I was prescribed an anti-depressant but I did not continue taking it. I soon returned to school and things began to improve. I did well in my classes and had a good group of friends. I felt I belonged. This was not to last though. One evening a professor invited me over for dinner. After one glass of wine I became incredibly sleepy. Upon excusing myself from the table I fell to the carpeted floor. He had drugged my drink and then entered me while I was unconscious. Hours later I awoke and stumbled home into the night. I didn’t tell anyone and felt ashamed. I soon distanced myself from everyone close to me, spiraled into a terrible state of regular drug use and self-hate, and I dropped out of school. Eventually crisis came when I was admitted into Ramsey Hospital in St. Paul for a “drug induced psychosis”. I call it an indirect suicide attempt with hallucinogenic mushrooms and amphetamines.

One middle-of-the-night thereafter, I decided to move to New Orleans. This experience is worthy of a short story in itself, yet here I’ll just share that within a month I was back. I landed in the Uptown area of Minneapolis. It’s generally where the music scene germinates and I immersed myself completely. For me this also meant I started using heroin regularly. This, combined with bipolar disorder, is an alchemy that is difficult to explain. Imagine the character Mr. Hyde in an opium den with an electric guitar.

Around six months after moving to Uptown, I believed I needed to leave Minneapolis again. Within days, I sold my car and bought a plane ticket to Prague, Czechoslovakia, the home of my favorite writer of that time, Milan Kundera. After recovering from heroin withdrawal on the plane and shortly thereafter in a youth hostel, I began to play and sing on the street, where for the first time I felt comfortable singing in public. It was a magical time banging out Dylan, Beatles and Neil Young songs on the Charles Bridge and then floating through the medieval streets with people from every place elsewhere.

I returned home to Minneapolis after a month in Prague. The drug use resumed and I admitted myself into an outpatient chemical dependency program at Abbot Northwestern hospital. From there I participated in a six month long outpatient mental health program through Hennepin County Medical Center. Unfortunately, the bipolar diagnosis would again not be on the radar, however, the resident psychiatrist did not give me a diagnosis nor prescribe medication. He was somewhat of a maverick in his profession for this reason. Regardless, I experienced talented therapists and a much needed community of support. I also started to deal with having been abused by the professor. I found the courage to tell the administration of Hamline University what happened and they responded by removing this professor from his position immediately.

One night an acquaintance asked me to sit in on bass guitar so he could audition a drummer. We clicked and the trio Push On Junior was formed. We rented a house together in Northeast Minneapolis and built a studio in the basement. We worked with incredible focus and energy. Eventually we became a regionally successful band. To have rocked cathartic pathos in the age of Nirvana was extraordinary, however, after two years, I left Push On Junior. Although I stayed away from heroin, pot and drinking were firmly a part of the lifestyle. It all became too intense and again I was spiraling.

Usually I would have some form of crisis while spiraling, but this time it didn’t happen.  I rented a cheap room to live alone, got a job at a bakery where I had to be up at 4:30am, and tried to slow down. I was also lucky enough to meet a girlfriend who would become a very positive influence in my life. For years I’d still be in a deep, deep well, yet for the first time I felt I was no longer in free fall. I could see a distinction between myself and my own thoughts. A force that wanted healing began to move inside myself breaking things up into parts. This is when I began to write songs that became useful to me. They were Me talking to Me about things inside that were out of view. The archeological dig of the Self began.

Substantial healing is a slow and curved road around the mountain. In these 17 years up to the present, I stopped using drugs of any kind, was properly diagnosed as having bipolar, hunkered back into school to finish my English degree, and found ways to make a living that inspired me. I worked at the Electric Fetus, ran an original acoustic music booking operation for Dunn Brothers Coffee, produced and engineered recordings for other artists, and now have a private guitar teaching practice in South Minneapolis where I live in a condominium apartment that I own. I’ve structured my life around two primary focuses: developing my songwriting, and becoming healthy. I spent time with helpful books like ones by Pema Chodron, participated in seminars by Landmark Education, and worked hard in collaboration with a therapist. I also met whom I consider the love of my life, Ellen. The past 11 years together has been filled with ups and downs yet love has persisted. We’ve persisted. How could I succinctly express what Ellen has meant to me? Unconditional Love would be a good place to start.

Around five years ago I felt that something was missing. I realized that an essential part of healing was to give to others. Through the great support of Fairview Southdale Hospital Volunteer Coordinator Pamela Mills, I began playing guitar for patients on the same psych ward where I first began playing guitar as a patient. Each Friday I meet people in a similar situation that I was in and share something of my own life. I’m reminded weekly of the power of music and of just simply listening to someone and sharing my experience. Through the full-circle story of my volunteering and the release of my first solo CD “Public Songs For Private Use”, media sources like MPR and the Star Tribune did feature stories on me and others asked me to be a guest on their radio programs. Then a stream of mental health organizations asked me to speak and perform my songs at annual events and fundraisers. Without design, I’ve become a professional mental health and recovery advocate. I get to meet thousands of courageous and compassionate people, but the best part is belonging just by being myself.

So what do I say when I speak? Besides sharing what I’ve shared with you, bipolar disorder for me is essentially having a brain with a low tolerance for stress and I used chemicals to deal with this stress. I’ve learned that everything I do affects my brain chemistry and, good news, I can influence my brain’s ability to effectively contend with stress with everything I do. Eating healthy, not using caffeine, taking supplements, exercising, chiropractic care, regular sleep, and meditation are all major influences on my mental health. Cultivating loving support around me and tending to these relationships, like my long-time partner Ellen, my family of my mom Sara, my dad Don, my step-dad Mario, sisters Gretchen and Melissa, brother Garth, and a small collection of incredible friends - they all are essential to my sustaining health. Mental illness is not simply a matter of genes. Day by day my brain has changed. The peace of mind that my health gives to my parents especially, after all the incredibly difficult worry and fear they experienced, was and continues to be a great source of motivation for me.

Learning the ways I become emotionally triggered and healing those parts of myself has also been essential. In working with my therapist Jill Marks, I learned that I experienced what is often called arrested development caused by events I experienced around the age of 14. Although I continued to grow into being an adult, there was still a very hurt, angry and scared 14 year old that would react in response to emotional stress. This emotional stress would activate my symptoms of anxiety attacks, mania and despair. Some things are too complex for a young person to contend with at the time. It’s almost as if going back into the feelings and gaining understanding updated my software. The adult within me is there for me in those moments when I become triggered.

Some people are surprised when they hear that after 10 years of taking lithium that I’ve weaned myself off from using this or any other medication. It was done with the support of my psychiatrist and therapist. Long-term lithium use can cause damage to the kidneys and liver and I’d begun to experience new negative side effects like musculature fatigue and, well, fear for the health of my kidneys and liver. I read a book called “The Chemistry of Calm” by Dr. Henry Emmons of the Penny George Institute in Minneapolis that so simply guided me toward how I could reduce symptoms in a substantial way without medication. This is what inspired me to take on the major life-style changes of a healthy diet, supplements, meditation and exercise. But just as important, in reading this book I realized that I’d been living as if my diagnosis of bipolar disorder were a life-time sentence where, although I could work to make my prison cell as beautiful as I could, I’d never ever be free.

Not true. Simply not true. And naturally, the more I’ve shared my story the better I feel, so thank you for taking the time to read this. I believe the greatest enemy to those who have a mental illness is isolation. My world has expanded within me and outside of me in ways I’d never thought possible. I think back on those early adult years and feel gratitude to know that I was as vulnerable as a dog on the highway - cars and semis whizzing past me - yet thankfully I was never hit straight on. Yes, I fell into a deep well and I’ve climbed from the well brick by brick. Yet without consistent mindfulness, I can still slip like anyone.  But there are things I do that allow me to trust that it’s unnecessary for me be in those traumatic spaces again.

Whether performing in traditional venues with my group Diedrich Weiss & Red Bird Rising, or as a guest speaker, I often remember that first stay in the hospital - sitting alone terrified yet trying to pick out the melody of "Scarborough Fair". Wow, you never know, you just never know how different life can become.

~ Diedrich