I had a charmed life up until 2010.
I was travelling around the world working as an actress/director with my husband, singer/songwriter turned youth sports coach, David Alexis, in tow.
My daughter Mina, now 31, was off to college at Cornell University, and my son Sylvester – Sly – now 32, was in his freshman year at UC Irvine.
They had had a wonderful childhood: they went to great schools, they were both athletic and smart, and their adult lives were, I believed, laid out before them.
In other words, we were a happy, and what I thought was a ‘normal’ family. (Well, as ‘normal’ as you can be when you’re a celebrity who gets stopped on the street by fans of Twin Peaks and Riverdale among other TV shows and films through the decades).
But then everything changed. Within months, Sly would be in the grip of a severe mental health crisis, convinced that he was dying, and my husband and I would find him convulsing on the floor of his campus accommodation.
In Sly’s first term at college, just as he was settling in and focused on bonding with his D-1 track teammates, he witnessed a tragic death of a fellow student, to which he had leapt in to try and save as he was the first person on the scene.
That unlocked something in him we never knew was there, nor did we know was hiding within our family genetics.
Mädchen Amick pictured with her son Sylvester – Sly – who is now aged 32
The week after, I remember having long conversations with him about the student’s death, sometimes lasting through the night. He was replaying it over and over in his mind. Had he done enough to save the boy? Or did he prolong his inevitable death?
He started experiencing waves of mania and with that came psychosis: paranoid and suffering from delusions, he also started to self-medicate to numb the distress.
Before the death of the fellow student, he would party with his college friends, but never excessively. Afterwards, he started using marijuana and alcohol as a crutch, more and more.
He sought help on campus, and there were a few therapy sessions offered, not nearly enough for what he was going through. But we hoped he had managed to process it and everything seemed to return to a relative state of normalcy.
But then just before the winter holiday break in 2011, we got a phone call from his roommate that sent chills down my spine. They said: ‘Sly walked out the door and didn’t take anything with him, and he hasn’t come back.’
We were living in Los Angeles at the time so my husband, daughter and I jumped in the car, and drove down to Irvine to frantically search the streets.
Finally, after hours of driving around, we found him wandering alone and looking dazed.
The second I saw him I yelled across the street, ‘Get in the car.’ He did what I commanded, but his behavior seemed strange.
My daughter Mina, who was coincidentally studying psychology, thought there was something ‘really wrong’.
We were terrified so we took him straight to the hospital.
Mädchen Amick thought she had a ‘normal’ family life – or as ‘normal as it can be when you’re a celebrity who gets stopped on the street by fans of Twin Peaks (pictured here)
Amick also starred in Riverdale (pictured) among other TV shows and films through the decades
Pictured: Amick when she starred in Gossip Girl alongside Chuck Westwick (right)
When we got there, they dismissed our concerns, saying ‘oh, he must have taken something, or drank something’. They concluded he had a substance abuse problem and referred us to an Addiction Psychiatrist.
That January of 2012, he went back to Irvine, to try and settle back in before classes started – he wanted to go back to being ‘normal’.
But one middle of the night, he called my husband to say he thought he was dying. We raced there and found him convulsing on the floor. We still don’t know what caused that, whether it was drugs, or whether he was in such an intense state of mania that it had triggered a seizure.
So, we took him back to the hospital, a psychiatric one this time, and that was when they said they suspected he might have bipolar disorder because he had no illicit drugs in his system, and yet he was in a state of full mania and psychosis.
It was only later that we learned his mental illness was triggered by the death he witnessed on campus.
I remember I was filming the Western crime drama Longmire at the time. I had to commute to Albuquerque, New Mexico, when my son was in the hospital, and it was gut-wrenching to leave him. Thankfully my husband was there to advocate for our son as best he could.
After that Sly took medical leave from college and was in and out of different treatment centers. Over the next few years, we began a journey through a very broken mental health care system.
Once we got past that first crisis stage, I knew I needed to do something.
I have always been a very reluctant celebrity, but I saw this opportunity to use my platform and share our family’s story to try to erase the stigma around mental health and raise awareness of the failing system.
Sly was doing better and was mostly stable and sober. He could never get his footing long enough to go back to Irvine, but he started doing community college courses and I hoped our troubles were mostly over. So, I started speaking out about our experience as much as I could.
Amick pictured with husband David Alexis (right) and her daughter Mina and son Sylvester
Sylvester called one night to say he thought he was dying. Amick and her husband raced there and found him convulsing on the floor
But then in 2021, Sly de-stabilized again and went back into mania and psychosis.
One night around 2am he called me and simply said ‘Mom, I need help.’ I was in Vancouver filming for Riverdale at the time and my husband was with me. So, while he and I flew home in a panic, Sly’s sister Mina swooped in to find her brother and we all spent the next month trying to, yet again, get him into the right treatment center.
Just like that, we were thrown back into the deep end of the mental health care system, and we saw that it was even more broken than it had been 10 years before.
The hard thing is, even if you do find the right place, the price tag is so exorbitant. It can be as much as $90,000 to $100,000 of non-refundable cash to walk through the door for 30 days of treatment. Too often your insurance won’t cover primary mental health treatment or the center won’t your insurance.
Every time I got quotes for treatment, I thought, this isn’t fair for anyone. I don’t care how much money you have, that’s not sustainable.
That was when we decided that we needed to do more than just share our story and really jump in and try to help connect people to what resources there are.
We started our non-profit foundation Don’t Mind Me in May 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic, right in the middle of our family crisis, while I was juggling filming in another country and directing my first feature film. But we desperately needed to start helping people the best we could.
Now that we’re 4 years in, we’re working to open our own non-profit treatment center in Palm Springs through our foundation.
Amick and her family wanted to help other people in their position and started a non-profit foundation Don’t Mind Me in May 2021 – right in the middle of the pandemic
Amick is now working to open a treatment center in Palm Springs through the foundation to help make mental health care accessible to all
We really want to make mental health care accessible to all. So, if somebody comes to our door and meets medical criteria, we’re not going to turn you away for financial reasons.
It’s how everyone deserves to be treated. In our opinion, mental healthcare is a human right.
Sly is doing well now. He’s stable and 16 months sober.
Although his problems changed the trajectory of his goals and plans at the time, he’s now found his footing, and I think an even bigger calling.
He’s now a certified peer support specialist, so he’s able to work in treatment centers and give his lived-experience support to clients navigating a similar path. He’s been through it, he understands.
I feel like he’s really giving back in a beautiful way.
There are still tough times, and our family has been through a lot, but we’ve come out the other side, and we are stronger for it.