At its core, punk rock is a confrontation. This confrontation takes many forms. Sometimes it’s about the music, such as when the Ramones bucked conventional norms to deliver blistering two-minute songs. Other times it’s the lyrical content such as the searing poetry of Patti Smith. Perhaps it’s the performance, like the incendiary live shows of Alan Vega and Marty Rev of Suicide. Or maybe it’s the Do-It-Yourself ethos of Ian MacKaye when he formed Dischord Records.
Regardless of its specific form, punk rock confrontation tends to have two consistent features. The first is that punk rock is for everyone. You don’t need particular expertise or skills – just the determination to express yourself. The second is that invariably, punk rock deals with intense and often frightening emotions that do not necessarily find expression in more mainstream culture. As such, punk rock was never exclusively a form of music. It has always been a spirit and an intention for anyone to confront society with uncomfortable truths through any form of expression.
One of the most uncomfortable and frightening topics facing our society today is mental illness. The ignorance and fear that surrounds mental illness has given rise to an unrelenting and harsh stigma that both condemns people with mental illness and blames them for their condition. Part of what fuels the stigma is that everyone involved – those who suffer from mental illness, family, friends, colleagues – are often afraid to broach this difficult topic. The result is that people often don’t get the care they need, leading to a worsening of mental illnesses. The stakes are high. People with mental illness suffer greatly and mental illnesses such as depression are the biggest cause of disability worldwide. We need people who are willing to step up and address this difficult issue to put an end to the stigma of mental illness so that people can get the care they need.
After talking with her on the Hardcore Humanism Podcast, I am convinced that what we need is mental health advocate Lily Cornell Silver. Silver is the daughter of the late Chris Cornell, solo artist and frontman of Soundgarden, Audioslave and Temple of the Dog, and music manager Susan Silver who worked with Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. And without any formal training she is doing what true punk rockers do – she is stepping up, doing it herself and taking on the tough topic of mental illness in her new interview series Mind Wide Open.
She brings a personal perspective to this project. Not only has she suffered from mental illness throughout her lifetime, but also, she has seen family members struggle as well. Silver recounts how the suicides of her father and Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington affected her. “I’ve struggled with anxiety my whole life and more with depression, as I got into my teenage years,” Silver told me. “When I was 15, I lost one of my best friends to suicide, and then my dad to suicide a year later, and…one of his best friends a couple months after that. So, after that whole ordeal, suicidal ideation and PTSD were things that I struggled with a lot.”
Silver recognized that because there is no universal language for mental health, people are often blamed for their mental illness as a character defect rather than a health condition. “That’s something I witness, honestly, a lot in parent-child relationships as well … this misunderstanding,” she said. “When someone’s being a moody teenager, or when someone’s being a brat, or someone’s being spoiled, whatever, versus like, they’re having a panic attack … or they’re having anxiety, and they’re lashing out because irritability is a symptom of anxiety … Or shutting down or excessive crying or whatever is a symptom of anxiety.”
Silver soon recognized that she was not alone – that many of her peers also struggled with mental illness. “That sense of existential fear is something that kids didn’t necessarily have to struggle with and bargain with as much in previous generations,” Silver said. “With the 24-hour news cycle, with social media, with the accessibility to constant information, I don’t feel like I’ve had a break the entire time I’ve been alive. You know, 9/11 happened, barely more than a year after I was born … I feel like we’ve all been on this constant alert our entire lives. And I think that’s kind of where that sense of anxiety may come from.”
This existential fear has been made worse by the Covid pandemic, which raised the specter of sickness, death and disconnection from activities and loved ones. Silver’s decision to start Mind Wide Open was particularly motivated by what she was witnessing from her peers during the pandemic. “I came up with that idea in April, around the beginning of quarantine,” she said. “I had just left college because of COVID, obviously, and was definitely feeling a lot of isolation. My depression worsened quite a bit, my anxiety worsened quite a bit. And I think people with those pre-existing issues can relate to that. Even people who had never struggled with that, were having those issues. And I have the privilege of having access to so many different mental health experts … and a lot of them were saying that what people don’t realize is that we are all experiencing a collective trauma.”
This strengthened Silver’s resolve to take her own experience and use it to help others find healthy and constructive way to cope with mental illness. She cites the work of Dr. Mark Brackett from The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence as an influence on her thinking regarding the necessity of emotional expression. “It is a human right to be able to articulate what you’re feeling. And the fact that it’s relatively inaccessible, and also not necessarily a common thing,” Silver described. “I know the power and I know the transformative capability of being able to name … Okay, this is anxiety, or this what I’m experiencing as a symptom of depression, or this a form of PTSD. That has literally saved my life, because it gives me power and it gives me information to know that I’m not crazy.”
And so, Silver has stepped up with Mind Wide Open to have these difficult conversations on mental illness to give people that language to talk about their mental health and ultimately feel validated. She covers the topic of mental health from a variety of perspectives with an eclectic group of guests, including rock stars such as Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and Duff McKagan of Guns and Roses, academic scientists such as Dr. Brackett and David Kessler, and leaders of charitable organizations such as Harold Owens of MusiCares and Laura Lipsky of The Trauma Stewardship Institute.
Silver views the Mind Wide Open Project as part of what she sees as “radical empathy” in her generation where there is an awareness of the suffering of others while understanding that individuals must take care of themselves to fight for social justice over the long haul. “I think something that I witnessed amongst my generation is a greater sense of radical empathy … You have to put on your own oxygen mask before you help others,” she said. “In order to make a difference societally, in order to be able to take a stand and be able to have the energy to be active in social justice, or environmental justice or mental health awareness, or whatever it may be. You have to be able to stand on your own two feet and you have to take care of yourself.”
The response to Mind Wide Open has been universally positive. And yet, she described receiving negative feedback questioning her “qualifications” to helm such an undertaking. And Silver took both a decidedly punk rock and radically empathic view on this criticism. “It’s frustrating … but it’s not going to derail me … I think that’s such an interesting response and something that I come at with curiosity. Because that’s part of the stigma that I want to shed – is that everyone is allowed to talk about mental health, everyone is allowed to struggle with mental health. And you don’t have to have a degree in order to talk about it,” Silver explained. “Makes me wonder what they’ve experienced or what they’ve been told in their life to come at it from that perspective.”
Silver relayed a recent conversation with her uncle, who was wondering where all the punk rock music was to meet the moment. And Silver explained that people like her and her peers are expressing the punk rock ethos in a different way. “People absolutely are channeling it into creativity — just in a different medium because it’s a different time,” she said.
And the time is now for Silver’s Mind Wide Open, and the radical punk rock empathy of her mental health advocacy.
Photo credit: Paul Hernandez
