SAME HERE

SAME HERE
'Healing, Humanity & the Movement to Unite'
Exclusive Interview with Eric Kussin
Conducted by Erin Macauley

​Eric Kussin is one truly inspiring human. From reaching the top of his field in professional sports to suffering a debilitating, life-altering mental health crisis that left him bedridden for two and a half years, and then rising to create the global mental health movement #SameHere, Eric’s journey is one of resilience, purpose, and transformation. His belief is that five in five of us experience mental health challenges at different points in our lives — not just the “one in five” with diagnosed mental illness so often cited by mainstream education. In this conversation, we explore the depths of Eric’s personal struggle, the turning point that led him to true healing, and the creation of a nonprofit movement built on a simple but radical truth: we all struggle with something, so why divide ourselves into labels when we could unite through shared humanity?

ERIN: Eric, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me. Your story is so fascinating as it really proves the theory that integrating Eastern and Western practices to manage our mental health is the best way for individuals to regulate a discombobulated nervous system. How and why did you come to this conclusion?

ERIC: Thanks, Erin, for having me, and thanks to AwareNow for creating such a great platform. It’s interesting because when I started to feel as sick as I did, I didn’t know the difference between Eastern and Western medicine, especially as it pertained to mental health. I didn’t think mental health applied to me at all.

Back when I was living in Florida (now I’m in New York) as Chief Revenue Officer of the Florida Panthers, after having worked for the NBA League Office and a number of NBA and NHL teams before that, I found myself only six months into my time with the Panthers feeling as though my brain had shut down on me.

I didn’t know at the time what it was. I thought maybe it could have been a brain tumour or the result of a traumatic brain injury from playing sports growing up. I thought maybe it was an aneurysm I was having in the moment. There were all these possible explanations because when your brain feels that shut off, without a singular event to point to, you don’t know the source.

So, I left my job with the support of my team, and the ownership group gave me almost a blank slate, telling me to take as much time as I needed. I remember our majority owner, Vinnie Viola, saying it didn’t matter if it was one month, two months, or three months — I’d come back and hit the ground running.

I left that job in Florida and went up to New York because I was told by everyone that’s where all the top doctors were — all of the Ivy League–trained doctors from Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth… and so what did I do? I sought out those experts for an explanation as to why I was feeling how I was feeling.

That explanation came in the form of being told I had different mental illness labels, that those labels were based on chemical imbalances, and that those chemical imbalances were what I needed to “balance out.” I was told I needed to find the right medication to “balance out my neurotransmitter imbalance.”

In the construct of Western medicine, you can imagine why that appealed to me and made sense. Growing up in the West, when you’re a kid and you get strep throat, bronchitis, or pneumonia, your parents take you to the friendly paediatrician. They have their stethoscope and white lab coat, they take a test — maybe a throat culture or chest X-ray — and they tell you what you “have.” Then you’re given an antibiotic, and two or three days later, you feel better.

So that’s why, when my brain wasn’t feeling right (and it was the first time I had ever felt that way), I took the advice of all these “top doctors” who told me to try different medication combinations — or “cocktails.” During that span, I was put on 52 different medication combinations over two and a half years. At the time, I felt so lost. I could not get out of bed. I needed to be cared for, living at my parents’ house. It was a pretty debilitating experience in my mid-thirties, on a twin bed from childhood, as all my friends were in the prime of their personal and professional lives. And it wasn’t because I wasn’t ambitious or didn’t want my independence — I literally couldn’t function.

So, 52 medications later and two-plus years in, I was told to do TMS therapy — transcranial magnetic stimulation — because it would work on the “hardware” of my brain since the “software” (medication changes) hadn’t worked. When I failed the TMS, I was told to do ECT — electroconvulsive therapy — and the doctor in the psych ward, a Harvard-trained doctor at Cornell Med, coaxed me into it by saying that after trying so many things that hadn’t worked, this ECT was my “last resort.”

Reflecting back, I saw directly how many things I was tried on by the Western medical system and the path they can send you down — the exhausting process of pill after pill, label after label, eventually being told to do treatments that put waves into your brain or electrodes on your head and shock it to get it restarted — only to be told you’re “treatment-resistant,” aka “defective,” and that you’d reached your last resort. But because I failed all of the Western medicine roadmap treatments, I had to turn elsewhere to learn other ways to actually heal at the source. This is where being a stubborn SOB helped me. I was on a mission to get my life back. I began to understand how my nervous system had been through so much. I realised that what I had witnessed with my brother growing up — how sick he had been for so many years (cancer twice, septic shock, coma, kidney transplant, multiple major accidents and broken bones) — had created an accumulation of trauma in my system. That trauma had impacted me physiologically — inside my body, in parts and then in full systems.

Western medicine may know what those structures and systems are because of the scans and tech it has, but it doesn’t talk about their synchronicity and interdependence as much — all as one system working together. The practices that Eastern medicine provides — various forms of breathwork and meditation, yoga and mindfulness, and others like singing meditation and sound baths — allow a true path to healing because they heal the structures and systems that connect the brain and body. They get to the source of how stress and trauma have impacted those structures and systems in our body over time. Western medicine mostly focuses on the brain alone and works to cover up symptoms.

When you grow up in the West and you see PTSD, ADHD, OCD — the 330-plus DSM-V labels — and then you’re given one or a few of those labels, you believe your path towards healing, just like with strep throat or pneumonia, is to find the right label and the right medication for it. I’m actually happy that, as miserable as those 2.5 years of hell were, I went through what I did following that Western medicine process, because it forced me to learn Eastern healing modalities that ultimately got to the source.

So, what I understand now is that Eastern medicine’s practices — with Western contributions that help us understand the science behind why these modalities work — are where true healing happens. I also want to be clear that I’m not anti-med. But I am anti–medication being positioned and sold as a “cure.” It can be a great symptom-management tool for those who find a med that agrees with them and whose side effects aren’t too drastic. But meds alone do not allow us to heal at the source.

ERIN: You suffered a total mental health shutdown when you were at the top of your game professionally, working for the Florida Panthers as their Chief Revenue Officer. How did it help you recover, knowing that you had the total support of those you worked with?

ERIC: That’s a great question. I don’t think I would have been able to get through the misery of the challenges I faced had it not been for the support of the ownership group and the executive staff I was working with at the time in Florida.
I went down to work for the Panthers because the owner of the team — Vinnie, who I mentioned earlier — had just purchased it. He was someone who grew up in tenement houses, living really poor in Queens, New York. He ended up going to the US military, attending West Point for college, and built an incredible life for his family. He started a high-frequency trading company, became a billionaire, and was able to buy a professional sports franchise. He was a big reason why I went down to Florida in the first place. I saw the vision he had for turning that franchise around, and I really trusted him. Two Stanley Cups later, it’s clear he knew what he was doing.

Because of his military background, when I came to share my struggles and explained that this crash I was experiencing was not going to be short term, he had the experience to know how to support me as a teammate. Keep in mind this was in 2015, when not a lot of others were supporting those with mental health challenges.

​So Vinnie looked me in the eyes when I was having that difficult conversation with him and said, “Take as much time as you need — one month, two months, three months. We never leave a soldier out on the battlefield.” He quickly realised this was going to take time for me to get better, and he showed me full support. He set me up with our HR department, who put me on disability to make sure I still had my insurance and some income coming in, so I could live without the fear of how I was going to afford everything I was about to go through medically.

Unfortunately, my journey lasted a full two and a half years, and on disability in the US that’s a long time. I eventually had to part ways with the team — at my own choice; they didn’t force me to leave. But I think if I hadn’t had their support early on, and instead had to worry about whether I’d ever get my job back or be ostracised from the industry, the weight of that could have crushed me. The support they showed during such a difficult time in my life made a huge difference as I began my path towards healing, and I will be forever grateful to them.

ERIN: You were put on over 50 psychotropic medications, went through both TMS and ECT, and this still did not help you — to the point where you were essentially in and out of being catatonic for 2.5 years. What’s your message to those today struggling with medication and trying to find a way through that?

ERIC: Yeah, I think my story is proof that, even though it’s just one person’s experience, going through that many different medication combinations and following that entire path — trying the TMS therapy, where the explanation was “we couldn’t give you the right chemicals to fix your chemical imbalance, so the issue must be a hardware issue in your brain” — shows how stuck this lane of medicine is, as if it’s their Bible.

The common theme in that whole path was that the treatments all targeted what was going on in my head — the actual physical structure of my brain. They were trying to change chemicals and then the ways in which structures like my neurons functioned. But the reality is that when we go through challenging life events (and all of us do), there are structural changes not just to the brain but to the body. There are all these physical and physiological changes that happen over time that connect the brain and the body. These may be complex terms to go through in a short interview, but we’re talking about everything from how your vagus nerve connects the brain with the rest of your body, to how your HPA axis becomes overly active and you continue to secrete cortisol over and over again throughout your body — leading to chronic systemic inflammation. Your amygdala starts pinging with high-frequency beta and gamma waves. Your gut becomes porous with leaks forming, leading to bacterial overgrowth. You’re not able to make the neurotransmitters you need to send from your gut back up to your brain. Your meridians get clogged, and there’s no way for energy to flow freely throughout your body.

So I share all of that to say that a big piece of healing is getting into the body itself and learning how the body was affected over time by the challenging life events you’ve lived through — and the ruminating thoughts related to those events. We hear about “fight or flight” all the time, but when we’re in that state for long periods, that’s what creates those physiological changes to the body. Rehabbing and getting to a better place doesn’t mean working on the brain alone — it means working on the body and the connections between the two.

Our organisation, #SameHere Global, refers to the work needed to heal as both top-down and bottom-up modalities. We focus on what we call STARR Exercises — Stress and Trauma Active Release and Rewiring — to start working on how those body parts have been impacted. Plaque builds up in our arteries, and we need to do exercises and eat foods to burn that plaque out so that we have healthier arteries. STARR helps us look at chronic stress and trauma the same way — how do we release and rewire them from our nervous system? Through STARR Exercises.
So my message to anyone struggling is this: maintain hope. The marketing messages from advertisers, social media, and websites would lead us to believe there are simple fixes, and that the problem only exists in our brain. But when you think of a physical gym and how many options there are to work out your body — there are just as many, if not more, ways to work out your “brain gym” for this connection between your brain and your body. You will find a path toward wellness. STARR has many exercises that work on different structures and systems in the body. Keep going. There are so many modalities to try. And if we can help in any way, you can always reach out to us.

ERIN: Can you tell us how the idea for #SameHere Global was born, and why it was so important to you to spread the message that 5 in 5 of us all suffer — not 1 in 5, as we’re often led to believe?

​ERIC: The idea for #SameHere Global was born when I realised that all of these attempts at treating me through medications and single-fix solutions weren’t working, and that getting into my body was so important to truly heal. I started to look at other organisations around the globe to see if they were talking about mental health in the same way I’d just come to understand it. Instead, I saw so many consistent messages that I thought, as a career marketer, were moving us further away from coming together as a community and healing as a global society. I saw three messages in particular that made me decide not to pour my resources and connections into existing organisations, and ultimately form my own.

The first message I saw from these large organisations was that they all led with the statistic that “1 in 5 people are mentally ill.” When I heard that, I immediately thought: we’re making this topic binary. We’re telling people that only 20% of the population is affected — but what about the other 80%? That’s a big reason why we have a reactive model.

The second message was that all these campaigns for normalisation used the same structure: an action word followed by “stigma.” Stop the stigma. Break the stigma. Kick the stigma. Strike out the stigma. Coming from sports, I saw all these leagues using the same phrasing — dunk, slap, slam. The issue with stigma is that it’s formed by human beings. So when you say stop, stomp, break, or erase — coming from advocates — you’re pointing the finger at people. You’re saying: “You healthy, fine, normal people — you’re being mean to those of us who are sick.” That’s never going to actually break stigma. It’s going to create a greater divide between people who believe they “have it” and those who believe they “don’t.”

The third message I saw came when celebrity stories were shared. These stories were always explained through the lens of disorder labels. “Britney Spears has depression — she’s part of the 1 in 5 group.” “Lindsay Lohan has anxiety — she’s part of the 1 in 5 group.” “You’re not alone.”

And the way you’d find out about their struggles in greater detail was through a People or Us Weekly article linked on these organisations’ websites — because they didn’t have endorsement deals to get direct quotes or interviews. Even now, when celebs share more openly, the focus is still often on how they “manage” their anxiety or depression — not on the vulnerable experiences that led there.

So if you add up those messages — the 1 in 5 statistic, the “stop stigma” phrasing, and the label-based celebrity narratives — what you see is a common theme. They all suggest that 1 in 5 people are mentally ill, we need to stop stigmatising that poor group, and if you’re reading this, ask yourself: do you shave your head like Britney Spears? Do you rip your jersey off mid-game like Antonio Brown? Do you rant about your family and run for president like Kanye West? There aren’t many people who proactively raise their hand after hearing that and say, “I want to be part of that group.” The messaging needed to change — almost a complete 180.

So the idea behind #SameHere is that when we show the sign language symbol — we’re all showing that we’ve all been through challenging life events that have impacted our mental health. Not 1 in 5, but 5 in 5. The visual symbol shows that people from all backgrounds and walks of life are in this together — because we all feel emotional pain that impacts our mental health.

I’ve got to think I went through what I did for a reason. Working in my dream career in professional sports, I was able to tap into my relationships with athletes, teams, and leagues to get them to share the idea of “Same…Here.” Not focusing the message on labels or disorders, but instead on the challenging life events we’ve all faced — divorce, job loss, breakups, abuse, bullying, sickness, or loss of loved ones.

When we connect through our stories and shared emotional pain, rather than just disorder labels, we realise this topic is for everyone — 5 in 5, not 1 in 5. So the concept of #SameHere became representative of the fact that 5 in 5 people experience life challenges and all live on a mental health continuum that fluctuates up and down throughout our lives.

ERIN: What’s next for #SameHere?

ERIC: Well, Erin, as you’ve been following along, it won’t be news to you that we launched an app not too long ago called SameHere Scale. It’s available in both app stores — iOS and Android — and we now have that app in schools, offices, military groups, sports teams, and all kinds of communities around the world, in multiple languages.

It’s really exciting to say that we’ve been using it with our US military based in Korea, and we’ve seen significant success — decreases in suicidal ideation and hospitalisations due to suicide attempts. So it’s been an incredible run on the technology side in terms of helping our education reach wider and more diverse audiences.

Why did we decide to bring technology into what we were doing? Because we simplify the neuroscience and explain it through a “Track and Act” model that’s understandable and accessible to everyone. We help people learn how mental health exists on a continuum through the polyvagal-informed SameHere Scale. That’s the “track” part of the app — it helps people understand how their nervous system moves up and down that continuum, fluctuating between sympathetic and parasympathetic states. The scale has been psychometrically validated by PhDs from Baylor University. Users can identify, based on their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, where they’re at on the scale at any given time and track changes over time — just like a weight scale, thermometer, or blood pressure cuff reading.

The “act” part of the app includes the STARR Exercises — long-form videos, audios, and visuals showing how to do each one. And not just “here’s an exercise,” but what it does for you. What does Havening do to dampen an overactive amygdala? What does tapping do to open up clogged meridians? Tutorials show people, just like at a gym, what each exercise does for their wellbeing.

Right now, as I’m doing this interview with you, I’m in Mexico City forming more international partnerships around this app and our education programs. We’re meeting with government leaders and business partners here. It’s really exciting, because this isn’t just a US issue — it’s a global one.

Unfortunately, because of how mental health has been treated and misunderstood for so long, we’re behind the ball globally. Mental health trends are worsening, and we have to start providing more upstream, preventative messaging and tools so we can get ahead of the problem rather than reacting to it. ∎

For more information on #SameHere Global’s educational programs in schools and offices — including their “5 Pillar Roadmap,” STARR training courses, and the SameHere Scale app — visit samehereglobal.org and 5in5inc.com, or connect with the movement on social media at @samehere_global.