Smalley on a mission of awareness and strength
Thomas Smalley calls his YouTube page “Struggle Into Strength.” He and his mom came up with the mantra, and anyone who has watched his two documentaries can begin to understand the enormity of his struggle and his strength.
One scene opens with Smalley, looking exactly like your or my college son — backward baseball cap, T-shirt — using a soap dispenser.
“My dad might not be OK,” Smalley says. He washes his hands. “My dad might not be OK.”
He reaches for a paper towel. He is asked what number he’s at. “Nine,” Smalley answers. Anyone who has broken an arm or experienced another medical emergency knows the scale. From 1 to 10, what’s your level of discomfort? Think about answering nine. That’s what Smalley is feeling at the moment, tossing the crumpled paper towel into the wastebasket.
He winces.
It’s called exposure therapy, and it addresses the obsession, not the compulsion. Smalley’s compulsion is to turn that water faucet on and off 15, 20 times until it feels just right, satisfying an irrational thought that something horrible would happen to his dad if he didn’t. Yeah, he’s dying to turn that faucet on and off.
“Smalls,” as his guys call him, played freshman ball at Fairfield Warde until he was overwhelmed by obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“People would say, ‘You look really tired. Do you ever sleep?’ I’m like, ‘You have no clue.’ ”
A junior at Siena College just outside Albany, N.Y., Smalley works hard these days to give us a clue. He is a basketball manager for the Division I program. He is a psychology major. He has a dream to work in the NBA as a player development coach. He also is a strong young man on a mission to help people understand OCD. To spread the word to those suffering from mental illness that they are not alone, to help eliminate the stigma. He considers the strength of NBA stars Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan sharing their stories of anxiety and depression and says, “I think people are starting to understand.”
He knows OCD remains
among the most misunderstood.
“You’ll hear people go, ‘I’m so OCD,’ ” he says. “They use it as an adjective. That’s one of the most difficult parts. People think you get caught up in washing your hands, because you want them to be clean and that’s it. That’s not nearly it.”
This is.
“My freshman year of high school, by the end of the basketball season, I was there tying my shoes 15 times,” Smalley says. “Everything was in 15. Bad thoughts, they’re irrational. But a person with OCD can’t decipher if they’re irrational, so you do these compulsions to try to minimize the anxieties.”
Asked how bad it got, he says, “I was failing out of school. I was writing and erasing everything in 25s. Imagine it.”
Imagine starting a geometric sequence. Erasing. Starting. Erasing. Starting an English report on, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and killing it. Starting. Killing it. Over and over and over.
“When I was at my worst in high school, I was doing about 14 hours of compulsion a day,” he says. “I’m not leaving the house. My parents, my family, went through a lot; it was tough.
“As soon as you do one compulsion, you want to do another. My mind’s always going. I was suicidal at a point. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. The lowest of lows.”
He went to talk therapy. Didn’t work out. He began seeing Amy Cawman of Westport, a clinical social worker who specializes in anxiety-related problems. Over the past four years, there has been real progress with exposure therapy combined with Prozac that helps ease the attendant anxiety.
“One of my intrusive thoughts is my family is going to die,” Smalley says. “Sounds ridiculous. For me it’s unbelievably real, and I’m away at college. You have to resist the compulsions, and when you do there’s an increased anxiety. It can be excruciating.”
Research shows 94 percent of us have unwanted thoughts. It is diagnosed as OCD when it causes significant distress and interferes with important areas of our life. About 2.2 million Americans have been diagnosed.
Compulsions, he says, still take up a couple of hours a day and there can be periodic relapses. He is not interested in pity. Say this about Smalls: He is remarkably positive.
“Two hours is a heck of a lot better than 12 to 14,” Smalley says. “I had clinical professionals tell me I shouldn’t go to college. Here I am; I’m able to go to class, I’m able to pursue my basketball dreams. Sometimes I’m feeling better and I’ll think, ‘I’m done.’ No, the truth is it’s going to be my whole life.”
We talk for an hour. I tell him how my wife has battled depression for 30 years, treated with electroconvulsive therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation and now experimental ketamine treatments at Yale New Haven. I talk about the joy that watching our son play D-III basketball has brought her. Smalls talks about the power of family and the game. He talks about the beauty of the struggle.
Warde coach Ryan Swaller made him a team manager and they remain good friends. He had a rough ride with Jimmy Patsos, the Siena coach who resigned in April, but the players have been tremendous to him. So has new coach Jamion Christian. Strength coach Ian Farrel, fellow manager Danny Cohen — in the documentaries Brian Harat produced, it is clear he is part of a brotherhood.
“Being on the court, that’s one thing OCD can’t get in the way of anymore,” Smalley says. “The players are my best friends. Thomas Huerter, whose brother Kevin just went in the first round of the NBA draft, has been my roommate since freshman year. He’s the best.
“My relationship with my family, we’re very close, my parents, my older brother. Basketball and my family kind of stopped my suicidal ideations. I couldn’t do it.”
He already has spoken at four International OCD Foundation conferences and twice at Yale. He has gained a sense of community, a desire to reach out from the isolation of mental illness to touch many lives. Yet also a satisfaction in reaching one at a time.
“People will come up to me at a party on a Friday night and say, ‘Hey, I saw your video, and I struggle with this or that,’ ” Smalley said. “The fact they feel comfortable enough to share their feelings with me, yeah, it’s one of the best feelings in the world.”
The struggle into strength must not be a lonely one.