Brandon Staglin

Brandon Staglin

Brandon Staglin: President of One Mind

Brandon Staglin grew up in Lafayette, a small suburban town near San Francisco, California. At age 7, he remembers his feelings of excitement when his sister was born. He and his sister remain close today. Though Brandon grew up in a small-town environment, his parents often took him and his sister abroad, traveling to Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Beijing. They also went on safaris in Tanzania and Kenya.

As a child, Brandon was advanced academically, and his teachers felt it was best for him to skip eighth grade. He remembers the challenges of studying with students who were all older and more advanced in their social development. He missed his former classmates.

At 14 years old, Brandon traveled to the Three Sisters Wilderness in Oregon where he would learn wilderness training along with 10 other teenagers as part of the Outward-Bound Program. He and his peers would guide rafts down rapids, climb glaciers, and hike to the top of the famous South Sister Peak.

He remembers his first solo trip during training where he was isolated in a wilderness campsite for a couple of days. Alone in the mountains, he began to reflect on principles to live by, realizing the need to believe in yourself and to believe yourself. He became determined to not fear the future and to not regret the past. He also realized that anything was possible and that he could accomplish great things. To this day, Brandon still thinks back to his meditation while alone in the wilderness and still holds these principles dear.

From his early years, Brandon was a science fiction fan and dreamed of building the world’s first interstellar spacecraft. This motivated him to excel throughout high school, taking advanced placement classes during his junior and senior year and always achieving 5, the highest score.

In addition to academics in high school, Brandon participated in track and intramural soccer. He also served as captain of the soccer team during his senior year, playing center half back.

Brandon traveled to Switzerland at age 16 as an exchange student, staying for six weeks with a family that only spoke French. While in Europe, he enjoyed perfecting his French, as well as mountain climbing and integrating into a new culture. He also began to think seriously about his college plans. A friend who traveled with him to Europe was about to leave for Dartmouth College, and after some serious thought, Brandon made it his new goal to study engineering at Dartmouth. In addition to their excellent engineering program, he looked forward to living in an area near open wilderness.

Brandon’s hard work in school paid off, and he realized his dream, winning a National Merit Scholarship to attend Dartmouth College following his senior year of high school.

Despite the excitement of beginning classes at Dartmouth, Brandon experienced serious culture shock in New Hampshire. The college environment was very different from the small town where he had grown up. He remembers the “prep school” environment, which he was not used to. However, he was able to make a few close friends. Brandon finished his first year in Dartmouth’s engineering program successfully, achieving a 3.7 GPA.

Back home for summer, Brandon looked for a paying job, but found it much more difficult than he anticipated. He eventually decided to volunteer at the Oakland Zoo to study the behavior of chimpanzees. While at Dartmouth, Brandon had added a second major, anthropology, and he felt the study of chimpanzees would complement this other major.

In addition to a stressful job search, during the summer after his freshman year, Brandon broke up with a serious girlfriend. He experienced significant anxiety, and for the first time in his life, felt he could not stop ruminating on his thoughts. He found himself unable to focus on work and unable to communicate effectively with others.

Increasingly anxious and stressed, Brandon soon took a turn for the worse. He began to feel that all the stress and tension he was experiencing came to a point on the right half of his head, behind his right eye, and that the tension had snapped. Suddenly, all the emotions that he was used to feeling about people in his life and memories from the past became inaccessible. He could not even recognize his feelings anymore.

With the sensation that half of his mind had disappeared, he felt that any new experiences and the awareness of his surroundings would only form through the right side of his body, and this would create a new personality. He recalls his mind becoming a “dark vortex of dread.”

Unable to sleep, Brandon began wandering around his community looking for a place where he could close his eyes and not be distracted, hoping to bring back the “right half” of his mind by sheer willpower. This search for solitude culminated when he was driving the freeway at 2:00 in the morning with his eyes closed. Hearing police sirens, he woke up, found himself swerving in and out of control, and became afraid, unsure of what he would say to the police. He passed a sobriety test but was still apprehended for reckless driving.

Police suspected him of using alcohol or cocaine. He was mandated to stay the night in a holding cell until his breath test came back negative in the morning, when he was finally released. Even though he had not slept for five days, he had not been able to sleep in the holding cell.

Following his night in jail, he was given a free bus pass. He picked up his car, which the police had parked for him in a nearby parking spot. He spent the rest of the day wandering around the community, still looking for a quiet place.

Later that day, afraid that his heart would stop after five days without sleep and unable to recognize that he was having a psychotic break, he called for an ambulance. However, emergency medical personnel could find nothing wrong with him. He did not mention to them that he had been unable to sleep.

Brandon’s parents had left on a trip to France a few days prior to his first psychotic episode. After his quick discharge from the emergency room, he decided to telephone a friend from high school, admitting that he was in desperate need of medical help, though he could not find the words to communicate what he was feeling.

Together with his high school friend, Brandon drove to a local psychiatric hospital in Walnut Creek, California. At first, Brandon did not want to admit he was struggling with a mental illness or enter the psychiatric hospital as a patient. However, following an evaluation at the hospital, he was informed that if he did not check in voluntarily, he would be involuntarily committed. Not wanting to have an involuntary commitment in his permanent legal records, he consented to enter the hospital for a three-day hold.

Because he appeared agitated, on his admission, Brandon was placed in an isolation room for an hour, which he found frightening. Meeting with other people who exhibited strange behavior felt uncomfortable, and he could not relate to them.

Following admission, Brandon was not seen by a physician for a day and a half, and then was offered no specific diagnosis, though he was told he had a thought disorder from a chemical imbalance in his brain. While in the hospital, he continued unsuccessfully to get back the right half of his mind through willpower.

Brandon was prescribed the medication thiothixene (Navane) which made him agitated. He remembers Navane as “stifling,” as though there was “thunder and lightning in my head.” The evening he started Navane, he tried to make a run for it and leave the locked ward. Tackled by a group of hospital staff, he was injected with a sedative for sleep. Brandon was then hospitalized again.

After his parents’ return from France, they took Brandon home from the locked ward against his doctor’s recommendation. Brandon and his parents managed to find a good psychiatrist who they could trust, though Brandon felt marginalized and resentful from the hospitalization. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia soon after, in 1990.

Brandon’s new psychiatrist took him off Navane and tried another medication, trifluoperazine (Stelazine) which gave him a seizure. Despite nearly intolerable side effects, with his parents’ encouragement, Brandon worked with his doctor to adjust his medications and consistently took them as prescribed.

After trying various medications for a few months, which were mostly ineffective, Brandon grew depressed and became suicidal, feeling he had lost everything. He experienced delusions, believing that if he made small mistakes, he would be thrown into hell forever. These delusions were very real to him and left him scared and exhausted. He hoped that he would make right choices and then die in his sleep shortly after. His medications did not help with these delusions.

He recalls a night when he was sleeping in his parents’ front yard in a sleeping bag under the stars, hoping that he would die in his sleep on a moral high note to enter heaven. During that night Brandon suddenly remembered his primary goal—to build starships. He realized there was so much more in life to see, experience, and do. He left his sleeping bag outside and came back into his parents’ home, determined to fight and not give up on his dreams.

The next medication Brandon tried was clozapine. After a few weeks, he found it to be the only medication he tried that was both tolerable and effective.

Thanks to clozapine, a sense of purpose, and a loving family unconditionally supporting him, Brandon began to get well. For some time, he could not feel his parents’ love, but knew it was there, and knew he wanted to feel it again. He was determined to recover. On clozapine, he began auditing classes at Berkeley. He also contributed to his community by volunteering at the zoo again, and at the Marine Mammal Center near Sausalito, helping sick and injured seals and sea lions. Brandon’s dream was to return to Dartmouth, which he successfully did in January of 1991.

Back at Dartmouth, Brandon carefully hid his diagnosis, expecting no one to empathize or understand, so he struggled socially. It took a few years for him to achieve grades as high as he had earned his first semester. But with treatment compliance and a strong will, Brandon graduated with his engineering bachelor’s degree in 1993 with honors.

Following graduation, Brandon took a job at an engineering firm in Silicon Valley called Space Systems Loral where he designed communication satellites for various companies as well as the federal government. For three years, he worked successfully full-time, faithfully taking clozapine.

Ambitious for his future, Brandon finally decided to return to school to study engineering in a graduate program. He was accepted at Stanford as well as his dream school, MIT.

While on clozapine, Brandon slept nine hours a night. Planning for the future, he realized that he could not thrive in a master’s degree program without regularly studying late into the night. He had been stable for years without a psychotic relapse and hoped to be able to live without needing any antipsychotic medications. Planning for life at MIT, he discontinued clozapine.

Six months after discontinuing clozapine, while working, Brandon suffered his second major psychotic break. He experienced tactile pain, feeling as though he was being stabbed with knives in his head and side. He began to experience what he had felt before—that the two halves of his brain were not working together. Because he could not sleep or concentrate, he was admitted to the University of California at San Francisco Hospital for a week in 1996. A retrial of clozapine was ineffective. This time, he was prescribed a cocktail of medications including olanzapine, lorazepam, paroxetine, and risperidone. Brandon describes himself as “stable” at that time, but not thriving. He would never begin graduate engineering studies.

Out of the hospital, Brandon moved into a small San Francisco apartment where he would be near his psychiatrist. He could not work or socialize normally, was unmotivated, and felt entirely alone.

About that time, in 1995, Brandon’s parents founded the nonprofit organization International Mental Health Research Organization (IMHRO) which they later renamed One Mind.

From its onset, One Mind always supported research into better treatments for schizophrenia. One of the first initiatives of One Mind involved a clinical trial on cognitive training at the San Francisco Veteran’s Affair’s Medical Center, spearheaded by Professor Sophia Vinogradov. Brandon took part in this trial as a subject. The project involved brain training exercises on a computer an hour a day for five days a week over a period of two months.

Participating in the program took discipline, but Brandon hoped the cognitive training would enable him to feel better and progress in his recovery. He also felt he was contributing to science by helping others.

This experience was a turning point in his recovery. On completing the program, Brandon was able to focus better on conversations and in general, which researchers believed resulted from the strengthening of neural pathways. Cognitive training helped Brandon get past a plateau he had reached on medications alone.

Following completion of the cognitive training program, Brandon moved back from his apartment in San Francisco to the Napa Valley, where he would live at his family’s home again. In 1998, he began to work for his family’s vineyard. He taught himself HTML website coding from a book and created a website for the vineyard, working as the site’s webmaster for a few years.

About that time, Brandon encountered a family whose son’s journey through schizophrenia was remarkably similar to his own. Off medication, he had also had a similar relapse to Brandon’s. Meeting this young man’s family helped Brandon learn the value of mental health advocacy, and Brandon began to consider the injustice and inadequate treatment of millions of persons around the world struggling with schizophrenia. He developed a new goal: to help people with schizophrenia around the world improve their lives.

The medication aripiprazole was approved by the FDA in 2004, and Brandon was switched to this medication in 2005. At first, the medication made him restless, which he dealt with by exercising for hours at a time. But after committing to exercise, he lost 50 pounds he had gained on other medications. And with exercise, the medication was tolerable.

In 2005, hoping to make a positive impact, Brandon joined One Mind as the Director of Communications. That same year, in the fall, he met the love of his life. For the next decade, Brandon worked both for One Mind and the Staglin Family Vineyard. In 2015, he joined the Board of Directors of One Mind.

In 2017, Brandon decided to move forward in his career by earning a master’s of science degree in healthcare administration and interprofessional leadership at the University of California in San Francisco. He was open about his schizophrenia with the university, and the university was welcoming and supportive. Halfway through the program, which lasted 18 months, he was promoted to President of One Mind.

Today, Brandon continues to serve as President of One Mind and helps with his family’s vineyard on the side. He is celebrating 14 years of marriage and still lives near family in the Napa Valley.

Brandon has been symptom free since the early 2000s. In recovery, he sometimes experiences feelings of mild paranoia when not getting enough sleep or under a great deal of stress, but he easily recognizes it when it begins. With enough sleep and rest, it resolves quickly.

Today, Brandon is an avid guitar player. In 2017, he performed an original song he wrote about schizophrenia recovery at four events around the United States, including at Mental Health America’s national conference and at One Mind’s annual fundraiser. Today, as Brandon leads One Mind as President, he continues to balance his hard work with practicing guitar at home, which enhances his personal life’s sense of meaning.

Brandon would encourage anyone struggling with schizophrenia to hold on to hope, have aspirations, and always make plans. He remembers that, even while ill, finding meaning was still within his reach with good treatment and family support. He also believes it is important for the patient to participate in their own care and recovery.

For family members, it is important to know that symptoms of illness can mask a loved one’s aspirations and personality. But treatment can make a person’s goals and personality shine through. It is vital to never give up on your loved one with schizophrenia. And it is also important for people living with schizophrenia to never give up on themselves.

Brandon believes in the power of purpose and of love from family and friends in his healing and eventual full recovery and is particularly grateful for his family for never giving up on him. He is proud of his and his family’s contribution to the recovery of thousands through the work of One Mind.

Today, One Mind is a nonprofit catalyzing visionary change through science, business, and media to transform the world’s mental health. Through Brandon’s work with One Mind, he aims to create a world where all facing brain health challenges can build healthy, productive lives.

www.OneMind.org