Andy Dunn describes his first manic episode in college, when his fraternity brothers and family found him in the hospital. He talks about how that public crisis shaped his decision to be open about bipolar disorder and what it meant for his career at Bonobos.
So you have this manic experience. The first time in your life in college, you're in a fraternity. Your fraternity brothers actually all come to the hospital.
They've.
Everybody's seen you in. And also your friends and family have seen you in the ward. And then can you share what happens after?
It's sort of. If it weren't so difficult, it's sort of fascinating what happens. There is a small group of people who know exactly what happened. In my case, my family and my close friends who never talked about it. And then everyone who I met after that who never knew what had happened. So it was a secret from everyone I would meet going forward. It was known by a select group of loved ones who never discussed it. And so I wrestled with what you might call a traumatic memory. It was once a month or so I would think about it. I would have a rising panic. Oh, my God, I have this thing. And we do something really cruel with bipolar and other mental illnesses, which is we conflate the identity with the illness. We say someone is bipolar rather than they have it. We would never say someone is cancer. That would be a terrible thing to say. We say they have cancer. And yet with mental illness, the moment that you are diagnosed, you no longer just have to deal with this new illness. You actually are the illness in the eyes of society. Imagine being a disorder. And that was how I felt for. For 20 years. And then the beautiful thing that happened in my life story is when the mania recurred 16 years later and it caused a reckoning for me and for everyone. Then it was, we were all in a different world. We were in a world of transparency, acceptance. How do we deal with this? How do we fight it? How do we navigate it? And it was a funny thing. And I'll just give the headlines on the story. I had a second catastrophic, manic episode in 2016. I, at that time, was in a different place. I was 36 years old. I had an awesome girlfriend. I was ready to settle down. Bonobos had 600 employees. We had 60 stores. We'd raised, as you alluded to, over 100 million of capital. We had over $100 million. Business had a lot of responsibility. I had a lot more to lose, in some ways, depending on how you define loss. And I had this terrible episode, same thing, messianic delusion. This time, I thought I was a hybrid of the Dark Knight and the President, which, by the way, is a badass combo. Right? Can you imagine it? Batman in the Oval Office. And unfortunately, after a week in the hospital And I was ready to be discharged. I was discharged straight into handcuffs. Four NYPD police officers arrested me. They took me straight to the 6th Precinct in Greenwich Village, across from my favorite restauran. I never even noticed it was there. And I was arrested and charged with felony and misdemeanor assault. Because during the mania, I was naked. I was trying to run into the street as this Batman president hybrid. And I struck my now wife and now mother in law. And that led to a very difficult six months afterwards of going through the legal system trying to figure out if I was going to have to step down from the company. And most importantly, was I going to lose the love of my life? Was I going to lose this job that I cared for so deeply? Was I going to lose my reputation depending on what news may come out of it? And I remember talking to my arresting officer in jail and I said, as he took my mug shots, are these going to be on the Internet? And he turned to me and he goes, dude, you're not the founder of Google. You just sell pants. And it was a moment of comic levity, but it was true. I think for a lot of people, we feel like what happens with mental health or mental illness can limit or ruin our career. And so part of the journey here is how do we make disclosure of mental health issues and of mental illness not a career limiting move, but maybe even one day almost like a career enhancing move. Like, this person has this superpower and we're all attuned to it. We're all here to help that individual stay healthy because we recognize that there's some beauty in it and there's some potential for creativity and high performance depending on what it is. And I think we can. And you raised Elon, and I think he's a fascinating example, right? He's the most influential entrepreneur on the planet. And he took some interesting venues, disclosing being on the autism spectrum on Saturday Night Live and then apparently disclosing having bipolar disorder in his new book. I can't comment on any of that, but I think we come to expect people who are doing innovative things to have something, quote, unquote, crazy about them. And I'll just close this little section of our talk with my editor at Penguin Random House wanted to call the book here's to the Crazy Ones. After the Steve Jobs Apple commercial, after he got fired from Apple and came back and talked about how effectively the crazy ones are the ones that change our society. I took umbrage at that title because I didn't want to additionally stigmatize the idea of quote unquote, being crazy. I think it's a choice of someone who is dealing with mental health issues or mental illness if they want to self describe in that way. I actually don't mind describing that, you know, self describing that way, but I didn't want to impose that on anyone, on anyone else. And so I think that's, that's kind of the job here. The job to be done is how do we unlock the potential, if we can call it that, of that quote unquote craziness, maybe better put neurodiversity, but not be taken down by it, not, not have it do harm to ourselves and to others.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
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