Music & Mental Health in Northern Minnesota

Marianne Combs:

Welcome to Filling the Well, a podcast created to nourish, provoke, and inspire artists and arts leaders. I’m independent journalist Marianne Combs.

Leah Lemm:

And I’m Leah Lemm. In this next round of conversations, we’re talking to creatives living and working in rural areas and Indigenous culture bearers. Our guests face particular challenges and celebrate the joys that come with making art outside of a big city and honoring cultural practices in the face of colonization and other historical and current threats. These artists focus on mental health, environmental conservation, cultural preservation, community wellbeing, and much more. There’s so much wisdom to share.

Marianne Combs:

And if you’re new to Filling the Well, I encourage you to check out our past episodes at Arts Midwest’s website, that’s artsmidwest.org. If you’re already familiar with our podcast, then you’ve probably noticed that Leah is a new voice on our show. Welcome, Leah. So why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Leah Lemm:

Thank you so much, Marianne, I appreciate it. I’m a community story sharer, mainly via radio and podcasts, and I focus on amplifying Native voices. I’m a citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in central Minnesota, and I have found my personal passion in sharing voices of people not often heard. And yes, I am here because I love the arts, I’m a musician and I think resource sharing is very critical to the arts world. And of course, you, Marianne, you’re kind of a personal hero of mine.

Marianne Combs:

Oh yeah.

Leah Lemm:

So it is lovely to take some time and be able to have an excuse to hang out with you.

Marianne Combs:

Right back at you.

Leah Lemm:

Thank you.

Marianne Combs:

And I am thrilled to listen with you to all these amazing artists and culture bearers and just reflect together on the wisdom that they share.

Leah Lemm:

And I am particularly excited to hear your conversation with a good friend of mine today. So years ago I moved to Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and when the news came out that I was moving, about a half dozen people told me I needed, needed, to meet our guest today. And well, we met and now we’re good friends, we’re buddies now.

Marianne Combs:

That’s fabulous. And that’s right, this hour we are paying a visit to musician Sam Miltich at his home outside of Grand Rapids.

As a teenager, Sam fell in love with the music of Django Reinhardt and started teaching himself a Roma style jazz guitar. He practiced for hours a day and formed his own band, The Clearwater Hot Club, with his dad playing the upright bass. By the time he was 18, Miltich was being invited to play with bands at Lincoln Center, across the country, and in Europe.

Sam Miltich:

I just couldn’t believe how beautiful the music sounded. Playing with really, really high level musicians was just a thrill.

Marianne Combs:

Then when he was 22, Sam suffered a major psychotic break. He had moved to the Twin Cities and was taking college classes.

Sam Miltich:

It was a complete break from reality. I didn’t know or understand what was happening to me, so I didn’t have any insight into what was happening. I was under a lot of stress. I was working a lot. I was living away from home for the first time in my life. I was in a brand new, serious, committed, first real serious committed relationship where we’re living together and paying bills together. I had this mentality of, I need to get with the program because I had had struggles before this, and so I thought I should take some community college courses and get a degree so I could get a job, a real job, and make some money so I could support myself.

And I’d never lived in an urban area before. And I think all of those factors were quite stressful. And it really put me over the edge. It got to a point where I was really delusional, really, really delusional. I was hyper, hyper paranoid and the delusion was, I was bad, I was evil, I was doing all these things to harm people. And people would say, “Well, what are you doing to harm others?” And I couldn’t cite what it was, I couldn’t even say what it was that I was doing. And then it came down to that my existence was harming other people, so this was my thought process.

Marianne Combs:

In a process that involved much trial and error, Sam was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, got on medication, and started seeing a psychiatrist regularly. He now believes the break was the result of several traumatic events in his youth, including the sudden death of his brother and his family’s home burning down. 15 years later, married and father to two kids, Sam continues to manage the symptoms of his schizophrenia while working as a full-time professional musician. But it’s not easy. A warning to listeners, our conversation includes a discussion of attempted suicide.

Sam Miltich:

I play music, but I always struggle with this feeling of that I just have to quit playing in the music business because it’s really hard to maintain your mental health in the music business. It’s just not conducive to it. It’s a really challenging thing, and it’s ironic that the music itself, the art is so powerfully good in healing for mental health, but the music business does just the exact opposite, the business end of things. It’s this sort of paradox, an irony that exists. And I always feel this thing that I have to quit playing or quit being in the music business because having 12-hour days, four hours driving one way and four hours driving back, and two hours in soundcheck and two hours on the gig, it’s really hard to get a decent amount of sleep.

And it’s really hard to get good nutrition and it’s really hard to get aerobic exercise. And it’s really hard to maintain a meds regimen on a regular basis where you can take your meds at the same time every day when you’re doing that. And it’s really hard when you’re busting your butt and you just are not getting the financial reward for the amount of time you put in that other people are putting in. And it’s just, it’s so… It’s such a challenge for me to think about it. How do I stay committed to my art and my mental health at the same time? That’s a challenge. It’s something I’m still wrestling with.

Marianne Combs:

You’re an artist who wants to continue being an artist while also doing what’s right for your mental health. And you live in a rural area, northern Minnesota. So how does that play into how you can take care of yourself, what’s available, what works, what doesn’t work?

Sam Miltich:

Well, it’s all interconnected. It’s all connected. I live in a rural area because I’ve always lived in a rural area and I love it. I don’t fit in a city. Even if I didn’t have schizophrenia, I’m not an urban person. It’s not who I am. It doesn’t hold the things that I want to do in my life or value. I remember kids in high school here saying, “There’s just not… I can’t wait to get out of Grand Rapids. There’s nothing to do here.” Whereas what I would say is, “Wait a minute. In April, we make maple syrup. In May and June, we catch walleyes. All the way from the spring, from Memorial to Labor Day, we’re gardening. We’re also fishing during that entire time from mid-August to mid-September, we’re collecting wild rice. Then early teal season happens for ducks. Then early goose season happens, then grouse season opens, then archery deer season opens, then duck season opens. Then November deer season is open. Then we can take a trip down to southwestern Minnesota and chase after pheasants if we get our venison in the freezer.”

“Then once December comes, we hang up the deer stand and put out the spear house for fishing. Then the good crappy fishing is right around Christmas and New Year’s, and I can spear right up through February, and if I need to take the dog for a walk, I can grab my shotgun and see if I see a snowshoe here, and then we’re back to maple syrup season.” And it was never that there was nothing to do here. From the time I was a little… I did a presentation on the circle of life when I was in kindergarten, I’ve been just deep into this natural world stuff from the time I was a little kid and my dad was involved with it. He gardened and fished and hunted. So it was in the blood. My granddad fished like crazy, my great grandpapa fished, and he was the first generation that was up here. I had both my grandpas on both sides were hunters. My dad was a hunter. It’s just in the culture. It’s in the way we live.

Marianne Combs:

And it sounds like it’s key to your mental health.

Sam Miltich:

It is. That’s the thing about it, just a common factor for me in terms of maintaining mental health is if I’m outdoors and doing physically active work, I do great. I just have so few symptoms, it’s just key to my mental health. The other thing is, an urban environment for someone with a psychotic illness, I am so overstimulated that I can barely function. My paranoia is through the roof. My anxiety is through the roof. My stress is through the roof. What fills my cup is solitude in the natural world. Playing music when I’m on stage and sharing that experience with the musicians, the interplay that happens in jazz music, that fills my cup, but long drive, not anymore. They don’t fill my cup. It takes something from me and having to book and do bids for how much money we’re going to get, it’s getting harder and harder for me.

Marianne Combs:

You have to sell yourself.

Sam Miltich:

And I don’t like that, that’s not who I am. I value humility in my life. And for one, I just don’t think that I’m all that great. I don’t feel like I’m all that special. So I feel like a phony when I try and sell myself. I feel like a fraud. Humility was always a value that was taught to me. And frankly, whatever skill that I do possess has come from humility of recognizing what I’m lacking. You don’t get better by tooting your own horn. You get better as a musician by looking at what you lack and how to fill in those knowledge gaps. Humility is how we grow as human beings. That’s like a spiritual principle to me, we spiritually grow as humans through humility, in my mind.

It’s recognition that you’re not the most important thing in the world, that maybe altruism and thinking about other people is maybe a deeper meaning than that. So this business of selling yourself, I can’t stand it. I just don’t like it. It’s pretty challenging making a living in northern Minnesota as a gigging musician. One of the issues is that rural areas, we just don’t have the same amount of money that urban areas have. Just a lot more wealth concentrated in an urban area. It’s not a judgment, it’s just a fact. And there’s not as much disposable income for people to hire you and pay you well.

What’s been my saving grace has been the Regional Arts Council, Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and the Minnesota State Arts Board through grant projects. That’s really helped me make a living. And then there have been people and venues up here that have been really dedicated and just good people, goodhearted people that are like me and like others, just dedicated to keeping art going in northern Minnesota. And we actually have a really pretty, though it might not be as large, a pretty tightly-knit arts community up here that’s got a lot of great, super dedicated people that are doing their best to keep things going under challenging circumstances. So I’m still in the process of trying to meld exactly how I can make all these things exist. And one of the things that I told myself in my recovery was, nothing is more important than your mental health, because all else hinges upon that.

None of the rest is possible. If you’re in psychosis, how good are you to your kids if you’re in the hospital? If you’re in psychosis, you’re so confused you can’t even figure out what scales to practice when you sit down to practice with a guitar. So you got to be able to maintain your mental health. That’s got to be the first priority, and then we build from there. So you can’t do things that risk it. I feel like with the pandemic, I’m shifting a little bit, reprioritizing like we all are because we hear that across the board with people, and I have a grant to purchase home recording equipment, and I’m just feeling like I want to spend more time writing music and recording.

Because I can set aside a chunk of three hours and be in total solitude in my home, and then in the afternoon I can go out in my garden and do my work. I don’t know if I can make any money that way, but at least I can continue my art. And with grant funding, we just got a grant from the State Arts Board to bring guest artists to Grand Rapids for 12 months to do our First Friday celebration. So I get to bring my super awesome jazz players up north and we get to do our jazz series. And so that’s grant funded, so I’m just thinking along those lines. And then those venues up here that are really dedicated to arts and musicians and those ones that do exist, we’re really lucky. So yeah, it’s a tricky thing.

Marianne Combs:

In terms of, I mean, because you have seen it firsthand, how do you feel about the resources available for mental healthcare in rural Minnesota? I mean, obviously this is where you need to be for your mental health because of the nature, but my understanding is that whether you’re in the cities or in rural Minnesota, there aren’t enough resources for mental health? I don’t know.

Sam Miltich:

Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. I have to admit, it’s so much better than it was. When I first got sick, oh my god, it was just… There was so little available and it was just kind of so inadequate. And fortunately, Itasca County is I think the most funded and has the most resources available of any rural county in the state. So it’s gotten a lot better up here, but it was not very good to start. So that’s back in 2006, ’07, ’08, something like that. And I just think the conversation around mental illness and mental health in general is, I didn’t even know what the word schizophrenia was when I was a kid. And then when I was a teenager it was, oh, it was the bad guy in the movie that was the ax murderer. I didn’t know anything about it until I had it.

And I don’t ever remember… It was like these… If you’re talking about mental illness, it was like these hushed conversations around the coffee table where you couldn’t let the kids hear about it, and there was no conversation about it. And that has really changed for the better. I still think we have a really long ways to go because there’s the statistic that people with a major mental illness live 15 to 20 years less than the general population. It’s not because the illness kills them, it’s because they’re homeless. It’s because they’re addicted to a substance. It’s that they aren’t able to get both adequate mental healthcare and physical healthcare. So there’s heart disease, there’s stroke, there’s addiction to drugs and alcohol and cigarettes, and there’s poor diet because of poverty. So the illness isn’t killing the people, but it’s our lack of care as a society for this demographic.

So it’s kind of funny because I’m a mental health advocate and we talk about it a lot, and I’m at the point where I’m like, “Let’s just get that statistic changed, let’s just get people out of poverty.” How do we get people out of poverty? And how do we reduce stigma? Which, as Sue Abderholden from NAMI Minnesota says, she told me, “We’re just moving away from the term stigma, we’re just going to call it what it is, which is discrimination.” Discrimination in terms of, people are unable to get insured. They can’t get healthcare. For instance, this is just one very minor example, but I can’t get life insurance at all because I have schizophrenia, because I’m more likely to kill myself. The statistic is because of suicide. So if I go, Katie gets nothing because I’m unable to have life insurance.

So that’s just an example of many of the inequality that goes on. And then the other thing is, and I experienced this too, the way the education system is set up is not conducive to people who have symptoms. We’re not able to… At least I’m not able to work in the same capacity. Like college, it was undoable, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t manage symptoms and do community college, it was not possible. It’s still not possible. So I don’t have an education. I have a high school diploma, that was it. So there’s just all these different barriers that are in the way. And even with gigs, it’s so hard for me to commit to something because it’s like, “Well, what if I’m really not doing good that day and I really need to get out in the woods to care for myself?” You can’t really cancel gigs.

And this is another example, if you called into your workplace and said, “I have COVID,” they’d say, “Please don’t come.” If you were to call into a workplace and say, “I’m having a bad mental health day,” “Well what does that even mean? What is a bad mental health day? Well, what are your symptoms?” “Well, I don’t really feel like telling you that I’m having these delusions right now.” And so you don’t get a sick day even though it’s a health condition, you got to show up to work. There’s no paid health days for mental illness.

Marianne Combs:

Or for musicians.

Sam Miltich:

Or for musicians, both of those things. So there have been times when I’ve really felt a deep sense of despair and hopelessness about the conditions under which both artists, just that alone or just alone, people with mental illness, have to live under. And then when you combine both of those things, there’s times it just feels impossible to do. And it’s discouraging. I’m extremely lucky. And the reason I’m extremely lucky is I have parents that live across the road and have been able to help me because they have the means in which to do it. They’re not rich, but they can certainly help. They’re middle class. And my wife, for northern Minnesota, has a good job working at an art center, and she’s able to support me.

If I didn’t have those things, it’d be really hard. It’d be really, really, really hard financially. I have social security disability, which is just barely enough to live on. It would just be poverty, is what it would be. And I say I’m fortunate because there’s a lot of people that don’t have that mom and dad and don’t have that wife. And so they just live in poverty. And guess what, when you’re living in poverty, you can’t really afford a boat to go fishing. And that’s one of the things that helps my mental health. So I just feel like we’re kind of failing a whole subset of the population, folks with mental illness.

And I like this term neurodiverse that’s being used more. And it makes sense to me. And the reason it makes sense to me is it takes away this idea of that mental illness, in quotes, is a deficit. And that what’s going on is our brains work differently than what would be sort of considered in our society neurotypical. It’s not something we can control, it’s our genetics, it’s how we’re born. It’s the brains that were born into our head. And there’s no doubt it’s a vulnerable population. It’s one of the demographics that there’s a really high incident of police, law enforcement violence and brutality. Someone’s in psychosis, law enforcement doesn’t know how to react, they’re trained with weapons, someone winds up getting killed.

Marianne Combs:

And you had an experience with the police at one point?

Sam Miltich:

I did. Yeah, I did. It wasn’t fun. Fortunately, nothing bad happened to me. But that’s another thing that’s really challenging for me. When my dad had his heart attack, it’s an ambulance that took him to the hospital. When I had to go to the hospital, it was the police. It’s really different when your neighbors see an ambulance pull up to your house or when they see police pull up to your house. And there’s a really brilliant lawyer who teaches at UCLA named Elyn Saks, who also has schizophrenia, and she has this quote, which just kills me. It’s so great. She said, “When I was sick and in the hospital, nobody brought me flowers.” That’s not what happens when you have a mental illness. People don’t…

You don’t get hot dishes and flowers and it just doesn’t happen that way. So it’s treated really different, there’s social consequences, there’s economic consequences that occur. And I’m not crying the blues because I have a beautiful life, obviously you can see that, just being in my home and the natural surroundings and explaining to you how I live, but it’s paradoxical. I don’t know how I wound up this lucky, I didn’t do anything to be this lucky. But the combination of living in a rural setting, living with a mental illness, and trying to be an artist, it’s hard. It’s not easy. But like I say, I don’t know how to talk about it even because I’m not trying to cry the blues. That’s not what it is.

Marianne Combs:

But you are somebody who can speak to larger audiences, and in fact, you’ve done that with your work in terms of your performances.

Sam Miltich:

Yes.

Marianne Combs:

You want to talk a little bit about what some of the concerts, the shows you’ve taken on tour?

Sam Miltich:

Yeah. Well, I developed a program called The Improvised Life, though I… We’ll see what I do with that title, if I’ll keep it, because it’s very close to the title of a book that Alan Arkin wrote. I didn’t realize that I had accidentally used that. That’s a great book, by the way. But it’s a program that I wrote… Or no, I didn’t write, my wife wrote a Minnesota State Arts Board grant for, and I toured around the state and my primary objective was to tell my story of my recovery from mental illness and how my artistic pursuits helped that. And my primary audience was I wanted to tour rural Minnesota. I didn’t want to go to the Twin Cities or St. Cloud or Duluth or Rochester. I wanted to play in places like Roseau or Northfield or Hibbing, small towns, rural communities, because I always feel like in terms of both art and mental health, they’re underserved.

And one of the things is in rural, there’s this assumption that we’re not well-educated and that we all just like country music or some kind of folk music. And I just got really tired of that, and it’s like, I know all kinds of people up here that love jazz, and I want to bring jazz to rural Minnesota and give people access and opportunity to experience really high quality jazz. So I had Chris Bates and Nathan Norman and Dave Carr with me, who were top of the top Minnesota jazz musicians, playing up in International Falls with me. The reception for it was remarkable because people were so, I think, hungry to have someone talk about this. So played in I Falls, we played in Cook, northeastern Minnesota, and everyone would come up to me, “Where can I get help?” And I’m going, “Oh my god, I need someone here who knows where the resources are because I’m just a guy telling my story. I don’t know where your local resource is.”

“My kid is struggling with this. My cousin is struggling with this. My husband is struggling with this. Your story gives me so much hope. I finally feel a sense of hope. I’ve been wanting to talk about this, get this off my chest, and I’m been so nervous to even say anything about it.” And it was like the reception was just huge. It was just massive. And so I try and address all these issues and I do feel like I can talk to a broader audience about it because it’s like, there’s a lot of fights to fight in this world. There’s a lot of injustice. And I’m a believer in commitment to social justice. And sometimes we got to ask ourself, what battles can we win? You got to pick and choose your battles. And I think we pick and choose our battles to what we can speak to best in our own life experience because people really take stuff in when it comes from a personal experience.

It seems like until it happens to us, we don’t really fully grasp it. But the other thing is, there’s a lot of intersections with these different social movements. There’s common threads and common themes that come out of it. And there can be a really beautiful dialogue of how to make life better for humans on planet Earth. We can do this. We can be human again, we can show compassion and we can show care and we can show love and we can show acceptance for all these diverse ways of existing as human beings on planet Earth, which is this precious gift of life that we have.

We’re alive, we’re here today breathing this air, being in this place, and it’s a gift. And when you’ve stared down suicide two times in your life and you recover from that, life is pretty sweet. Life is very sweet because you looked over the edge, you looked into the abyss, you saw the darkness, you saw the mystery of what human consciousness, existence, non-existence, the unknowing and the unknowable of our most vulnerable states of who we are and how terrifying that is. It makes sitting in that deer stand and watching grouse budding in a hazel bush that much sweeter.

Marianne Combs:

You’re listening to the song Crepescule with Katie off of Sam Miltich’s CD, Peasants with Torches, which I just love.

Leah Lemm:

Mm-hmm, I could listen to Sam’s music all day, so relaxing, and thank you for sharing this with me. When I moved to the Northwoods, I had this romantic notion, in fact, that notion could probably have the soundtrack be Crepescule with Katie, no joke. But so I thought I’d become this more earthy and woodsy person with pet birds and deer coming to my hand, eating from my hand. But-

Marianne Combs:

Right, right, magical relationship with nature.

Leah Lemm:

That’s right. But the woods, it’s just so much more like Sam said, a gift. And we have this responsibility to coexist. So what I’m hearing from Sam throughout this is that a lot of us are living in conflict with our surroundings and with society around us. So being in the woods, we can try to live in harmony. And to go back to what Sam shared about when you’re sick with mental health issues, people don’t bring flowers.

Marianne Combs:

It’s such a hard truth.

Leah Lemm:

Yeah, a lot of times people will disappear. There’s the societal response to mental health that is more complicated, that isn’t as nurturing, where the woods, frankly, is not really judgemental.

Marianne Combs:

Yeah, and I can see how it would be seductive to just retreat into the woods away from society. But Sam isn’t doing that, he’s working to actually change the social response to mental health by creating and touring his show, The Improvised Life, he’s opened up a dialogue. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post-performance conversation in Cook, Minnesota.

Speaker 4:

My son was diagnosed bipolar schizophrenic a year ago. And my question to you is, at what point did you decide that medication is the way to go? It’s torn my family apart. His mom, I have to worry about him. Is he going to hurt himself?

Sam Miltich:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

Hurt others. He doesn’t want to come to admit, or he doesn’t want to accept his diagnosis.

Sam Miltich:

Sure.

Speaker 4:

He feels that medication will make him not think anymore.

Sam Miltich:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

How do you get to someone that is in a manic state? How do you try to get them to go to their doctor? Because like I said, this has been a nightmare for my family and being that he’s 21, our hands are tied and I’ve been told by doctors and law enforcement that, “Unfortunately there isn’t anything we can do for you or your son until he hurts himself or others.” And I can’t accept that.

Sam Miltich:

Yeah, I wish I had an answer.

Speaker 4:

Did you accept your diagnosis and did you… It just…

Sam Miltich:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

It’s hard.

Sam Miltich:

Yeah, it’s extremely hard. And when I put this program together, there’s certain things that I just simply don’t share. There’s things that I’m willing to share and things that I keep to myself because it’s such a challenging subject. And I mean, it’s probably hard to hear this, but the only person that can really come to grips with that is him. I guess for me, my life just got to a point where it just started falling apart and it became clear to me that if I wanted to have any semblance of a life or any sort of sense of normality, that I had to come to grips with the fact that I had this illness. And the medication part is a really hard part because you’re afraid that your essence of who you are will be taken from you by the medication and you have that fear.

And medication is a very scary thing to begin because you don’t know how you’re going to react to anyone given medication. And the other thing that you have to bear in mind as both a patient and as a family member is that, at least from my… The thing I have to say, that this is just merely my experience. I’m not a mental health professional and this is just my story. So in regards to how I coped with it, it took a while before I found what the right medication was, and it was kind of walking through hell trying to figure out what the right meds were.

And I did fortunately find something that works, but I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it’s not fun to take them. My experience with taking antipsychotics is that there’s a… I feel like I can’t breathe. I feel like I’m sort of suffocating at night when I take my meds. About an hour after I take it, I feel this intense pain in my chest and this sort of crushing feeling like… It’s like when you’re trying to catch your breath and you can’t quite crest the ridge, so you don’t feel like you can really breathe, for me. And I’ll share that with you, and it’s been 10 years of my life doing that.

Marianne Combs:

That was Sam in a post performance Q&A in Cook, Minnesota, sharing some really intimate and difficult truths.

Leah Lemm:

Mm-hmm, and that’s what I appreciate about Sam so much. He says things that are tough to hear, but he is this embodiment of sharing and vulnerability and strength all in one. In fact, Sam has helped me, through our friendship, feel more okay with my own struggles, gaining perspective and camaraderie and not feeling alone. Yeah, so I really appreciate that about Sam. And another thing that Sam highlights is such an important tool, such a good practice, is setting boundaries.

Marianne Combs:

Oh, yes. Mm-hmm.

Leah Lemm:

And we can all do this to help keep ourselves in a place that we feel good and comfortable operating. I’m not saying it’s easy, I don’t think Sam’s saying it’s easy, but it’s-

Marianne Combs:

Oh no, no.

Leah Lemm:

… a place where we feel empowered to make decisions about how we move through the world.

Marianne Combs:

And it’s a real skill. I mean, whether you’re the person who is working through a mental health issue and you’re trying to figure out what are the right boundaries for yourself in order to keep you happy and healthy and safe, or whether you’re the person who’s like a parent or a loved one who’s trying to set boundaries in order to help their loved one who’s working through a mental health issue, but maybe also needs to set their own personal boundaries to keep themselves healthy and safe, it’s just, it’s very delicate, complex work.

Leah Lemm:

Absolutely.

Marianne Combs:

I asked Sam, if he could change the way the world works, what would he do? And I love his answer.

Sam Miltich:

If we were living in a perfect world, I would hope that people with mental illnesses would have enough financial resources to take the pressure off of them so they could spend the time to be able to do what they need to recover. I actually think a lot of social problems… And I’m not kidding, I mean, I think about world conflict and they say, “Oh, well this is an ethnic conflict,” or, “This is a religious conflict.” It never really is, that’s just made up for saying, “This is just another land grab.” This is just another way for the powerful to take land, which is resources, away from other people. And the problem is, there’s just not enough resources to go around or people are asking for more than what they need. It’s happened all over the globe for all of history. Just a land grab, right?

So my feeling in theory is this, if people have enough resources, social issues just start to melt away. I think a lot of issues just melt away. If there’s equality, and not just equality, but equity and people have what they need, people are just a lot happier. There’s a lot less conflict when people are happy, because they have enough time for leisure. They have enough time for family. They have enough time for those things I just described, for love, for relaxation. And the way we think about work in our society, our concept of work is really strange. This nine-to-five is a construct that not everyone needs to prescribe to or live by or even has. Think about our deep… That’s what I love about hunting, is it’s like it’s a really deep and ancient thing for us as humans. And all of us did this to survive.

Same is true for gardening, any kind of harvesting. This is the back to the basics. What I wish… And this is an interesting statistic, people with mental illnesses, in quote, unquote, I’m just going to use quotes here, underdeveloped nations or places that are not part of like the wealthier nations on Earth, where they have less access to mental healthcare actually do better. And that’s a cultural thing. It’s because there’s more time spent outdoors, there’s more time spent with family. There’s more of a natural human life that exists within these cultures. And there’s a lot of Indigenous cultures where their whole framework in thinking about mental illness is very different. And it’s not when… I think even when we frame it as an illness, because we talk about the disparity between mental health and physical health. Well, even that conversation is a little bit off because we’re dividing out the body, that the head is somehow not connected to the body. It’s not holistic, how we’re thinking about it. So that already creates an illness model. And when we have illness, we think of that as deficiency.

They’re deficient in some way and less capable. Well, that’s not necessarily the truth. It’s different, it’s a different way of being, it’s a different human value system. And so just the paradigm of mental illness versus neurodiversity, which we talked about, are two different things. And so I think if people with mental illness had enough financial resources that they could live comparably and had enough to live, what you get off of social security disability is not enough to live. I’m on it and I still have to work. I think if people had that, they would have the ability to say, “You know what? I don’t have to go to work today because I need to go take a walk in the woods. I need to be with my dog in the woods because I’m experiencing pretty intense delusions right now and I know that when I’m in the woods, the stress of the input goes down, diminishes, my symptoms decrease. I do better.”

So I think if we just provided enough resources… But that comes down to cultural values too, of… Capitalism isn’t good for mental health. It’s just not, I’m going to say it out loud. I know it’s going to be on a podcast and it’s going to be published. Capitalism sucks for mental illness. It doesn’t work. The way our education system is set up, is set up for people to succeed in this capitalist society that we live in because we have to, because it’s the world that we live in. So we have to set it up that way to do that. And that education system doesn’t work for people with mental illness. You can’t. I can’t, anyways. Maybe some people can, but I can’t do that. And…

Marianne Combs:

You also said to me, I remember in a previous conversation, you said to me that people with mental illnesses or mental health issues or are neurodiverse are like canaries in the coal mine.

Sam Miltich:

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. They are canaries in the coal mine in the sense that we don’t understand how schizophrenia works. It’s some combination of genetics and personal experience. So it’s personal events that occur, it’s environment that can trigger those genetic factors into what would become psychosis. And why are we having a… I’m hearing on NPR and all these different news outlets that there’s this mental health crisis going on in the US. Well, duh. Of course. The way our society is set up does not promote good mental health because it’s not humane. We don’t live in a humane world. And I’m not going to name names or parties per se, but there are people and people in power and parties in power that essentially, just in essence, have embraced cruelty.

It’s just cruelty and it’s inhumane. We need to create a more human world of inclusion and acceptance and providing for people what they need. And it just comes down to simple tenants. Treat others the way you want to be treated. Be kind, be compassionate, be generous. When you’re a kid, what are you told? Do you have more than someone else? We teach our kids to be generous. But then there’s these moral injuries that people suffer, people who… My dad is a combat vet, he was in the Marine Corps. People have these moral injuries because we’re taught from the time we’re little kids that were supposed to be kind, we’re not supposed to fight, it’s not good to hit. And then there’s this… People are 18 years old and all of this is supposed to be thrown out the window and you’re trained to kill other human beings.

So you’re just supposed to forget all of this indoctrination and all this socialization that you have, and it’s just supposed to be thrown out the window with this training? And why are these conflicts happening? Well, it’s always wars of conquest over resources, of course. You know what I mean? That’s human history. It’s all of human history. But see, that’s the whole deal with this to me, is it always boils down to the natural world. It always boils down to simply resources. It’s just the most basic thing. And that’s why when me, with someone with mental illness or other mentally ill people, start to feel well because they’re living human lives, they’re seen as humans, they’re viewed as humans, they’re living humane lives, and we can’t escape our evolution.

We are children of the Earth. It is the Earth that has given us life. And we’ve moved, in my opinion… These are all opinions, none of these are facts and people can disagree with me. I’m perfectly okay with that. We’re children of the Earth and when we engage with Mother Earth, when we engage with our family, which is the Earth and the other living creatures that are on the earth, we’re going to feel more whole, we’re going to feel more connected, we’re going to feel more human. So in answer to your question, this is long-winded, when mentally ill people are given the resources that they need, they can live more human lives. They’re going to have fewer symptoms, they’re going to be happier, they’re going to be healthier, and we’re not going to have to see them as ill. We can see them as neurodiverse.

Marianne Combs:

And the other thing that I find so interesting that you point to with this is that these are all things that would benefit everyone.

Sam Miltich:

Everybody. Everybody. And so that’s why I was saying there’s all this, we’re using these terms now, intersectionality and all this stuff, there’s all these crossed and mixed paths. We’re all so connected as human beings, even though we think we have these massive differences between us, we’re so connected. And to me, that’s another huge part of the mental illness thing, is human connection. When we can connect with other people, when we can connect with humans, we’re part of that community. And that social isolation that occurs, that stigma with mental health that occurs decreases. It’s human connection, it’s connection to the natural world, it’s connection to art, but not art for the sake of the capitalist system, like I was saying, the business. So it’s not the music that’s not good for you, it’s capitalism. I think one of the things that’s with mental health and rural people is I think that, I don’t know if this is the right term, erasure, maybe?

I think for a lot of people, it’s a lot more convenient to just ignore that mentally ill people exist because we didn’t use to talk about it. And there’s a kind of cruelty in the feeling that you don’t even… You’re not even there. And so we’re here, we exist, and I think I’m grateful that people are talking about it and I want to see more action. The same is true of people in rural areas. I think there’s this kind of, people forget in the arts world because most of the arts world is centered in Twin Cities or other metropolitan areas, there are those of us who are artists in rural parts of the state, and it’s not all just folk art. There’s very intelligent, highly educated, creative people in rural Minnesota. And our art is just as worthy as art in a metro, and the other thing is we’re just as deserving of having arts opportunities to experience in our rural communities.

Marianne Combs:

That’s Sam Miltich, jazz musician, mental health advocate, and just a wonderful human being. Leah, I can see why you two are friends.

Leah Lemm:

Sam is so great, and I love the recognition of the brilliance of people in rural areas, and Sam is an excellent example.

Marianne Combs:

Absolutely. And I love the idea that by making society more welcoming and manageable for people who are neurodivergent, that we’re really making the world a better, healthier place for everyone.

Leah Lemm:

Totally. And we all benefit from that.

Marianne Combs:

You’ve been listening to Filling the Well. I’m Marianne Combs.

Leah Lemm:

And I’m Leah Lemm. Tune in next time when we talk with two Indigenous culture bearers about their relationships with the land and water.

Marianne Combs:

This podcast was produced and edited by Emily Goldberg and mixed by Eric and Amanda Romani, with original music by Dameun Strange. Special thanks to Bramble Films, Kristian Berg, and Bernie Baudry, who provided us with the recording of the performance in Cook, Minnesota. The recording was made for an upcoming documentary on Sam, which we can’t wait to see.

Leah Lemm:

One out of every five Americans lives with a mental health condition. If you’re looking for resources for you or a loved one, we recommend paying a visit to nami.org. The website of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, that’s N-A-M-I .org.

Marianne Combs:

Filling the Well is a podcast of Arts Midwest, amplifying the power of Midwestern creativity. Find out more at artsmidwest.org.