Rachel Steinman, the host of Dear Family, becomes the guest as her Dear Friend, Benjamin King flips the tables to interview her about her family’s legacy of mental illness, suicide, addiction, and more.
Rachel was a psychology major who received her Masters in Education and multiple subject teaching credential from UCLA. She’s taught every elementary school grade, K-6 and has even been the school librarian. She’s a writer, essayist, and memoirist who can’t help but self-examine her own life as well as others’. Rachel’s become a fierce and avid mental health advocate and educator working with NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) as a lead presenter for the “Ending the Silence” program going into high schools to discuss warning signs, resources, and recovery with teens and their parents.
To the outside world, Rachel has a picture-perfect Instagram family. She married her handsome and hilarious best friend, is the mother to two accomplished and beautiful teenage daughters, and rescued the cutest puppy. But like all families there are secrets; stories behind the pretty pictures because mental illness is invisible. Rachel is the daughter, granddaughter, and sister of bipolar, depression, drug addictions, ADHD, neurosis, narcissism, and suicide. She’s the half-sister and step-daughter of parents on their third marriages and a third divorce. She’s a mother doing her best to raise daughters growing up in an increasingly anxiety-filled world of social media, insane college applications and tuition. And yet those who know her, say she’s one of the happiest, most grounded, and mentally healthy people they know. But it hasn’t come easy.
Twenty-four years after Rachel’s beloved grandfather jumped to his death from his high rise, she found his incomplete manuscript revealing dark family secrets. She became his unlikely ghostwriter to understand her family’s sad legacy of five generations of mental illness resulting in four suicides. With a burning desire to change the legacy her daughters would inherit, Rachel began to soul search and research. Her writing ended up not just helping her understand and forgive her bipolar mom, who came from parents who both died by suicide, it ended up saving her.
Rachel has become a true believer we are only as sick as our secrets and that love and connection are the best medicine of all. By sharing her own and others’ personal stories we can heal, find community, and compassion for others and ourselves and we can live a life worth celebrating.
SHOW NOTE LINKS:
Rachel’s Essay about Anthony Bourdain
Rachel’s Essay Divorced Parents Don’t Have to Suck
NAMI- National Alliance on Mental Illness
NAMI’s Ending the Silence Program
National Suicide Prevention Hotline
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