By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer

Drawing is a favorite pastime for children who often capture themselves playing with friends or enjoying life with their families and beloved pets. Paul Kaiser remembers creating much darker images.

“Some of my earliest memories of negative emotions, if you want to label them as that, are around dealing with very strong emotions that were depression,” shares Kaiser, now 30.

“I would draw these pictures of me basically killing myself and stuff like that when I got really, really sad. My brain would rationalize it like, ‘Oh, if I weren’t alive, then I wouldn’t have to feel this.’ I was just 5 or 6 years old.”

Kaiser wouldn’t know the words “suicidal ideation” until much later.

His early cries for help through his art were largely ignored.

“I drew those pictures and I’d throw them at my parents when I was upset. My parents just didn’t know,” he says. “They were super young; my mom was barely 19. It was never, ‘Oh, let’s go bring the boy to a psychologist.’ That wasn’t something they could afford, or would have even thought about.”

His feelings evolved during high school.

“They weren’t as juvenile,” Kaiser says. “I was no longer drawing pictures, but those were feelings I still harbored inside of myself. We didn’t really think about that. The stigma was different around mental health. You had to have been seeing things and hearing things to have been diagnosed with something.”

Today, educators are mandated reporters, but there were no school interventions for Kaiser.

“It never got in the way of my school life, it more so just got in the way of my emotional management and my stress management, which really started to play out around the time I left home.”

Kaiser lived in Yuba City, but went off to junior college and moved back to his hometown of Santa Rosa.

“When I started to come into my own as an adult and realized that the world is a scary place and there’s crazy things going on, my stress management skills were negligible. I quickly gravitated to what I had learned in my last couple of years in high school, which was smoke some weed, drink some beer, and go party. I looked for things that were pleasure-seeking. It was, ‘Let me fix how I feel right now with some external influence,’ rather than, ‘Let me dive into why I feel this way.’”

Kaiser simply wasn’t taught how to handle that.

“Growing up, my parents definitely had their own struggles as well with mental health,” he says. “They never really developed the skill set to manage their stress well. That wasn’t even something they got to think about until all the kids had left the house. When you’re a very young parent and you’re just trying to get by and make sure there’s food on the table, your mental health comes second to taking care of the children and making sure the basic needs are provided for.”

Substance use masked real issues.

“Those activities had diminishing returns. In the beginning, I could smoke a little shake [cannabis remnants] and I’d be as high as a kite, but it got to the point where I had to keep smoking, I had to buy stronger weed. Eventually it consumed my life. … I was permanently stoned from ages 20 to 25.”

Smoking, Kaiser eventually realized, was not something he wanted to do, but something he felt compelled to do.

Up In Smoke

Consumed with cannabis, Kaiser often missed out on family interaction.

“If you couldn’t bring weed to places, then I really wouldn’t go,” he says. “If I didn’t feel comfortable smelling like a blunt around my nieces and nephews or my cousins and my grandma and grandpa, I would stay on the outskirts of the family party.”

His educational pursuits also suffered. By then, he was studying art history at Sacramento State and dreamed of owning a gallery or being a curator. “When I got into Sac State, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m back.’ I felt good again.”

Weed choked those positive vibes.

“I couldn’t stay in the whole class because at some point I’d have to leave to go smoke and I could not come back to class smelling like a whole blunt, because I would have to smoke an entire Backwoods to myself. It got to a point where my grades suffered and I dropped out.”

Kaiser fell into a familiar depression.

“Throughout my life, I always had these spurts of being very depressed for a few months and then coming out of that depression and having so much energy and motivation to change my life and do all kinds of things. It’s this constant up and down.”

When Kaiser withdrew from school, his parents withdrew their financial support. He took a part-time job at Peet’s Coffee.

“My life was flipped upside down, I was working a 4 a.m. shift. I’d smoke on my way to work, get off at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. and I’d immediately smoke, go home and sleep until 11 p.m., then hang out and play games, and then leave for work again. I didn’t want to interact with anybody. I really didn’t want to be alive. I didn’t have any motivation to do anything.”

Kaiser questioned his purpose in life daily and recalls holding a knife while cleaning up at the coffee shop, seriously considering using it on himself.

“I did not feel valuable at that point,” he admits. “I didn’t feel like I had anything to show for myself. I’m 23-24, a lot of my friends are already exiting college and starting careers, some of them were even starting families or getting out of the military. All I had to show for what I’ve done is an addiction to weed and a partially completed degree.”

“Why am I here?” conversations can either motivate or discourage a person.

“It definitely sent me further into my spiral,” Kaiser says. “That’s when things got really, really intense. I’d already started going to therapy because of this whole situation and I was feeling so terrible.”

A couple of months in, Kaiser says his therapist diagnosed him with bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders. He didn’t have a working knowledge of one and didn’t understand how he could have the other.

“You hear bipolar and you think one moment they’re happy and the next moment, they’re mad,” Kaiser says. “That’s not the clinical definition of it. The same with PTSD. I’ve never been around people getting shot and killed. That was not my lifestyle. I grew up kind of in the suburbs. I never was in a war.”

Wish It Were Sunday

Kaiser initially rejected the diagnosis. That was before the manic episode.

“That came at 26. I had been at Peet’s Coffee, just doing my thing, making sure my rent was paid and I was really stressed out,” Kaiser shares.

A new roommate wasn’t working out. He got a second job and felt his supervisor at the first one was giving him undesirable shifts in retaliation, which messed with his sleep schedule. “I started taking some supplements that actually exacerbated things because they aren’t good for people with bipolar disorder.”

The supplements were made of St. John’s wort, which according to the National Institute for Mental Health can have dangerous side effects, such as the worsening of psychotic symptoms in people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

“I was trying to turn my life around and do better mentally. I started taking St. John’s wort and the combination of my stress at home, stress at work, lack of sleep, and lack of health management because even though I was trying to do better, I still did not have basic knowledge about what kind of foods to eat, etc., etc., I started acting really, really funny.”

Kaiser would work out for hours and read countless books about diet and herbal remedies. He’d soon add another term to his vocabulary: orthorexia.

“Orthorexia is basically an obsession with eating clean,” Kaiser explains. “I was doing things that on paper are super good for you. I started taking a journal and writing down my whole day. I started making to-do lists and getting all this stuff crossed off my list. It was like how somebody on meth can feel like they’re doing a lot of good stuff because they’re being productive and they’re getting stuff done. But the way they’re going about it and the abuse they’re putting on their body is totally unhealthy.”

Kaiser also started “dabbling” in different religious theories.

“It was like in the movies where the really smart guy sees all these numbers in front of him and starts making all these connections, or when the detective has that wall of papers and he’s putting the red string from one thing to another, connecting the evidence. That was my lived experience. For three months I would go to the grocery store and I was convinced that this product is connected to this product and this is linked to this. … I was making absurd assumptions and having these insane thoughts.”

In one of the “craziest” scenarios, Kaiser was convinced he could put himself in a meditative state and be immune to harm.

“I was riding my bike through downtown and thought, ‘I’m going to meditate while I’m riding my bike. I’m going to close my eyes and I’m going to ride through the stop lights and nobody’s going to be able to hit me because I’m protected.’ This was a full-on hallucination.”

He blindly glided through stop lights for an hour. Opening his eyes unscathed only validated his delusions.

“I was convinced I had superpowers,” Kaiser says.

Dedication Vs. Medication

Kaiser’s therapist referred him to a psychiatrist who could prescribe medicine for bipolar disorder. He looked up Seroquel online and wasn’t a fan of its reported side effects. Kaiser began exploring alternatives.

“I decided that if my symptoms don’t get any better, then I will get on the medication. But if they do get better with the research that I do and adjustments to my diet and adjustments to my spiritual life, then I don’t need the medication. My primary goal is to make sure that my mother does not have to worry about me.”

Evolving spiritually helped Kaiser feel less aimless, as did working on his physical well-being.

“I really did get saved,” he says, calling Christianity his life preserver.

“I found myself coming around mentally. It was all clicking. At that point, I’d lost my friends. My family thought I was a nut. I lost my job. I dropped out of school. I had nothing and Jesus was telling me I was still something. … I finally was becoming whole.”

“Head Space: Exploring Black Men’s Mental Health” is an OBSERVER’s special series.This project is being reported with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2024 Ethnic Media Collaborative, Healing California. Senior Staff Writer Genoa Barrow and The OBSERVER are among the collaborative’s inaugural participants.