Sheila Houlahan: Talking Night, Mother, Suicide and Mental Health

Through her personal experiences with mental health, Sheila Houlahan has become a passionate advocate for awareness of mental health issues and suicide. She is an Indian-American actor, singer, producer, and writer. As well as was the executive producer and actor in her recent award-winning project, ‘Night Mother’, which screened exclusively on Twitch. Sheila describes the film as “a hybrid of the traditional cinematic experience,” where it utilised Twitch’s innovative platform for live performance interwoven throughout the film, encouraging viewer interaction. The film has a powerful message: you are not alone.

Sheila is a pioneer for giving a voice to the stories and experiences of people of colour and those she describes as “differently-abled”. Her journey as a content creator and storyteller has not always been easy, seeing her dealing with crippling anxiety, PTSD, panic attacks, and suicide attempts. She is very open about her experiences, expressing how they have helped shape her values and ground her, keeping her aligned with what she is intensely passionate about.

One of her desires is to see reform for the current mental healthcare system. She hopes that her project ‘Night Mother’ connects with those facing a mental health crisis amidst the ongoing struggles faced by many during the Pandemic, including depression, PTSD, and what Sheila describes as a “collective grief”.

We love her mission and our deeply personal conversation with Sheila shined a light on what she believes in, why, and how she has learnt to keep true to herself and her journey of arriving at her own Fierce Truth.

“If you create something that comes from the heart and is made with the intent of touching people, that you know creates positive change and creates healing, people want to receive that. Especially in these times right now where everything is dark”. – Sheila Houlahan

Kim: Sheila, who are you in your own words?

Sheila: I am a person who had a roundabout journey to what I really feel is my purpose in life and I think it has been shaped by the political climates that I grew up in. Growing up in the ‘90s and then emerging into the 2000’s, which was a wildly conservative time. Then coming out of that as an American into President Obama’s years, followed by Trump. I think that politically, sort of matched my own growth as a person.

As a child, I was very unaware of myself. I was so unsure of my own identity as someone who identifies as differently abled, as someone who’s mixed race, as someone who had a score of battles that she didn’t know were coming for her in her 20s.

But I will say, at this point in time, I am a woman who is confident in who she is. Is confident in her desire to tell stories and amplify stories that need to be heard right now more than ever. In particular, I am really interested in highlighting stories and experiences of people of color and also folks who are differently abled. Whether it be through mental health, chronic invisible illness, or anything else. I think there are voices that aren’t being amplified enough.

As I’m stepping into my new role as executive producer, which I never thought that I would do, if it’s not that kind of a story, I’m personally not interested in telling it.

We’ve had so much of the ‘straight white man action hero, he’s going to save the world’. They were fun and I’m not knocking that because sometimes that’s what you want to sit down and watch, but I think I am interested in doing what I can to amplify other stories.

Kim: I really resonate with that and the importance of highlighting the diversity of people’s truth. It’s what we are about too. I haven’t heard the expression ‘differently abled’ before though. I love that. I really would love for you to speak to that whole term and what it means.

Sheila: I really love it too. The first time I heard it, it made so much sense because when we look at the word disabled. So, it’s putting everybody on a spectrum of ‘you should aspire to be like this’. When somebody has to deal with lifelong physical, mental or, whatever-you-have issues, then they can’t aspire to be like that. I like the term ‘differently abled’ because it implies everybody can show up to the table just as they are. It’s more like a spectrum of all perspectives and all kinds of people are welcome.

Kim: What lights you up the most about being who you are choosing to be right now?

Sheila: Oh my gosh, I feel more like myself than I’ve ever felt before and that lights me up. There are hard days too, I’m not going to lie. I have had my own battles with Mental Health for a really long time, over a decade now. I have also had my own battles with physical health, so it’s not without it’s challenges. But ultimately what lights me up is feeling like I am grounded in who I am. That I am living in accordance with my own sense of self and in accordance with my own values and trying to have a value-based life.

As a content creator and storyteller, I am working on my actual process for storytelling to try to tell stories in a way that is aligned with my values.

I think something magical happens when you sit back and you finally live in the truth of who you are and your values, beliefs and ideals. There’s something really cool that happens when you do that.

Kim: What ignited you to become such a strong advocate for Mental Health? Where did that journey begin for you?

Sheila: Well, that was my journey. I don’t think I would have had half the empathy that I have now if I hadn’t been through that battle myself. I’ve struggled with severe Mental Health problems since I was a child. Crippling anxiety, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide attempts. I had an eating disorder for 14 years and I have been involuntarily committed for my Mental Health before, which is something that I talk about openly.

I’ve lived with all of these things, that ended up being a result of physical health problems that were not being addressed, along with a total lack of serotonin in my body. Couple that with the fact that women and especially women of color, are so egregiously gaslit by the medical system. There was alot of untangling that needed to happen and through that process, as I was in the weeds, I started to learn first-hand the deficiencies of our systems.

I went to the emergency room once because I felt that I was a danger to myself. Immediately I was placed in leather handcuffs, even though I was not exhibiting any violent tendencies. I was medicated without my consent and involuntarily committed for 72-hours at a hold facility. Upon being examined by a doctor 24 hours after arriving, he was like “oh, I don’t know why you’re here, you’re fine” and sent me home.

The facility didn’t have proper food or nutrition for the guests. There were human feces on the ground. There were two to three people for a room. One of my roommates was having a schizophrenic episode and kept taking her clothes off and standing right next to my bed. It was an abysmal setting., bars on the windows and the whole nine yards. So having been in the belly of the beast myself, I realized that this is something that desperately needs to be addressed.

We have urgent care facilities for people experiencing physical symptoms, so I don’t know why we don’t have them for Mental Health care. Needless to say, I became a loud outspoken advocate for reform for our current Mental Healthcare system.

There are so many things where the Western world claims to be advanced, and yet we don’t have any systems in place for people in that crisis, which shocks me when it’s so common. Especially now, with the unprecedented levels of mental health crisis that we’re all going through.

So, having been through this myself, one of the reasons that ‘Night Mother’ has grown into the project that it has, is that I realized the timing couldn’t be more necessary. That people were all in this bizarre chronic PTSD symptom together. I can speak to what happens when you don’t address it, so I think it is more important now than ever that people take Mental Health seriously.

Kim: I agree. Let’s talk about ‘Night Mother’. From the moment I first heard about your project, it fascinated me because I understand the importance of the key points that you highlight.

Sheila: ‘Night Mother’ is actually a Pulitzer Prize winning play written by playwright Marsha Norman. She’s fantastic. This play is something that I had personally studied years ago and then re-reviewed while I was going through the worst of my troubles.

It is about a mother and a daughter existing in a house together and because they live together, there’s not that much to talk about. The daughter is going to kill herself and the mother is finding every single tactic to try to negotiate with her daughter to reconsider. Then the daughter says, “Well, considering I’m pretty much one foot out the door, can we just have one final conversation where we take the masks off? Because we have lived under this false pretence and deluded ourselves. So, my gift that I ask for before I go, is to have one real conversation with you.” So that’s what it is about.

Going back in time to the summer of 2020, I was thinking things aren’t going to be normal again until 2021. Remember when we thought that? I was thinking about what I want to do as an artist, what excited me and how could I use these limitations to my advantage. So, I reached out to Ellen McLain who is a long-time dear friend and mentor of mine back from my singing days. She’s also a singer. She’s very, very well known for her work and voiceover in the video game Portal and she’s a phenomenal actress and just a hilarious human being.

So, I reached out to see if we could figure out a play, or a script, or just work on something together. I wanted to learn from her, because this is something she’s done for so long and she loved the idea and immediately threw out ‘Night Mother’ (mainly because it was a two-woman show) and as soon as she did, everything immediately fell into place and the details sort of came in from there.

A lovely friend of mine, Bernie Su has a show on Twitch called ‘Artificial’ that everyone should watch. It’s Emmy award winning. It’s fantastic. I remember the first time I’d heard of his show I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a really cool potential here’. He’s using Twitch as a way to have live input from the audience while the story is being told and I thought that was pretty cool. Instead of traditional TV or movies, where we see it and then we have a reaction, the audience is a part of the story. That touched me and I filed it away in the back of my head.

There was a time where we explored the possibility of just doing it for a limited Zoom audience, but Ellen and I had poured so much of ourselves into the show that we realized, ‘No, let’s do this on Twitch’. Let’s do this right. Let’s have this be something that exists as a piece where audiences can interact with it and where hopefully, it leaves our audience feeling a little bit less alone and a little bit less foreign in the experiences that we’re all going through in the pandemic. It all just sort of came together.

One of the things about the intricacies of how Twitch works that I didn’t know, is that the audience needs to see proof that it’s live which I was not expecting. So, we had to have some sort of component that’s going to clue in our audience as to how this production is live. I’m not going to give away what that is, because it’s an innovative filmmaking piece that we’re using. But I will say, part of it is pre-recorded and part of it is live. You’re going to know which is which. We’re not going to necessarily know the order.

It’s definitely going to be a lot more audience interactively based, and I’m really excited to see how that turns out. In essence, the day that it goes live, you can almost think of it as the audience watching us put the film together in real-time.

Kim: Wow, to realize that your adaption of ‘Night Mother’ is going to be a live performance, that’s incredibly exciting.

Sheila: It’s going to be live and that’s why I’m calling it, a hybrid film. It’s a hybrid of the traditional cinematic experience and then almost like live theatre. The result is it’s going to be live, but then afterwards, it’s going to live on Twitch forever, where you could stream it much like you would a movie on Netflix. This is why I say if you tune into the live stream, you’re going to actually watch us put the film together in real-time. You’re going to watch the story be told and the audience interactivity as a component to that story being told, in real time.

Kim: It’s highlighting some extremely important Mental Health issues. Let’s talk about what the overall message of ‘Night Mother’ is.

Sheila: The original play was written in the ‘70s and we’ve adapted a lot of things. We’ve modernized it. One thing we’ve done with it and this relates to your question, is we have set it to be over a Zoom call between a mother and a daughter in the COVID-19 pandemic. We are having Zoom be so prominent that the Zoom connectivity issues almost function as another character in the show. It’s funny because we’re all like, ‘I’ll die if I have another glitch in my Zoom’, but we’re using it as a tool to be like, ‘What if you were in this position where you’re on a Zoom call with somebody who’s saying at the end of this hour, “I’m going to take my life” and you now have to deal with Zoom and all of its connectivity issues while trying to have a real heart-to-heart connection?’ So, it’s gritty.

It’s pretty in your face and the message is not altogether positive, which has prompted a post-show programming that I’ll speak on in a second. But what we’re doing is we’re not saying, “Be an ally today”; we’re saying, “Suicide is real”.

The depression, the PTSD and the collective sort of grief that we’re all going through in light of being in a pandemic for this long is real. It needs attention and it needs to be taken seriously. This is not something we can sweep under the rug. This is not something that’s going to go away on its own. This is something that is going to need careful litigation and massive worldwide strategy for us to collectively heal from it together. So, that’s really the message of the piece.

You see the deficits that both the mother and the daughter experience in their respective lives and how they got to this point. So, to that end, it invokes the tragedy of the whole show to the audience as, ‘Well, this didn’t have to happen, but because of XYZ, it did happen.

It is like a giant awareness campaign. But I want to speak to the post-show programs as well.

In putting this together, I knew we were going to hopelessly trigger our audience and that didn’t sit right with me as a producer. I don’t want to put this super distressing content in the world and then be like ‘Bye, good luck’ and that got me thinking about another element of Twitch that is unusual.

What’s cool about this, is that there is a chat box so our audience can interact with each other in real time. We’re going to have a couple of different celebrity Twitch streamers manning the chat box so that if any audience member is typing stuff that indicates that they may be triggered and exhibiting any significant sort of Mental Health crisis or distress, the moderator can connect them with resources immediately. It provides safety in real time dialogue, discussion, community building and care.

Let’s do this right. Let’s have this be something that exists as a piece where audiences can interact with it and where hopefully, it leaves our audience feeling a little bit less alone and a little bit less foreign in the experiences. That we’re all going through in the pandemic. It all just sort of came together.

It’s definitely going to be a lot more audience interactively based and I’m really excited to see how that turns out. In essence, the day that it goes live you can almost think of it as the audience is watching us put the film together in real time.

Kim: That’s amazing actually.

Sheila: I’m pretty excited about it. It feels more responsible.

Kim: I don’t think there’s anything out there that’s been done like that before. You’re really setting a precedence with this – For what you’re trying to bring to the world, as well as in the overall message too.

Sheila: Thank you, I’m trying. We’re also going to have a post-show discussion with cast and crew as well as with members from The Trevor Project which is an LGBTQ organization that specializes in addressing Mental Health crises for LGBTQ teens. We’re going to have a couple of other experts in the psychiatric field and several familiar celebrity Twitch streamers that our audience members will recognize. We’re all going to come together and talk about our experiences.

Why is this important? Because if you or a loved one needs resources, here are XYZ links that can be clicked, (and we will discuss) where resources can be downloaded. So, that is absolutely a part of the program. This way audience members aren’t left feeling bereft, they’re left with resources and tools.

Kim: What impact would you like to see ‘Night Mother’ make on the world?

Sheila: I would love ‘Night Mother’ to do two things. I would love it to reach out to different viewers and show them ‘You’re not alone. We’re all experiencing this. Your life matters. You being alive matters and there is help. Even though we’ve been living in isolation, that doesn’t mean you’re alone. Those are not two equal terms.” So that’s one goal.

The other goal is to have this set an example to people in legislative positions and people in power, to say, “What can you do with your jurisdiction, or with your company to ensure that Mental Health care is being taken seriously for your constituents, your employees and your people?” Also, what can we do as a society to address the gaps in systemic Mental Health care?

I think what I’m hoping for with this project, is that it shines a light on the problems that need to be addressed.

I don’t want it to be the typical rhetoric that you see around Suicide Prevention Month or National Mental Health Awareness Month. I want to shine a light on the ugly nature of what we’ve let this become. I want to be like, ‘Here it is. I’m making you look at it. You can’t look away and now that you know what this is, what are you going to do to be a part of the solution?’

Kim: I think sometimes, unless you’ve got that shock factor, people don’t pay attention. What is your vision moving forward? As a woman standing up for what she believes in? As an actor in Hollywood? And also, in your incredible passion and advocacy for Mental Health?

Sheila: I think this is the beginning. One thing that I’m doing with my team is keeping track of our entire process so that I can show this to studios and to investors. That’s definitely part of it. I have a project that I can’t talk about just yet, but I’ve been contacted by someone who’s interested in having me write and produce their biopic and it’s absolutely a story that needs to be told. I’m really excited about that.

I didn’t set out to be a producer or writer, that was never a goal. I wanted to be a performer. I don’t think that those things are mutually exclusive, but suddenly I have this new passion that this whole process has ignited in me.

If you create something that comes from the heart and is made with the intent of touching people, that you know creates positive change and creates healing, people want to receive that. Especially in these times right now where everything is dark.

Certainly moving forward, I want this kind of content creation to be a part of my life. Whether that continues to exist on Twitch or it exists in new platforms that we can’t even imagine yet. Maybe we get to wield different kinds of technologies for good, rather than just for the sake of the technology existing, right?

Kim: When we talk about passion and purpose and what we’re here to do, I’m a big believer that those seeds are planted from our life experiences. With your own Mental Health journey, your acting and now a passion for content creation and producing, (it feels like) you’ve been given these incredible tools and empathy to give back and help others heal through storytelling.

Sheila: I love that you said that because I totally agree with you. As I’ve gone into this, I knew that I did not want to engage in this career at all if there was no giving back component.

I think that there’s so much of life that is a cycle and cyclical elements can be found all over our world. Whether it be the changing of the seasons or the life cycle. So, our brains work in cycle and ritual. As such, I think it’s really important that the ‘give-get’ cycle be employed, especially when you get to do something that’s your passion or your dream.

I think it’s really important to give back to the world whether that be simply the acts of inspiring new voices to continue to tell stories or maybe a more philanthropic approach, which is what we’re trying to do with ‘Night Mother’. I think that we ourselves don’t feel complete unless we’re existing in that
entire cycle.

Kim: Oh, absolutely. So, last question Sheila, what is your Fierce Truth?

Sheila: My Fierce Truth is that life and the human existence can be ugly sometimes and that’s okay. My Fierce Truth is that we have worked so hard as a society for some reason, to try to hide everything, to push our skeletons down, to push our shadows away and to present as beautiful and as picture-perfect as possible inside and outside. My Fierce Truth is saying, I think that we really rob ourselves of real connection and genuine joyful experience by doing that.