Andrea McKenna Brankin - Breaking the Mental Health Stigma

Andrea McKenna Brankin's remarkable journey from a suicide attempt to becoming a powerful mental health advocate offers hope to anyone struggling with mental illness. Following her bipolar disorder diagnosis in her early thirties, Andrea chose a path of resilience rather than victimhood, transforming her eight-year recovery process into a roadmap for others.

The moment of diagnosis proved surprisingly liberating for Andrea. After years of extreme mood swings, reckless behavior, and deep depressions, she finally had an explanation for her experiences. "It was an absolute relief," she shares, "because I realized there's hope for change, treatment, normalcy, happiness, and joy." This perspective shift—viewing her diagnosis as the beginning of recovery rather than the end of normalcy—became the foundation for her healing journey.

As a seasoned journalist who worked across Boston, New York, London, and now Singapore, Andrea applied her professional drive to her mental health recovery. Her book "Bipolar Phoenix" outlines ten essential strategies that rebuilt her life, including establishing a treatment plan with medication as her cornerstone, finding supportive communities (her "rugby family"), seeking professional help, maintaining accountability through volunteering, practicing meditation as a yoga teacher, and learning self-love through daily practices.

Beyond her personal journey, Andrea addresses the cultural dimensions of mental health stigma through her volunteer work with Writing Through in Singapore and Vietnam and at Day Spring Treatment Center for traumatized teen girls. She speaks candidly about once-taboo topics like suicidal ideation, describing it not as a character flaw but as a symptom of illness that can be overcome with proper treatment. "I never thought I'd make it to 50," she reveals, explaining why each birthday now represents a tremendous victory over her former reality of constant suicidal thoughts.

Discover how acceptance becomes the first step toward healing in Andrea's powerful story of transformation from patient to advocate.

Reach out...

 Website: https://www.bipolarphoenix.com/

Email: Bppandrea@gmail.com

Suicide Crisis Helpline (Canada & US)  988

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Who is Julie Fairhurst?
Julie Fairhurst – Speaker, Author, and Founder of Women Like Me

Julie Fairhurst is a champion for women’s empowerment and the founder of the Women Like Me Book Program. Since 2019, she has published 30 books and 300+ true-life stories—at no cost to the writers—giving women a platform to heal, inspire, and reclaim their power. Dedicated to breaking generational trauma one story at a time, Julie’s mission is to uplift women emotionally and financially, helping them create better lives for themselves and their families.

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Chapters

• 0:26 Meet Andrea McKenna Branden
• 1:36 Bipolar Diagnosis and Rock Bottom
• 4:17 Ten Steps to Mental Health Recovery
• 9:48 Volunteering and Community Support
• 13:49 Living with Purpose After Suicidal Thoughts
• 19:24 Finding Hope and Resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:14

Hi, everyone, and thank you for being here at another episode of Women Like Me's Stories in Business. I'm your host, Julie Fairhurst, and I'm here with a very interesting lady today. I'm thrilled to welcome Andrea McKenna Branden. And she is a senior or a seasoned journalist, a yoga teacher, a fitness instructor, passionate mental health advocate. She has worked and lived all over the world: Boston, New York, London, and now in Singapore. And she's been bringing stories to life through print, radio, and television. And so what we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk about a few things, but we're going to focus mainly on her book, which is called Bipolar Phoenix. Oh, there it is. Perfect. Yeah. And um, and she's we're gonna talk about uh her journey with bipolar disorder, resilience, and recovery. So, Andrea, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13

Thanks for having me, Julie. Nice to meet you. Let's talk about mental health.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18

Okay. Well, why don't we start with what brought you to to write the book?

SPEAKER_02: 1:24

Yeah, so um I got diagnosed with with, I'm gonna hit you with the big stuff early, uh, with bipolar disorder. Maybe I thought it's hard to remember, maybe 30 or 31 years old. And this was after a suicide attempt. Prior to that, I'd had depression, you know, kind of wild behavior, but functional, had jobs, relationships. And um, I just kind of was going through a divorce, and then I hit rock bottom and uh had an overdose. And they put, and this is the time, maybe 20 years ago, where they were diagnosing bipolar by suicide attempts by saying, Oh, you don't have depression, you have bipolar disorder because it's of a high propensity for suicide attempts in either depressive or manic states. Let me explain. Bipolar, it's a mood disorder that has very high highs, very low lows, and a period of normalcy in the middle, which is the sweet spot, which is where all the medication wants to put you. And and it works very well when you when you when you work on your recovery. So uh I was diagnosed then, and um when I was in the hospital, I I said, you know what, I'm not gonna be a victim of this. I'm gonna uh help other people. And it did take me about eight years to recover, which is what the book is about, all the different things I did to recover. But it wasn't until I got to um Singapore when I had time to write the book. And I wrote about eight to ten years of my life of recovery. And I just had time to write it. I was in a book group in the American Women's Association, and and I as a journalist, it was like it wasn't that hard for me to bang out, you know, the words. It's it's easy that's easy. That part was easy, but it wasn't easy to go through and relive a lot of that stuff, a lot of those experiences. Talking to people about how they viewed me was really hard. But that was the impetus for uh writing the book. And I'm a speaker and I've always been a speaker in Chicago and and uh on TV and at universities and stuff, and they would always say, Where's your book? Where's your book? So now I have the book. That was COVID that I published it.

SPEAKER_00: 3:34

Yeah, yeah. The book, having the book's important, especially if you're on TV and doing all those public speaking events. So what so what do you think? Do you have lessons in your book that women? Yeah, can you tell us some of those lessons?

SPEAKER_02: 3:49

Yeah, I mean, it's for everybody, but um, you know, certainly connecting with me as a woman. I have about 10 chapters, I think it's 13 chapters, but 10 that talk about the 10 different things I did to help myself recover. And they are things like have a treatment plan. For me, that was number one medicine. I know people don't love, don't always want to take medicine, but for me, it saved my life immediately and put me on a path of recovery that allowed me to now build a life uh of happiness and joy and fullness. And and it's because I take medication. So having it, but either way, having a treatment plan was my absolute first uh first lesson. Um, I have things like find your family, whether it's your immediate family or your church family, or for me, it was my rugby family. Um, they helped me during my uh during my suicide um attempt recoveries and all that. Um, you know, talking to a professional rather than leaning on your family too much, uh, staying accountable. I do things like volunteer and I started volunteering, even though I wasn't making a lot of money myself. I thought it was important to volunteer and I've continued that work here in Singapore. Um, I'm in the yoga teacher, so meditating was a really important lesson for me. Um and like fake it till you make it, practice success, and happiness is one of my chapters. Learning how to love yourself, which is a lifelong journey. I understand that. But I did this eight-year period where I was doing all of these things, like I had beads, I wish I had them hanging somewhere, where I did month uh Indian uh Sanskrit mantra, yeah, you know, three twice a day. Like, please help me change my life. And you know what? Like, whether or not you believe that, it it did come, it did come to pass that I did change my life. So I have a lot of lessons like that. Yeah, you want to focus on anything specific.

SPEAKER_00: 5:42

Well, I wanted to talk to you about was it difficult when you got your diagnosis?

SPEAKER_02: 5:47

Okay, so no, because I I think it was a little bit of a surprise because I was thinking, I'm so original, you know, I'm I'm creative and I'm exciting and la la la, but I was also reckless and oh and overspent money and talked too much and and was had deep depressions where I couldn't get out of bed. But what it was was a relief because I'm sitting in the hospital room in the mental hospital in Chicago, which was a fantastic hospital, Northwestern, and all these people around me with all their different stories, and I'm sitting there and everyone thinks I work there, you know, and I'm like, no, I'm here as a to as a patient. And it was like, um, here's the diagnosis, and here's all the things that we see in you that helps us show that you're bipolar. And I was like, that's why. And I thought everybody was going nuts like me. And and then I realized that I had, you know, a propensity for certain behaviors based on the symptoms of the illness, like like overspending, over talking, interrupting, arguing. Arguing is a big one for mental health because you can kind of tell when people argue that they've they're troubled, um, troubled minds, you know, tortured souls. But so it was an absolute relief. And I what I realized, and this is in my book, is there's hope. There is hope for change, there is hope for treatment, there is hope for normalcy, happiness, joy. And I just knew it was gonna take time. So I was like, okay, cool. Now we're on a path because I'm really driven and I like to have a plan I followed. I wanted to be a journalist. I worked hard to get to Boston University, got my first job in New York and London, and you know, like I I'm a driven person. So I put that energy into my recovery and said, Yeah, you know, here's what I'm gonna, here's how I'm gonna manage. But now I have a plan because I know what it is. Yeah, that was a relief. It was a relief.

SPEAKER_00: 7:36

Yeah, I think I think that um I have to take my medicine, sorry. That's okay. You go ahead. I think that that's uh acceptance is so important for for being able to go towards healing. And that's why I was curious. That's okay. And that's why I was curious about what you know how you handled that when when uh when you you got the news. And I think that if you if you're yeah, if you think you're just crazy, but then you find out you're not really crazy, there's actually a reason for your behavior and your thought pattern and stuff, it can actually make you feel relieved.

SPEAKER_02: 8:14

I yeah, it's the minority though, to be honest. A lot of people are that uh people come to me, have always come to me since I'm so open about it, and they say kind of hey, you know, now they talk a little more openly, but 20 years ago, 15, 10 years ago, it was hey, my my my daughter just got diagnosed, and I was just like, you know, nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma is a whole nother thing. What it is is that people don't want to accept that there's something wrong with their mind, yes, and of course, and that their behavior is is is is collated into this illness list of symptoms like me. I looked at it as positively as a relief that I had an answer. A lot of people look at it as oh no, like it's the end of their, it's the end of their world. You know, so acceptance is hard. They don't want to take medicine medicine, they don't want to work on it, they just want it to get better, and it's that's not how it works. You have to work at recovery.

SPEAKER_00: 9:08

Yes, absolutely. Well, good for you.

SPEAKER_02: 9:10

I want to do that work, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 9:12

And I love that you've got all of those, the path that you took so that there's so when people read your book, they're like, Oh, okay, here's what here's what I need for support. Step twos, yes, absolutely. Let me ask you, I'm I'm just so curious about you volunteer for writing through Singapore and Day Spring Treatment Center for Teen Girls. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_02: 9:37

There are two different things. So, Writing Through is a charity that was based and started out of uh Cambodia by an American writer who an author who wrote about lit about stories about Cambodia fiction. And she started a writing through program to help English proficiency in Cambodia. It is it is expanded to Vietnam and actually in North America, Mexico, and and other places too. But here in Southeast Asia, uh Singapore English is pretty much everyone speaks English, so it's yeah, it's one of the first languages everybody learns. But um there's marginalized communities that don't get a lot of support for that kind of thing, and also self-expression. You know, a lot of other countries are very stoic, very much keep your keep your problems to yourself, don't talk about it, don't don't, and especially in Asian culture, yes, um, it's shameful, you know. So to tell your story may not be apropos, you know, for what where you live. Yes. And um, so we went in and taught people how to use their brain and be creative and access a point in in their life where they can tell uh write a poem or be creative or show share their feelings or share their story. When I when I facilitated, a lot of it was share your story. Yeah. And when I did a um uh session in Vietnam with um victims and recovery people of um human trafficking, that was unbelievable, mind-blowing. And then, but marginalized communities here, like like our art students who are handicapped, um, wonderful work. And this leads, so that's what that is, telling stories, and then we present it. Now that leads into Day Spring, because I did the program at Day Spring. Day Spring was is the first residential treatment for young girls dealing with trauma specifically, abuse, specifically, specifically, sexual abuse was very is really the thing. So I go in, women's empowerment, show them a strong lady, show them a healthy family. My daughter, my husband come, we play rugby with them. Um, we did a little writing, um, but mostly I coach kind of coach rugby with them and show them how to do some sports and why are sports good for you. And yeah, um just just just to try to to give a little back because those girls may or may not have a mental illness, but my god, they have lived a life. And we're just trying to have them have some safety and normalcy and uh and go forth and and do your best, you know. So those are the two organizations I work for here.

SPEAKER_00: 12:03

Wow, I think that that's just so beautiful. I have uh a writer that um is from China, and when she was in Canada for uh she'd only been here for two weeks, she had a very traumatic experience, never talked about it. Now she's in her 50s, she finds me and says, I don't want this burden anymore. I want to tell my story. And after when we were done, we we did a podcast. And what she said, I thought was so interesting. She said, My community needs this so badly because we don't talk about anything. And her parent and her parents didn't they passed away not knowing what had really happened to her because because of the shame and just everything around it. So I I think that um yeah, I think sometimes we we in the West tend to forget that not all cultures are as open or moving forward, you know, they're going backwards and using old old fables and old old ideas and old traditions, yeah, rather than moving forward and and looking at empathy and and learning how to listen.

SPEAKER_02: 13:13

And like Singapore is really good about that. They're very different from other countries in set not only Southeast Asia but Asia. They have a government program that talks about how to listen when someone has mental health problems. How to listen. It's amazing. It's on a bus shelter. Like, okay, first thing you should do is not judge. Second thing you should do is say, uh I'm here to listen. And and I mean, it's and that's a government effort. It's they're fantastic here. I love it. They're moving forward quickly with mental health support.

SPEAKER_00: 13:40

Wow, that's wonderful. Yeah, we could use some of the rest of the country. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Wow. So your book now, um, it's available, where is it at? On Amazon.

SPEAKER_02: 13:52

Amazon, Amazon and Kindle. Oh, and only. And it's what the reason I'm on there is because it's worldwide.

SPEAKER_00: 13:59

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. So anybody that's interested, what we'll do is um Andrea will send me the links when she gets a chance, and I will add all of them into the details section so that people will know how to find you for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 14:14

There's the awesome cover done by my tattoo artist. Yeah, it's dope. Yeah, my tattoo artist um did the cover for me. Uh huh. So that was beautiful.

SPEAKER_00: 14:24

Very cool. So, what's next for you? Are you gonna do other books, new projects, more advocacy work? What are you up to?

SPEAKER_02: 14:33

I will continue to do my advocacy work. I get invited to speak fairly often, uh, you know, a handful of times a year. And and I always say yes. Like when I, you know, invited to be on the podcast. Um, I always say yes because I want to talk about mental health and continue the conversation. Um, I think I don't have a plan for the next book. It would be about motherhood and bipolar disorder, though I can tell you that. But I I'm mindful of my daughter's um privacy and I'm not ready to tell those stories yet. I think really my project is my is my life and managing my disorder and having just I just I I chase dopamine, I chase joy. Yes. So I just want to have the fullest life that I can have and be the best I can be for my family uh as a bipolar mother, as a bipolar person, as a person, as a woman. Um, and and just live walk the walk, you know, walk the walk of what I talked about in my book. And it's hard, and I struggle, and I still have symptoms sometimes, and I still am not great or not the best. We all have times where we're not happy with our own behavior or whatever. I mean, that's just life. But for bipolar people, there's a we carry a lot of guilt because um because it hurt people. Yes, you know, yeah, and um so that's my project is to just live. And and now my big thing in my book was that I had wanted to die all the all the time, every day. I mean, like suicide was always on my mind. And then when I when I changed my life and got better, I stopped wanting to kill myself. I know it was heavy, but this is what what recovery can do for you. It can give you that piece of you can turn you can turn 50. I never thought I'd make it to 50. Yeah, and I'm like, woo, you know, every year I have a big birthday party because I'm like, yes. So that's my celebrating my life will be is my my ongoing next project. But I will continue advocacy and writing. I write two columns um um for magazines on mental health and experiences that I've had. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 16:38

I love what you just said because that um, you know, you're celebrating every year because there was a time where you didn't want to be here. And oh yeah, that's there's people.

SPEAKER_02: 16:53

I talk about it so casually, but it's because I've come to terms with the fact that suicide uh aware is a is a symptom of bipolar disorder. It's a symptom, it's not you're being selfish or you're you're not grateful, which is the worst thing you can say to someone. Yes, yes, it's a symptom of the illness, it's overwhelm and it's it's the only thing you feel.

SPEAKER_00: 17:14

Yeah. Well, I think it's wonderful that you are talking about it and you have come to terms with it so that you are you can be open and honest with people because I think we need to hear that. We all need to hear it. And whether it's it's someone who's listening who's experiencing it or a family member, it's just it gives people hope and it gives them a little encouragement that you know there's ways for me to help. Get Andrea's book, read the book. It's gonna give me tips and tools that that that will that will be able to help for sure.

SPEAKER_02: 17:48

That's so the book is full of all my tools. So I'm very happy to share it.

SPEAKER_00: 17:53

Yeah. In the program that I run, the Women Like Me book program, one of the one of the rules is that at the end of every story, we must have lessons for our readers. Yes. Because we don't know that's fabulous. Yeah, you will never know how many people you can you've helped from from telling your story. And so um I I I'm moved by you, but I I appreciate that you've done that. And um, and uh I can I can see how difficult it it was for you. And I appreciate the fact that you've overcome enough that you're able to get on podcasts and speaking events and and talk about it so because it's just so important. And so many of us go into guilt and shame, and then we start to hide. And then that just makes our problems worse.

SPEAKER_02: 18:44

Yeah, isolation is one of the great problems in our societies around the world. Yeah, whether it's for mental illness or other reasons, but but the guilt. One of my friends who's a psychologist read my book and said, you know what? The overarching, she knows me really well. The overarching or underarching emotion that she felt was that I felt guilty. And I was like, I did. I hurt people. I don't want to smile when I say that, but I hurt myself. I hurt other people, I hurt my family. Yeah, you know, and it's like you have to forgive yourself and never mind if they forgive you or not. Yes, I lost a friend all throughout all this stuff. Yes, yes, you know, it haunts me, but yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 19:24

It's um you're absolutely right. And that's the step to healing is forgiving yourself for what you've done. Um how you were living your life. That's your yeah, so much. Oh, I got shivers. Well, Andrea, I uh I could talk to you for hours, but I know I know that's I know the time.

SPEAKER_02: 19:43

Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to come on and and and be a woman like you and woman like us, and and you know, if you want to see my version of the story, then um happy to be part of the community.

SPEAKER_00: 19:56

Thank you. I appreciate that. So, everyone, if you want to uh get more information uh uh about Andrea and also where you can pick up her book, I will have links for you uh in the details section so that you all know where to go. And don't hesitate. And if you're, you know, as I said earlier, if it's you, if it's a family member, um, a friend, a good friend, a husband, I have another writer whose husband committed suicide, you know, and I don't know if there was anything for her going through that, going through that. And um, but but there is there is help and there is tools and there is understanding, but you have to reach out for those things, whether they're in books or telephone calls or podcasts or whatever they are. So well, Andrea, thank you so much. I appreciate you doing this. I appreciate all of you being here for this episode of Women Like Me Stories and Business, and we will see you again.