Courage to Come Back: Rachel Fehr (2017) and David Chalk (2025)
The most obvious thing about Rachel Fehr and David Chalk is that they are not defined by diagnoses and for both of them they have carried several labels. All of which are important only in that they defied them all. Rachel is the 2017 Courage to Come Back award winner in mental health. In the years since then, she has gone from teaching marital arts to attending classes and using what she learned to parse out which of the psychiatric diagnoses she was given were accurate and which were misdiagnoses -and then realizing as is so usual her autism had been misdiagnosed as borderline. From this she created new and positive life skills and taken her life that much farther. Now she wants to use her skills to create a traditional medicine farm as 2nd stage housing for men coming out of prison. David won the Courage to Come Back award this year (2025) has defied every assumption adults had about him as a child. He created his own businesses and was a millionaire at 28 years despite being told graduating from high school that the only life he could hope for was welfare, jail, or a psych ward. Despite his success he held a burdensome reality. His ADHD messed with his focus. His Dyslexia messed with his ability to read. And his pragnuh… meant he had a difficult time just recognizing faces – any faces. But clearly David is not someone his accepts what others might consider fate. At 62 years he participated in a program which led to him being able to read in 11 hours. Now, he is developing an educational program that can be used around the world to help others to do the same.
Music by Shari Ulrich
The most obvious thing about Rachel Fehr and David Chalk is that they are not defined by diagnoses and for both of them they have carried several labels. All of which are important only in that they defied them all. Rachel is the 2017 Courage to Come Back award winner in mental health. In the years since then, she has gone from teaching marital arts to attending classes and using what she learned to parse out which of the psychiatric diagnoses she was given were accurate and which were misdiagnoses -and then realizing as is so usual her autism had been misdiagnosed as borderline. From this she created new and positive life skills and taken her life that much farther. Now she wants to use her skills to create a traditional medicine farm as 2nd stage housing for men coming out of prison. David won the Courage to Come Back award this year (2025) has defied every assumption adults had about him as a child. He created his own businesses and was a millionaire at 28 years despite being told graduating from high school that the only life he could hope for was welfare, jail, or a psych ward. Despite his success he held a burdensome reality. His ADHD messed with his focus. His Dyslexia messed with his ability to read. And his pragnuh… meant he had a difficult time just recognizing faces – any faces. But clearly David is not someone his accepts what others might consider fate. At 62 years he participated in a program which led to him being able to read in 11 hours. Now, he is developing an educational program that can be used around the world to help others to do the same.
Music by Shari Ulrich
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Vancouver co Op Radio cfr OH one
hundred point five FM. We're coming to you from the
unseated traditional territories of the Squamish, muscream and Slighway tooth
nations around Vancouver, BC. I'm your host, Bernardine Fox, and
this is this show that dares to change how we
think about mental health. Welcome to Rethreading Madness.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
We have ever been fer No, what the hell I'm
gonna do when I can't see a fine away under over.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver co Op Radio
cfr OH one hundred point five f M. I'm Bernardine
Fox and I have the pleasure of speaking with Rachel
Fer today. Did I say your last name right?
Speaker 3 (00:54):
It's Fair.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Fair. That makes more sense, Rachel Fair. So welcome Rachel.
Thanks for coming and chatting with me.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Well, thanks for the invite.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
You are the twenty seventeen Courage to Come Back Award
winner for mental Health and I love having the award
Winteress for Mental Health on my show. I won in
twenty twenty two and it is an incredible honor to
be acknowledged for the work that we do that so
often isn't necessarily understood or recognized or even realized. So
(01:27):
congratulations on that, even though it's many years past that.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
You're welcome. One of the things that you've been dealing
with almost your whole life is being misdiagnosed. Can you
talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
So originally, as a teenager, I was diagnosed with depression
at age thirteen, and from there it went on to
an anxiety diagnosis, potentially bipolar and traits of schizophrenia, and
then they landed on a borderline personality disorder diagnosis, which
(02:05):
was also false. But I didn't figure that out until
I was forty two.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Oh my god, how did it come about that you
figured that out?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I had a psychologist. My last psychologist told me that
I had every symptom of autism, that everything that's on
the DSM criteria, and that's what got me thinking that.
But he did not diagnose me with autism. He actually
told me I could solve most of my problems by
getting a boyfriend.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
You told me that, Oh if only life was so simple,
you just have a boyfriend in every corner. Oh yeah,
but you did something really novel. And that's the thing
that I really want to talk about. You went to school.
You took yourself to school to learn about psychology, to
(03:04):
help yourself figure out how to help yourself.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
I did. The more I learned about borderline personality to disorder,
the more I realized I didn't actually have it. The
diagnosis never actually bring true for me, and I had
taken a couple of years of psychology in high school.
When I was in school, they offered college level courses,
(03:29):
and from there, as an adult, I started to attend
mental health summits because I couldn't keep a doctor because
they didn't really have much left to teach me at
that point. And through the mental health summits and through
the Embrace Autism website which has all of the assessments
(03:53):
for the autism assessment on the website, I discovered that
I actually have level one autism.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So the borderline personality disorder is the most common diagnosis
for women with level one autism.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
The most common misdiagnosis is that what yes, yes, yeah,
And I've heard that so so many times. In fact,
so many times I hear about people being misdiagnosed with
borderline either too quickly or or just inappropriately or honestly.
With the work I do around therapy abuse and exploitation,
(04:32):
it's often because the abusive therapist is looking for a
way to discredit their client who might tell on them.
So it is a terrible diagnosis and it's too often misapplied.
And so I'm hoping that you have managed to move
away from that and people are recognizing that you are
(04:53):
autistic as opposed to BPD.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Well, I've just started telling people like, if I in
a situation where I may become overstimulated, I just tell
them upfront, like, if this happens, I'm going to need
to step away and take a moment to regulate how
I'm feeling. And that's gotten me a lot further than
not talking about it. But the reason level when autism
(05:17):
is so often misdiagnosed in women is women are taught
at a much younger age to internalize their struggles and
the majority of autism research is based on white men.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
The majority of research is based on white men.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Yes, so a lot of POC and women often struggle
in getting a correct diagnosis because there's been next to
no research on how it presents in women, which is
drastically different than the way it presents in men, women
are taught to be mild and meek, can you be ladylike?
(05:58):
And so we often more often than not internalize our symptoms.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Do you think that is also goes along with masking.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Well, that's exactly what it is. We're taught to mask
at a much earlier age because it's acceptable for boys
to be loud and boisterous and have you know, tempers,
whereas it's not so society where society expects women to
be the opposite.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
It's true, that is very, very true. I met you
at the twenty twenty five Coach to Come Back Award
and there they were talking about work you were doing
around dismantling stigma around mental health. Can you talk a
little bit about that work.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Well, yeah, so I do a lot of This is
mostly when I'm out in the community. Due to a
car accident a few years ago, I now have a
service dog, which tends to spark conversations with random people,
and so I like to take those opportunities to kind
of educate people on the differences and just spread awareness.
(07:16):
And I've had a great deal of success I've had.
It's just amazing how little people actually know about how
mental health presents, especially within women, because you know, like
with especially with autistic women, our special interests tend to
be socially acceptable, and so that tends to get missed
(07:40):
because they're like, oh, you're just an artist or you're artistic,
or you're this, or you're that, when in reality, it's
actually a special interest that dominates the majority of my time.
Right Fortunately for me, my special interest is learning, and
so through that I was able to discover more about
my health and learn how to manage my symptoms and
(08:03):
learn basically learn how to treat myself.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
And that's an amazing thing really when when you know,
you say it very calmly and sort of matter of factly,
but you know, it takes an incredible brain to be
able to be objective enough about what you're experiencing, to
be able to apply what you've learned to a treatment idea,
and to then assess it and see whether it is
(08:28):
this working, is it not working? Should I do something different?
Should I? You know, and do those measured kind of
outcomes on something that most people can't get objective enough
away from them their own self to be able to do.
How were you able to do.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
This lots and lots of meditation, mindfulness practice, but also
through dialectical behavioral therapy, which honestly I think would be
helpful for everyone, not just people with mental health. So
through dialectical behavioral therapy, one of the tools that you're
(09:03):
taught is called shaping, and it's shaping is when you
take a coping technique and you change it to work
for you, to work better for you.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Can you give me an example.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Um, oh, that's a tough one. Well, for instance, like
when you're overstimulated and you're trying to calm down. So
there's multiple methods. Number one is meditation, but not everybody's
able to quiet their mind long enough to meditate. So
(09:40):
instead of trying to meditate for half an hour, do
it for thirty seconds, reset yourself, do it again, and
through that practice you can extend it. But it makes it,
it makes it doable. So you basically take the technique
and you break it down, so you know, if there's
ass spects of one technique that work for you, but
(10:03):
other aspects of that technique don't work for you, just
do the ones that work.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
For you, right, that's reasonable.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Kind of take what works and leave what doesn't and we.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
All should be doing that all the time. There shouldn't
be any other rule about what you do except that rule.
You are an incredible person and there's no doing an
interview with you is sort of like, Okay, what part
of this amazing person's life should I pick? And I
really don't want to just pick. I mean, one of
(10:35):
the other things that is true for you is that
you had a personal issue and you decided that the
laws needed to change, and you proceeded to change them.
Can you talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Yes, I was married to a person who did not
have a conscience, so the old dasmtern would be sociopath.
And when I finally was able to it took some planning,
but I was able to get away with my children
(11:10):
despite domestic violence laws not being helpful then. But I
was married to him, and you can't get a divorce
unless you have a process server serve the person in person,
and that needed to change because that's often detrimental to
(11:32):
the safety of battered women because then you have to
have an address for service and you can't use social media.
And it took me about seven years to convince to
find a judge that I was able to convince and
based on the issue of safety and a combination of
the fact that he was a drug addict without a
(11:54):
permanent address, I was able to convince the judge to
allow me to serve him on face book.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
And so was that like a message a messenger? Okay? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yeah, So basically I just took photos of all the
documents and my lawyer just sent a message through Facebook messenger.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Wow, and that works. That's very cool. And so when
you were saying the divorce laws, the whatever, the parameters
of that aren't very useful to somebody or helpful to
somebody who is afraid for their safety. What do you
was this back? When? When was this? Is this something current?
Or is this a while ago?
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Or this was oh dear, I got married in two
thousand and four, so this was I believe twenty and eleven.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
So only fourteen years ago. Yeah. Do you think the
laws have changed a lot since then? Besides the one
that you managed to get changed?
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Well, now you can now that you can serve them
on social media. So because I was able the judge
gave me permission, that set a precedent and so now
everyone can do it because the judge the courts can't
say yes to one person and no to another.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
So it's for whenever you have a new president, that
precedent becomes the new law.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
And part of why this is important is that if
you serve somebody, if for instance, then if say, if
you are somebody who's serving without a lawyer in that
service document, you have to provide the address which which
they can reply to, right. And so by virtue of
having to serve them and having that address, you are
(13:42):
in fact outing yourself about where you live. And if
you are in danger, doing that is a very dangerous
thing to do, not just for yourself but for your children.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah. So now you can actually use an email address
as an address for service, or you can use a
lawyer's office, but divorce law. But to get a divorce
you cannot get legal aid for divorce.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
No.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
And also you can't just have anybody serve divorce papers.
So prior to my divorce it had to be a
process server. And at that time they were charging two
hundred and fifty dollars per attempt, right, So if they
attempt to serve and they failed to serve, you still
have to pay that two hundred and fifty and then
you have to pay it again. So it was it's
(14:29):
financially which made it financially impossible to get.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
A divorce, especially if somebody it doesn't really have a
fixed address and they're moving around a lot, that would
make it very difficult. So thank you on behalf of
all battered women everywhere in Canada, BC, all of Canada.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
So divorce is federal. It's only done in Supreme Court
right right, And so because it was I was granted
permission by a Supreme Court judge, that means it's a
precedent for the entire country.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Well, thank you on behalf of all battered women everywhere
in Canada.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
We needed other options, yes we did. I was too
stubborn to let him win. I wasn't going to allow
him to force me to be tied to him for
the rest of my life.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
But this is a signature of yours and that you
don't come up against a rule that's not working and
just go, oh, well, I guess I can't. You come
up to them and go how else can I change
this or how else can I do this so that
I can get better or I can heal regardless of
(15:38):
whether or not you know. I mean, it's one of
the things about you that is so remarkable. What's where
are you going now with your desire to help and
red stigma? And there's some work that you were looking
at doing to help men.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Yeah, so there are there aren't enough reasons for women,
but there's even fewer resources for men. And through my
dad's work in pouring sweat ludge and helping people in
addiction and helping people coming out of prison, and he
goes into the prisons, the poor sweat these men who
(16:18):
are spending most of their adult lives in prison, they
get let out, they spend three months and a half
way house, and then they get kicked to the curb
with no support, no life skills, no budgeting skills or
anything like that. And then, especially for Indigenous men, reconnecting
with their culture oftentimes gives them a greater chance of
(16:39):
success in turning their lives around. So I'm hoping to
find some financial backers. I would like to start a
traditional medicine farm that includes second stage housing for Indigenous
men coming out of half way houses. You've got these
men who are working so hard, who wants so badly
(17:01):
to turn their lives around, but when they've spent you know,
eighteen out of their twenty adult years in jail. They
don't have the skills to survive in the world.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
And then they're going out dealing with the colonial contest
exact process.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
So my idea for the program actually came from Norway's
prison model. So Norway has actually, with their current prison model,
has reduced recidivism rates from eighty percent to seventeen percent,
Oh my god, simply by providing therapy. In their prisons.
(17:41):
They only supply one meal a day, but within the
prison there's actually a grocery store, and every prisoner has
a job and they buy their own food. They're taught
how to shop, they're taught how to budget, and they
don't live in cells. They live in blocks with other men,
which is more like an apartment with multiple rooms, and
(18:01):
they have their own kitchen and they cook their own meals.
So they're taught how to cook, they're taught how to budget,
and it made a huge difference in the amount of
people who reoffended. They've actually had to clothes probably I
believe half of their prisons as a result of this model.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
And when you talk about I love Norway, I love Norway,
but for so many reasons. But now I love Norway
for this reason. When you talk about a traditional medicine farm,
you're talking about an indigenous traditional farm. And you talked
about your dad. So where are you from, Rachel?
Speaker 3 (18:36):
So I'm from Canada. So when I say my dad,
I mean my adopted dad. My biological dad committed suicide
when I was very young, and in my early twenties
I started attending a sweat lodge run by a gentleman
named Old Hands, and him and his wife Anna, who
he decided that I didn't have parents, so they were
(18:59):
going to be my parents.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
That's wonderful.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Now my dad is a medicine man and my mom
is a medicine woman, and I've been learning a great
deal from them. So rather than use traditional medicine, which
oftentimes doesn't work for me, I've learned how to use
different medicines. For instance, bear root is good for treating asthma.
(19:25):
Breathing in the smoke from bear root actually opens your
lungs just like an inhaler does. And soap berries are
a good source of iron. So iron supplements that you
get from the pharmacy, your body can only process about
ten percent of what you're taking in and the rest
just kind of like builds up in your body and
can cause long term problems. But if you eat a
(19:47):
spoonful of soapberries once a day for ten days, it
brings your iron levels back to normal and your body
processes one percent of it.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
That's interesting. I did not know that.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
All pharmaceutical medicine and comes from indigenous medicine. It's all
based on plants. I can't remember the name of it,
but there's a plant that produces a substance that has
the same effect as morphine, and you can make your
own aspirin out of willow bark.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Wow. Interesting. So traditional medicine farm to assist men coming
out of prism. Second stage housing, well.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Second stage housing. So you know, you put in ten
hours a week on the farm, You help with the
growing of the plants, you learn about the medicine, you
learn about your culture, and part of that time would
be spent in cooking classes, learning how to cook meals
together as a group to have that social structure, because
you can't just treat the illness, and just teaching the
(20:48):
skills alone isn't enough. You also need a community, right,
So this would be more of a holistic approach, right, And.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Where would this farm be situated in and how close
are you too?
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yes, if I can find the backing, there's actually a
property I have in mind that's available for sale. It's
a nice chunk of farmland here in Surrey that is
close enough to a bus stop so that these gentlemen
could still go and have a regular job as well.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
And how much funding are you looking at? Well?
Speaker 3 (21:22):
The property I believe is about nine million dollars, right,
but it's twenty eight acres and then there would be
the costs so for the living situation, because it is
farmland within the Agricultural Land Reserve. I had the idea
of building a barn, making the top half of the
(21:43):
barn as rooms, and then have an industrial kitchen downstairs
with a living area and a community area, possibly expanding
to have an event center there as well, so that
it could be a self sustaining program.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Right. That sounds wonderful, Rachel. I have no doubt you
will pull it off.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Whatsoever, we'll see because the way I figure it'll take
about twenty million to get it off the ground.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Well, twenty million is not that much money, and today
is a world. So we will just imagine twenty million
dollars landing in your lap.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Just put it out in the universe, and if it's
meant to happen, it will happen.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
You know.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
That's the other thing too, is I just got tired
of getting let down, so I just choose to believe
that something's meant to happen. All I got to do
is have the faith and it'll happen.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Absolutely. That is the only way one can live one's
life believing that how things happen are the way they
are meant to happen.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
So yeah, and reducing your expectations because you know, oftentimes
we have unrealistic expectations or people don't you know, meet
what we want to happen. So it's radical acceptance. Basically,
the situation is what it is.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
If it's gonna work, it's gonna work. If it's not
gonna work, well I'm gonna go find something.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Else, Yeah, exactly, And if I.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Can't find what I want, then I'll make my own opportunity.
I've been told I'm never gonna succeed my whole life.
I was always told I was stupid. I had my
family telling me I was missing that piece that makes
you human?
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Oh god, yeah, how how would they ever get there
with you? I can't even imagine, honestly.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
And I just I got tired of it and I
just decided, you know what, you think I can't do it?
Watch me. And instead of getting angry, I chose to
be spiteful and well, you think I won't succeed, Okay,
try let's try this. And I don't do it to
shove it in their faces, like I don't go back
(23:52):
and go, hey, you know I did this, I did that,
but you know you said I wouldn't achieve anything. Well,
to date, I've won the Courage to Come Back awards
as well as the Canada Win fifty medal m hm
and you know and other things, and I just choose
to live in the moment right.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Well, you're doing it all right, Thank you, Rachel. Thanks,
You're welcome and we'll be right.
Speaker 5 (24:20):
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(24:40):
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Speaker 1 (24:57):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver co Operate d
CFR one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox. Rethreading
Madness is coming up to its sixth anniversary of being
on air. We produce an air each week out of
CFR one hundred point five FM on the unseated traditional
territory of the Squamish, Muscriham and Slighwey Tooth nations around Vancouver.
(25:19):
Bc RTM was one of the first radio programs to
focus on mental health issues here in Canada, in an
area swamped with statements from therapists rooted in colonial ideas
about mental health and trained in the DSM. RTM works
to ensure that the voices of those with lived experience
have agency and opportunity to define who they are and
(25:42):
what is true for them who listens to us. Beyond
those with lived experience, our audience includes their friends and partners,
along with therapists, counselors, and students of psychology. Since twenty
twenty two, all of our programs have been uploaded to
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(26:03):
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Speaker 6 (26:12):
Eyeh, turn you up. Quigate Yuons Queen sna Hi, everybody,
my name is quigate Yuwon's. I'm a member of the
Squamish nation and the yagolanis klan of the Hyda Nation.
You're listening to co Op Radio cfro O one hundred
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(26:34):
and Slavetooth nations. Ah you hang out this A lot
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Speaker 7 (26:44):
Rock and roll.
Speaker 8 (26:47):
Swings.
Speaker 9 (26:49):
This is going be all.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Let's see with the left hand, yeah, and the right
hand fits in with something like this, Yeah, here.
Speaker 10 (26:56):
We go now.
Speaker 9 (26:59):
Yeah called rock and roll, and you can hear all
about it on Rock Talk Discover the hidden but enchanting
side of the music Friday mornings at nine o'clock.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Oh. If that isn't enchant thing, nothing is.
Speaker 10 (27:17):
Go ahead, Jess.
Speaker 8 (27:18):
Dance go crazy.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver called Radios FR
one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernadine Fox and today
I get the pleasure of talking with David Chalk. I
met David Chalk at the twenty to twenty five Courage
to Come Back Award gala, where he was given an
award for mental health. David lives with dyslexia ADHD and
(27:43):
something called pras pagnosa. I think I may have said
that very slowly, but maybe correct. I did look it
up and I did practice on how to say. I'm
not sure I said it right. David believed with the
belief about himself that he would never succeed and it
was something that was instill in him by the school
system and all of those who live with disabilities, whether
(28:05):
their physical or emotional disabilities, often face the same thing,
but David had something that not everyone has. He had
a mother who always believed in him. So welcome, David.
Speaker 8 (28:16):
Welcome, good to hear your voice again, and thank you
for having me on your show today.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
My pleasure. Can you start by describing for our audience
what dyslexia, ADHD and proSP pagnosa are and how they
impact on a child in school?
Speaker 8 (28:33):
Oh my god, Okay, sure, I'm sure many of your
listeners have it themselves or in their family. It's probably
if you put all those together, thirty percent of all
people have either one or most prosopagnaesia. The last one
is the most complicated and complex, very rare, but it
is the inability to recognize the human face. Our brain
(28:56):
can do many magical things, and one of them is
it can have an unlimited amount of memories for recognizing
people and the emotion and the look on the face.
We believe nature put it in place so that a
baby could recognize the mother with all the different facial
looks it could give them. Because there's someone not understanding
(29:17):
that might look like a different person. Well, that one
is enough to throw me into a loop. Most of
the time I can see someone in ten minutes later,
I don't recognize them. I recognize voices quite well, but
you can imagine what it's like in the business world,
so that one has really kicked me in the gut
a few times. ADHD is a way in which the
(29:41):
brain is very active. It's hyperactivity for the most part,
but it doesn't have to be hyperactivity. We tend to
focus very hard. We tend to need constant excitement in
our life. Most people Richard Branson would be a good
example of someone with ADHD and dyslexia because we are
(30:01):
risk takers. Very common in entrepreneurs. My god, probably forty
percent of all entrepreneurs have it because it drives you
to want to do things. Now, Dyslexia, which is a
term we do here quite often for learning disabilities, isn't
really a thing. What it is is a name given
to a child that can't seem to learn to read
(30:24):
for whatever reason. And the reason really behind that is
what we call neurodiversity. Neudiversity means prosopagnesia, ADHD, dysgraphia. There's
about one hundred things that can be wrong with the
brain that has it not wire properly. These are not
mental deficiencies. They are just a different way of wiring
(30:45):
the brain. And it so happens that in the first
years of school, grade one to three we are taught
to read. One to three is taught to read, three
to twelve is read to learn. Now, a child going
into school prior usually has a pretty good childhood. They're curious,
they're happy, they're joyful, they play, they walk into the classroom,
(31:09):
and now there is demands on them, pure pressure, feedback.
Children all sorts of activity, about fifty to sixty percent
of them get anxiety. It is very natural. We all
get anxiety, but when you're only five or six years
old and it triggers you hard, it actually shuts down
(31:30):
a part of the brain that is required to learn
to read. And if you are already a little bit
neuro divergent and that anxiety kicks in, well, then the
likelihood of learning to read drops off by about eighty percent.
That's who I was, and that's what happens to about
fifty four to fifty six percent of all children in
(31:52):
North America.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
So all children, not just ones that live with a
disability of some kind.
Speaker 8 (31:58):
No, And this is what makes it so interesting, because
you know there's a couple of ways. You can go
into grade one. You've had an incredibly good life and
you transition in and you may or may not get anxiety.
You could have had a difficult home life, so you're
already one step backwards going to the classroom, and you're
much more likely to have a setback a trauma experience.
(32:22):
And then there is the learning divergent, which do have
a wiring condition and they are highly likely about eighty
percent likely to have a fight or flight response happen.
The interesting thing is in the numbers, about twenty to
thirty percent of children a neuro divergent one way or another.
Yet nearly sixty percent of children fail to learn to
(32:44):
read or literally fail through the education system, indicating one
more time that it is the environment. The fighter flight
response for survival triggers corozol and adrenaline. Brain kind of
shuts down. We want to get out of there and
and learning becomes secondary.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
It's interesting because I have a child who has ADHD
and probably mild autism. It's actually my grandchild, but I've
been raising her and she could speak in full sentences
at nine months, but she couldn't read. And by the
time she hit you know, halfway through grade two she
still couldn't read. She still couldn't get the idea, and
(33:26):
we were taught that it was probably because of her
not thinking in terms of a word, but thinking in
terms of sentences. But now what you're tolling me makes sense,
because she actually didn't learn to read in school. She
learned to read by video games.
Speaker 8 (33:45):
Yes, and you kind of hit it there. Let me
just give you the quick overview because I'm sure many
people in your audience would love to understand this. We
learn through sound pattern recognition. Think of a child from
early ages, like eight months or so, up to grade five,
before they go into school, they learn more than four
(34:05):
thousand to five thousand words nouns, adjective pronouns. They haven't
been taught anything. They know how to conjugate a verb, run, running,
have run. Everything came from what we call pattern recognition,
or the other turn for is statistical learning. When you
go into the classroom, what you are required to do
is take the sounds you learned and put them on paper,
(34:28):
record them, and then lift them off the paper. That
is the most complicated thing for a human brain to do.
There's no circuitry, so we have to learn this pattern
symbol relationship. You know, just under half children do pick
it up, but any neurodivergency errors on the side of
I want it to be a sound and I don't
(34:50):
want to attach it to a symbol, which is a
letter of the alphabet. So you saw that. So many
parents say they were wonderful before they went to school,
and then all of a sudden, it's as if they
lost half down almost intelligence. Because it's not intelligence, their
inability to learn. And that is it. Because the brain
can't do it. And if for any reason fight or flight,
(35:10):
which is our need to survive, it overacts. It puts
these hormones in the body, and those hormones are basically
telling the brain after millions of years of evolution, we
don't need to think about this. You need to get
the heck out of there. And that numbness or that
lack of oxygen it gives to the frontal cortex is
enough to have reading, not updake, and that underlies everything.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
It's interesting as I've always known that video games were
the thing that solved this problem for her, and once
she learned to read, once she figured that out, she
went from you know, being in grade two, to reading
at a grade four level by the end of it,
to reading at a grade eight level by the time
she finished elementary school, to reading at a university level
(35:57):
by the time she hit grade nine. So it was
it was just finding the way that she learned and
allowing that to be and not impose some other form
of learning on her.
Speaker 8 (36:12):
Well, you actually solved it another way too, the fact
that she accelerated so much. I think parents should know this.
When you go into fight or flight, you got cortisol
and adrenaline. When you go into curiosity and excitement, you
have dopamine and a seat of colin. And when we
trigger that a video game.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Oh interesting, When.
Speaker 8 (36:31):
You trigger dopamine, you excite the brain to want to learn.
If you start to integrate learning or reading into that,
the dopamine and the seta coline continue to occur. And
now reading actually does that. So you answered the question
and you solved the problem. Excitement, attention and focus drive
(36:52):
dopamine that drove her to want to learn to read.
Reading became excited and she accelerated. You literally, you were
balancing the neurochemicals of the body without most people knowing
it and resolving the entire reading and literacy problem yourself.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Well, I wish I could take credit for it. I
would have to give it all to her. My only
job was to not let anybody talk me out of
letting her play video games. So anyways, supported her I did.
I always do, so it is my job. So you
ended up graduating from school having had these disabilities all
(37:30):
the way through. Were you able to read by the
time you finished school?
Speaker 8 (37:35):
No, not at all. When I was tested at sixty two,
I read at a grade three level. When I was
graduating high school, I was called into the counselor's office
and I was told, David, people like you end up
on welfare, on the street, in jail or dead. You
don't have much of a future because you can't learn,
(37:56):
and no idea. What was causing me not to learn?
The science wasn't there back then It is there today
with things I just told you. But this is what
children go through. Fortunately, as you said, I have had
a mother who would not quit like you. She supported
me with unconditional love and with that, as I told you,
when you get the brain chemicals moving into an excited
(38:19):
mode of belief oneself, you can do anything regard whether
you can read.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
And you did do anything because you did not fulfill
your principles ideas of what was true for you. You
ended up being actually highly successful even though you couldn't
read after leaving school, and very quickly after leaving school.
So can you tell folks about that.
Speaker 8 (38:44):
Yeah. The first thing I did right after graduating, well,
I wanted to be an aerospace engineer, but I wouldn't
be able to get into university. So I thought, okay,
rather than fly rockets, I'll fly plane. So it became
an airline pilot. My ADHD kicked in. I couldn't sit
in the cockpit, so I thought, okay, technology, she's moving.
I'll get into computers. They were new. I bought an
Apple to computer. I took it apart, I saw how
(39:05):
they worked, started building them, and I created Yeah, the
company went well over one hundred million dollars. I had
a few companies like that. Just did it out of
passion and desire. But I want to make it clear
for parents who have children who are suffering reading, it
is not intelligence. It is how the brain is working
(39:25):
and wired. I have lots of knowledge and educational components,
so I can tell parents how they can get around it.
The one thing to know, you could have one of
the most brilliant children on the planet. Einstein, Edison, Picasso,
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. They all have these issues, except
(39:45):
they got support the right way. So if there's one
thing I can tell your listeners, if you have a
child suffering in school, I actually bet if we look
down the road, you support that children child the right way.
They've got an incredible future awaiting them of technology.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Yeah. I do believe that we have some weird ideas
about what success is and who can do what. And
I always liked those stories about, you know, somebody coming
along who who was expected not to do anything and
you know, ended up being just as you said, brilliant
(40:26):
and doing incredible things, like somebody who's in a vegetative
state who was given a computer finally and wrote an
award winning screenplay those things. Yes, yes, yeah, exactly. So
you where he became an entrepreneur, You created several businesses,
you were highly successful, but you still couldn't read.
Speaker 8 (40:49):
That's right. Reading is a way of bringing information in
that we said at the beginning. Sound is another way
to do it. So I learned through sound. I listen,
and I spoke. That's why I do a lot of speaking.
Reading is just extracting information off a page that has
been stored there. Now, the ability to read can make
(41:11):
life wonderful because you can power through information. You can
read contracts easy, you can do all sorts of things.
But it does not limit creative thinking. So for me,
it did not hold me back. Yes, I felt like
a fraud. I carried trauma and shame at levels people
can't even comprehend. But I hadn't lost my self esteem.
(41:33):
And with that I just pushed forward and said, damn
the torpedoes. You can't read. You don't even know what
that sign says, but you can probably go build one.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
True. All of that is true. So where did you
go from there? Like, at what point did you because
you now know how to read?
Speaker 8 (41:55):
Oh God, I read voraciously. I love reading. I wish
people would understand and that when you solve the problem
of reading, you open up a portal to the world
of excitement. Oh I love it and I loathed it
Before what happened was COVID. I was doing consulting, coaching,
business mentoring, public speaking, and all of those went down
(42:18):
the toilet. I was sixty two years old. We didn't
know where the world was going. And I thought, you know,
I need to solve what's wrong with me. And I
got tested and I was told I have all these
issues wrong with me. And I contacted someone who said,
you know, there's a gentleman in the US, John Cochrany's
a very famous man who has dyslexia, and he's creating
(42:40):
a documentary and they can't find any adult that is
willing to show that they can't read on camera in public.
And they believe they can teach you how to read.
And if you want to do it in front of
a camera, there's a Hollywood production. It was called The
Truth About Reading, or is the Truth about Reading? If
you will do that, you have the opportunity to learn
to read well. I had nothing to lose, and across
(43:03):
the border during COVID, I had to get special clearance.
I flew to Michigan. I had a private tutor and
they taught me a way of reading that is never taught,
is unknown. It is almost like a secret code. And
with that, within eleven hours, I read at a post
university level.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah, that's just I mean, I heard that the night
of the gala as you said it, and I thought,
oh my god, I mean this is that's an incredible statement.
Can you share with us how that happens?
Speaker 8 (43:35):
Yes, I will, because I'll give it to you another way.
We are electrochemical machines. We are run by hormones and chemicals.
As I said earlier about your granddaughter, the most powerful
thing in our brain is the amygdala. It is fight
or flight. It looks for safety, and it's constantly firing,
(43:56):
having us on edge. Well, for any one that's got
a difficulty, that isn't going to cross over the other way.
But what I did say is that we learned through patterns,
and that was where the magic was. Because my brain
could not take reading in the way another normal person could.
I was overloading. But the area of a brain called
(44:20):
the pattern recognition area is where the knowledge goes. When
we learn guitar, piano, chess, extreme sports, anything that is
pattern related. Well, lo and behold. The English language is
a friggin pattern twenty six letters, forty four sounds. If
we learn it not as reading, but learn it as sound,
(44:42):
and then you are given examples of how you take
that sound and code it onto the page, which is spelling.
The rate of learning is so fast, and because it
was done one on one with tutoring and it was
happening quickly, I was so excited. I went into a
state called flo which is hyper learning, and literally by
(45:03):
the hour. By the fourth hour, I broke down because
I could feel it, not physically but emotionally going into
my brain. By the eleventh hour, we had gone through
hundreds of words, coding them onto the page. When they
gave me a book to read, I didn't see it
like a bunch of letters. I saw it as patterns
(45:24):
that I could pull together very quickly, and the reading, well,
that was it from I came home after that and went, Okay,
something happened there and I got to figure that out
solve it for the rest of the world.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
So can you give me an example of a pattern.
Speaker 8 (45:38):
Yeah, a pattern is a chair, because any chair is
a chair, and a table or a tree, or a
cat or a dog. We learn it because we have
what's called an extraction of it. Our brain understands what
it is when it comes to words, and they are
made up of symbols of letters. Every time you change
(46:01):
the order of the symbols, you have a new meaning.
The brain doesn't like that it wants to see a
symbol a certain way. When we are young. Patterns are
the repetition of a parent saying or a guardian saying
certain words under certain conditions. It's how we learn about nature.
It's how we learn everything in our life except reading
(46:24):
breaks the breaks the mold. Every time you change the pattern,
it has a different meaning. And that is the dilemma,
and that is the crisis that when we teach reading,
we teach it as memorization. The brain cannot memorize thousands
of words. You are taught look at the word, sound
(46:45):
it out, and put it in your memory. Well, some
children can do that to various degrees. But when you
completely flip it the other way around, and you don't
look at what the word is, but you say the word.
We know hundreds of words. We work on the words
we know, and we learn how to code them onto
the page. It changes everything. Science proves it. Neuroscience firmri machines,
(47:08):
the ones that scan your brain and looking at lighting
up areas, they can see that the pattern, recognition, understanding
is going to the same part of the back of
the brain. We're complex things, as I said, like chess
and piano. Think about it. If you play guitar, you
don't even know what your fingers are doing half the time,
or piano, you're playing chords, they're tending typing. I should
(47:33):
use that example more often. But think about a touch typist.
If you ask them how they do it, they go,
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
I type one hundred and sixty words a minute and
I don't even have to think it's it's and it
is patterns. It is all about stuff that you're talking about.
Speaker 8 (47:48):
For that example, because I type at about seven words
a minute, pick and pack, I've never truly taken the
time to learn the patterns you did. And look at
the power it gives you. It doesn't matter what you're typing.
You don't even have to think about it. That is
a region of the brain called the basil ganglia, which
is the technical term for it. And when we teach
(48:10):
by pattern and there is focus and there's a tension,
and there's an excitement about doing it, there's no limit.
One hundred and forty or more. You are an exceptional
typer and you are using the exact part of the
brain that I am putting reading into. So imagine some
child neurodiverse dyslexic autistic ADHD that triggers that part of
(48:36):
the brain learns to read through pattern recognition. They can
do it. And that's how as an adult eleven hours
a child, you know it's going to be a couple
of weeks or a month, and then we're going to
move along with them and get them into more advanced language.
But that is the power of it. The brain is
an amazing machine. We use it the right way, we
(48:57):
can do amazing things with it.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Yes, while reading is so important in our world. So
you have taken your own life experience and your own
experience putting together businesses that are highly successful in your
public speaking and mentoring and coaching, and you've packaged it
all together into creating an infrastructure to help other people
(49:22):
learn to read in the way that can you talk
a little bit about that.
Speaker 8 (49:27):
It's a big endeavor. I have a good friend of
mine that has been in AI like me for decades,
and Kevin Barbruski. When I got back from learning to read,
I said to him, Kevin, something changed. I didn't understand
about the brain the way I'm telling you. I had
to learn and read. I went down to Stanford did
everything I could, and I said, you know what happened
(49:51):
when they taught me pattern recognition. That's how you actually
teach AI. You teach it patterns. You've seen how they
give it cats and dogs and words. And then the
most important thing they do is they correct it right away.
They make sure the AI doesn't get a wrong inference. Well,
when I had the tutor there, she corrected me immediately.
That doesn't happen in the classroom. So as we started
(50:12):
putting two and two together and ten and twenty together,
we found about forty things that didn't happen in the classroom,
and we realized the two most important things are you
must teach pattern recognition. You need one on one tutoring
for that. And you must be emotionally empathetic and understanding
and have a safe environment. Well, those two things we
can do with AI. We can teach AI to understand
(50:35):
human emotion in the eyes, the face, the voice, the
dilation of the eyes. We're programming that into it. The
pattern recognition. We look at the language and we break
it down into the patterns, and because I learned how
to do it, we program the AI on that. I'm
building out the technology. We've done all the basics of it.
I still need to raise another two million dollars to
(50:57):
do it, but when we've done it, be able to
deploy it like getting water into your home or electricity
globally that anyone with an Internet connection will be able
to learn to read with emotionally attentive AI on a
pattern recognition basis that will meet them exactly where they are,
(51:18):
communicate with them in multiple languages if they don't already
speak English, and for probably eighty percent of the world,
we can give it to them for free. Impoverished, those
in prison, those veterans, those in war torn count for
North America, there's some people that can afford forty seven
dollars and they'll pay for it. But this is transformative.
(51:40):
Reading is not a subject for the classroom. It is
a skill. We're not saying school isn't the most important
thing there is, because you need to learn. But if
you don't know how to read, you can't learn, or
you don't want to learn. We're like scess holding. We'll
take a child that is four to five years old
how to read at a grade four level. By the
(52:00):
time they're in grade one, when they go to school.
They'll have the most enjoy wonderful experience of learning that
a child could have. Everyone's ad playing field.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
This just teach English.
Speaker 8 (52:15):
Well, yes, and that's part of it. Down the road,
it might do many things. But we've got seven hundred
million people on the planet Earth that are suffering trying
to learn English. In North America alone, one hundred and
eighty million people and all of them reading below grade six,
can barely read a book to their children. So we
have a massive development here to do English, but it
(52:40):
will understand eighty other languages and bring them over to English.
We're not teaching other languages because English has now become
the de facto language of science, technology, artificial intelligence, transportation, airlines, communication,
so other people can do it. We'll show them how
to make the technology. I want to get it in
(53:03):
children's hands before they go to school and stop the
suffering and trauma that occur.
Speaker 1 (53:09):
That's wonderful. So if people want to know more about
what you're doing, how can they reach you.
Speaker 8 (53:15):
Well, the technology is not available yet. It is called
reading Road and there's not really a website that has
technical specifications of it, but it's reading Road dot ai
because it is artificial intelligence. I'll give you my email
address if they contact you. Most people think I'll never
respond to them, but I do parents who are worried,
(53:37):
concerned not just about what I'm building, but how they
can help their children. My email address is David. My
first name, Chalk my second name, so David at Chalk
and then Corp Corp. David at Chalkcorp dot com. Email me.
You'll be surprised you'll hear back. I do this out
(53:58):
of passion and love and desire because I learned, unfortunately,
what hell can be like when you don't fit in
and you don't suffer in those early grades from trauma,
and you learn to read. Reading is a symptom. Those
who can't read have difficult lives. If you look at
(54:18):
the incarceration, eighty percent of all incarcerated people read below
grade three. It's called the pipeline to prison. So when
we see reading falling off, we know there's trauma. What
we have to do is pick the reading up, so
self esteem comes up, the negative thoughts about themselves start
to go away, and they contribute to life. They become curious,
(54:42):
and again, if they're neurodivergent, they have a possibility of
being some of the most creative and intelligent contributors.
Speaker 1 (54:51):
Absolutely, I so agree with that. That is so true.
And two million dollars is really in this day and
age and in this world, is really a nice things.
So let's hope that two million shows up in your
bank account.
Speaker 8 (55:04):
I don't minimize it, but yes, you know you're hearing
tens of millions, hundreds of millions. It's because we know
what we're doing. It's very focused. We can build it
with AI. And again, this is going to be so
robust in the prisons. Our first prison test will be
San Quentin, so understand how serious this is in the
gold of which we have to build it.
Speaker 1 (55:24):
Yeah. Well, thank you, David. I so appreciate you coming
and chatting. That award you received is so well deserved.
I am happy to have you on and chatting about this.
So I look forward to hearing about it, hitting it
out there and helping people.
Speaker 8 (55:41):
Thank you, I received it for all those other people
that deserve it.
Speaker 1 (55:46):
I understand that. Thank you.
Speaker 4 (55:48):
David joined Gnargie with guest hosts every Monday from one
to two point thirty in the afternoon.
Speaker 7 (56:00):
It comes a live.
Speaker 4 (56:04):
When Spirit Whispers is where we explore treaties in BC,
residential school stories, foster care, and ideas about truth and
reconciliation in Canada plus news on the news.
Speaker 7 (56:17):
You'll stop but one you listen to me because you
might believe what you have seen and which you don't
believe that what takes the great.
Speaker 4 (56:24):
Don't miss this great opportunity to become familiar with your
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us strong. When spirit whispers Mondays at one pm.
Speaker 3 (56:36):
Like a trip, Zack, catch what I'm saying, like a trip.
Speaker 11 (56:39):
More than you, and there's more than me, and there's
plenty more online if you don't believe, and if you
need some more convincing, let's spend then not alone in
a resident school building comes a.
Speaker 1 (56:55):
And that's our show. My thanks to the Courage to
Come Back Award winner's Rachel Fair and David Chalk, who
demonstrate every day that we are not defined by a
mental health diagnosis and are able to continue to do
extraordinary things in our lives that benefit so many. And
to our listeners, our thanks for joining us today. Stay
safe out there. You've just listened to Rethreading Madness, where
(57:19):
we dare to change how we think about mental health.
We air live on.
Speaker 10 (57:23):
Vancouver co Op Radio CFRO one hundred point five FM
every Tuesday at five pm, or online at co opradio
dot org. If you have questions or feedback about this program,
or want to share your story, or have something to
say to us, we want to hear from you. You
can reach us by email rethreading Madness at co opradio
(57:43):
dot org.
Speaker 1 (57:44):
This is Bernardine Fox. We'll be back next week. Until then,
will ever been fir?
Speaker 2 (57:53):
God? What the hell I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1 (57:58):
When I can seem to.
Speaker 2 (58:00):
Find my way under or over to just when I'm
ready and give up the fight? They are when we
turn out the lights in It's all right, it's all right.
(58:22):
Don't you really be alright?
Speaker 7 (58:28):
Why do I always believe but when you're.
Speaker 2 (58:31):
Jolley, everything's gonna be out right?
Speaker 7 (58:38):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (58:44):
Why don't I wonder how you know? Surely you don't
have all of the facts.
Speaker 11 (58:54):
You could be just making it up.
Speaker 2 (58:59):
Whow I ever think of that?
Speaker 1 (59:04):
It's some kind of magic in the.
Speaker 2 (59:06):
Words that you breathe saying, baby.
Speaker 7 (59:11):
Take it from me.
Speaker 1 (59:13):
It's all right, it's all right.
Speaker 2 (59:17):
Don't to have real be alright?
Speaker 7 (59:23):
Why I always believe that when.
Speaker 2 (59:26):
You tell me everything's gonna be ofright, everything's gonna be
off right than anyone else.
Speaker 11 (59:41):
It's such a cliche, just words people say to be
nice somehow, and nan far from you.
Speaker 7 (59:54):
I'm convinced you're
You're listening to Vancouver co Op Radio cfr OH one
hundred point five FM. We're coming to you from the
unseated traditional territories of the Squamish, muscream and Slighway tooth
nations around Vancouver, BC. I'm your host, Bernardine Fox, and
this is this show that dares to change how we
think about mental health. Welcome to Rethreading Madness.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
We have ever been fer No, what the hell I'm
gonna do when I can't see a fine away under over.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver co Op Radio
cfr OH one hundred point five f M. I'm Bernardine
Fox and I have the pleasure of speaking with Rachel
Fer today. Did I say your last name right?
Speaker 3 (00:54):
It's Fair.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Fair. That makes more sense, Rachel Fair. So welcome Rachel.
Thanks for coming and chatting with me.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Well, thanks for the invite.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
You are the twenty seventeen Courage to Come Back Award
winner for mental Health and I love having the award
Winteress for Mental Health on my show. I won in
twenty twenty two and it is an incredible honor to
be acknowledged for the work that we do that so
often isn't necessarily understood or recognized or even realized. So
(01:27):
congratulations on that, even though it's many years past that.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
You're welcome. One of the things that you've been dealing
with almost your whole life is being misdiagnosed. Can you
talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
So originally, as a teenager, I was diagnosed with depression
at age thirteen, and from there it went on to
an anxiety diagnosis, potentially bipolar and traits of schizophrenia, and
then they landed on a borderline personality disorder diagnosis, which
(02:05):
was also false. But I didn't figure that out until
I was forty two.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Oh my god, how did it come about that you
figured that out?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I had a psychologist. My last psychologist told me that
I had every symptom of autism, that everything that's on
the DSM criteria, and that's what got me thinking that.
But he did not diagnose me with autism. He actually
told me I could solve most of my problems by
getting a boyfriend.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
You told me that, Oh if only life was so simple,
you just have a boyfriend in every corner. Oh yeah,
but you did something really novel. And that's the thing
that I really want to talk about. You went to school.
You took yourself to school to learn about psychology, to
(03:04):
help yourself figure out how to help yourself.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
I did. The more I learned about borderline personality to disorder,
the more I realized I didn't actually have it. The
diagnosis never actually bring true for me, and I had
taken a couple of years of psychology in high school.
When I was in school, they offered college level courses,
(03:29):
and from there, as an adult, I started to attend
mental health summits because I couldn't keep a doctor because
they didn't really have much left to teach me at
that point. And through the mental health summits and through
the Embrace Autism website which has all of the assessments
(03:53):
for the autism assessment on the website, I discovered that
I actually have level one autism.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So the borderline personality disorder is the most common diagnosis
for women with level one autism.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
The most common misdiagnosis is that what yes, yes, yeah,
And I've heard that so so many times. In fact,
so many times I hear about people being misdiagnosed with
borderline either too quickly or or just inappropriately or honestly.
With the work I do around therapy abuse and exploitation,
(04:32):
it's often because the abusive therapist is looking for a
way to discredit their client who might tell on them.
So it is a terrible diagnosis and it's too often misapplied.
And so I'm hoping that you have managed to move
away from that and people are recognizing that you are
(04:53):
autistic as opposed to BPD.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Well, I've just started telling people like, if I in
a situation where I may become overstimulated, I just tell
them upfront, like, if this happens, I'm going to need
to step away and take a moment to regulate how
I'm feeling. And that's gotten me a lot further than
not talking about it. But the reason level when autism
(05:17):
is so often misdiagnosed in women is women are taught
at a much younger age to internalize their struggles and
the majority of autism research is based on white men.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
The majority of research is based on white men.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Yes, so a lot of POC and women often struggle
in getting a correct diagnosis because there's been next to
no research on how it presents in women, which is
drastically different than the way it presents in men, women
are taught to be mild and meek, can you be ladylike?
(05:58):
And so we often more often than not internalize our symptoms.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Do you think that is also goes along with masking.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Well, that's exactly what it is. We're taught to mask
at a much earlier age because it's acceptable for boys
to be loud and boisterous and have you know, tempers,
whereas it's not so society where society expects women to
be the opposite.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
It's true, that is very, very true. I met you
at the twenty twenty five Coach to Come Back Award
and there they were talking about work you were doing
around dismantling stigma around mental health. Can you talk a
little bit about that work.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Well, yeah, so I do a lot of This is
mostly when I'm out in the community. Due to a
car accident a few years ago, I now have a
service dog, which tends to spark conversations with random people,
and so I like to take those opportunities to kind
of educate people on the differences and just spread awareness.
(07:16):
And I've had a great deal of success I've had.
It's just amazing how little people actually know about how
mental health presents, especially within women, because you know, like
with especially with autistic women, our special interests tend to
be socially acceptable, and so that tends to get missed
(07:40):
because they're like, oh, you're just an artist or you're artistic,
or you're this, or you're that, when in reality, it's
actually a special interest that dominates the majority of my time.
Right Fortunately for me, my special interest is learning, and
so through that I was able to discover more about
my health and learn how to manage my symptoms and
(08:03):
learn basically learn how to treat myself.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
And that's an amazing thing really when when you know,
you say it very calmly and sort of matter of factly,
but you know, it takes an incredible brain to be
able to be objective enough about what you're experiencing, to
be able to apply what you've learned to a treatment idea,
and to then assess it and see whether it is
(08:28):
this working, is it not working? Should I do something different?
Should I? You know, and do those measured kind of
outcomes on something that most people can't get objective enough
away from them their own self to be able to do.
How were you able to do.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
This lots and lots of meditation, mindfulness practice, but also
through dialectical behavioral therapy, which honestly I think would be
helpful for everyone, not just people with mental health. So
through dialectical behavioral therapy, one of the tools that you're
(09:03):
taught is called shaping, and it's shaping is when you
take a coping technique and you change it to work
for you, to work better for you.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Can you give me an example.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Um, oh, that's a tough one. Well, for instance, like
when you're overstimulated and you're trying to calm down. So
there's multiple methods. Number one is meditation, but not everybody's
able to quiet their mind long enough to meditate. So
(09:40):
instead of trying to meditate for half an hour, do
it for thirty seconds, reset yourself, do it again, and
through that practice you can extend it. But it makes it,
it makes it doable. So you basically take the technique
and you break it down, so you know, if there's
ass spects of one technique that work for you, but
(10:03):
other aspects of that technique don't work for you, just
do the ones that work.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
For you, right, that's reasonable.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
Kind of take what works and leave what doesn't and we.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
All should be doing that all the time. There shouldn't
be any other rule about what you do except that rule.
You are an incredible person and there's no doing an
interview with you is sort of like, Okay, what part
of this amazing person's life should I pick? And I
really don't want to just pick. I mean, one of
(10:35):
the other things that is true for you is that
you had a personal issue and you decided that the
laws needed to change, and you proceeded to change them.
Can you talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Yes, I was married to a person who did not
have a conscience, so the old dasmtern would be sociopath.
And when I finally was able to it took some planning,
but I was able to get away with my children
(11:10):
despite domestic violence laws not being helpful then. But I
was married to him, and you can't get a divorce
unless you have a process server serve the person in person,
and that needed to change because that's often detrimental to
(11:32):
the safety of battered women because then you have to
have an address for service and you can't use social media.
And it took me about seven years to convince to
find a judge that I was able to convince and
based on the issue of safety and a combination of
the fact that he was a drug addict without a
(11:54):
permanent address, I was able to convince the judge to
allow me to serve him on face book.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
And so was that like a message a messenger? Okay? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yeah, So basically I just took photos of all the
documents and my lawyer just sent a message through Facebook messenger.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Wow, and that works. That's very cool. And so when
you were saying the divorce laws, the whatever, the parameters
of that aren't very useful to somebody or helpful to
somebody who is afraid for their safety. What do you
was this back? When? When was this? Is this something current?
Or is this a while ago?
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Or this was oh dear, I got married in two
thousand and four, so this was I believe twenty and eleven.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
So only fourteen years ago. Yeah. Do you think the
laws have changed a lot since then? Besides the one
that you managed to get changed?
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Well, now you can now that you can serve them
on social media. So because I was able the judge
gave me permission, that set a precedent and so now
everyone can do it because the judge the courts can't
say yes to one person and no to another.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
So it's for whenever you have a new president, that
precedent becomes the new law.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
And part of why this is important is that if
you serve somebody, if for instance, then if say, if
you are somebody who's serving without a lawyer in that
service document, you have to provide the address which which
they can reply to, right. And so by virtue of
having to serve them and having that address, you are
(13:42):
in fact outing yourself about where you live. And if
you are in danger, doing that is a very dangerous
thing to do, not just for yourself but for your children.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah. So now you can actually use an email address
as an address for service, or you can use a
lawyer's office, but divorce law. But to get a divorce
you cannot get legal aid for divorce.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
No.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
And also you can't just have anybody serve divorce papers.
So prior to my divorce it had to be a
process server. And at that time they were charging two
hundred and fifty dollars per attempt, right, So if they
attempt to serve and they failed to serve, you still
have to pay that two hundred and fifty and then
you have to pay it again. So it was it's
(14:29):
financially which made it financially impossible to get.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
A divorce, especially if somebody it doesn't really have a
fixed address and they're moving around a lot, that would
make it very difficult. So thank you on behalf of
all battered women everywhere in Canada, BC, all of Canada.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
So divorce is federal. It's only done in Supreme Court
right right, And so because it was I was granted
permission by a Supreme Court judge, that means it's a
precedent for the entire country.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Well, thank you on behalf of all battered women everywhere
in Canada.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
We needed other options, yes we did. I was too
stubborn to let him win. I wasn't going to allow
him to force me to be tied to him for
the rest of my life.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
But this is a signature of yours and that you
don't come up against a rule that's not working and
just go, oh, well, I guess I can't. You come
up to them and go how else can I change
this or how else can I do this so that
I can get better or I can heal regardless of
(15:38):
whether or not you know. I mean, it's one of
the things about you that is so remarkable. What's where
are you going now with your desire to help and
red stigma? And there's some work that you were looking
at doing to help men.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Yeah, so there are there aren't enough reasons for women,
but there's even fewer resources for men. And through my
dad's work in pouring sweat ludge and helping people in
addiction and helping people coming out of prison, and he
goes into the prisons, the poor sweat these men who
(16:18):
are spending most of their adult lives in prison, they
get let out, they spend three months and a half
way house, and then they get kicked to the curb
with no support, no life skills, no budgeting skills or
anything like that. And then, especially for Indigenous men, reconnecting
with their culture oftentimes gives them a greater chance of
(16:39):
success in turning their lives around. So I'm hoping to
find some financial backers. I would like to start a
traditional medicine farm that includes second stage housing for Indigenous
men coming out of half way houses. You've got these
men who are working so hard, who wants so badly
(17:01):
to turn their lives around, but when they've spent you know,
eighteen out of their twenty adult years in jail. They
don't have the skills to survive in the world.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
And then they're going out dealing with the colonial contest
exact process.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
So my idea for the program actually came from Norway's
prison model. So Norway has actually, with their current prison model,
has reduced recidivism rates from eighty percent to seventeen percent,
Oh my god, simply by providing therapy. In their prisons.
(17:41):
They only supply one meal a day, but within the
prison there's actually a grocery store, and every prisoner has
a job and they buy their own food. They're taught
how to shop, they're taught how to budget, and they
don't live in cells. They live in blocks with other men,
which is more like an apartment with multiple rooms, and
(18:01):
they have their own kitchen and they cook their own meals.
So they're taught how to cook, they're taught how to budget,
and it made a huge difference in the amount of
people who reoffended. They've actually had to clothes probably I
believe half of their prisons as a result of this model.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
And when you talk about I love Norway, I love Norway,
but for so many reasons. But now I love Norway
for this reason. When you talk about a traditional medicine farm,
you're talking about an indigenous traditional farm. And you talked
about your dad. So where are you from, Rachel?
Speaker 3 (18:36):
So I'm from Canada. So when I say my dad,
I mean my adopted dad. My biological dad committed suicide
when I was very young, and in my early twenties
I started attending a sweat lodge run by a gentleman
named Old Hands, and him and his wife Anna, who
he decided that I didn't have parents, so they were
(18:59):
going to be my parents.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
That's wonderful.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Now my dad is a medicine man and my mom
is a medicine woman, and I've been learning a great
deal from them. So rather than use traditional medicine, which
oftentimes doesn't work for me, I've learned how to use
different medicines. For instance, bear root is good for treating asthma.
(19:25):
Breathing in the smoke from bear root actually opens your
lungs just like an inhaler does. And soap berries are
a good source of iron. So iron supplements that you
get from the pharmacy, your body can only process about
ten percent of what you're taking in and the rest
just kind of like builds up in your body and
can cause long term problems. But if you eat a
(19:47):
spoonful of soapberries once a day for ten days, it
brings your iron levels back to normal and your body
processes one percent of it.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
That's interesting. I did not know that.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
All pharmaceutical medicine and comes from indigenous medicine. It's all
based on plants. I can't remember the name of it,
but there's a plant that produces a substance that has
the same effect as morphine, and you can make your
own aspirin out of willow bark.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Wow. Interesting. So traditional medicine farm to assist men coming
out of prism. Second stage housing, well.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Second stage housing. So you know, you put in ten
hours a week on the farm, You help with the
growing of the plants, you learn about the medicine, you
learn about your culture, and part of that time would
be spent in cooking classes, learning how to cook meals
together as a group to have that social structure, because
you can't just treat the illness, and just teaching the
(20:48):
skills alone isn't enough. You also need a community, right,
So this would be more of a holistic approach, right, And.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Where would this farm be situated in and how close
are you too?
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yes, if I can find the backing, there's actually a
property I have in mind that's available for sale. It's
a nice chunk of farmland here in Surrey that is
close enough to a bus stop so that these gentlemen
could still go and have a regular job as well.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
And how much funding are you looking at? Well?
Speaker 3 (21:22):
The property I believe is about nine million dollars, right,
but it's twenty eight acres and then there would be
the costs so for the living situation, because it is
farmland within the Agricultural Land Reserve. I had the idea
of building a barn, making the top half of the
(21:43):
barn as rooms, and then have an industrial kitchen downstairs
with a living area and a community area, possibly expanding
to have an event center there as well, so that
it could be a self sustaining program.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Right. That sounds wonderful, Rachel. I have no doubt you
will pull it off.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Whatsoever, we'll see because the way I figure it'll take
about twenty million to get it off the ground.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Well, twenty million is not that much money, and today
is a world. So we will just imagine twenty million
dollars landing in your lap.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Just put it out in the universe, and if it's
meant to happen, it will happen.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
You know.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
That's the other thing too, is I just got tired
of getting let down, so I just choose to believe
that something's meant to happen. All I got to do
is have the faith and it'll happen.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Absolutely. That is the only way one can live one's
life believing that how things happen are the way they
are meant to happen.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
So yeah, and reducing your expectations because you know, oftentimes
we have unrealistic expectations or people don't you know, meet
what we want to happen. So it's radical acceptance. Basically,
the situation is what it is.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
If it's gonna work, it's gonna work. If it's not
gonna work, well I'm gonna go find something.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Else, Yeah, exactly, And if I.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Can't find what I want, then I'll make my own opportunity.
I've been told I'm never gonna succeed my whole life.
I was always told I was stupid. I had my
family telling me I was missing that piece that makes
you human?
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Oh god, yeah, how how would they ever get there
with you? I can't even imagine, honestly.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
And I just I got tired of it and I
just decided, you know what, you think I can't do it?
Watch me. And instead of getting angry, I chose to
be spiteful and well, you think I won't succeed, Okay,
try let's try this. And I don't do it to
shove it in their faces, like I don't go back
(23:52):
and go, hey, you know I did this, I did that,
but you know you said I wouldn't achieve anything. Well,
to date, I've won the Courage to Come Back awards
as well as the Canada Win fifty medal m hm
and you know and other things, and I just choose
to live in the moment right.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Well, you're doing it all right, Thank you, Rachel. Thanks,
You're welcome and we'll be right.
Speaker 5 (24:20):
Back to the CFRORO has the most Reggae and Caribbean
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week off with some reggae oldies on Tuesdays from ten
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(24:40):
On the first and second Saturday of every month. It's
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On CFRO one hundred point five FM, Vancouver Cooperative Radio.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver co Operate d
CFR one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox. Rethreading
Madness is coming up to its sixth anniversary of being
on air. We produce an air each week out of
CFR one hundred point five FM on the unseated traditional
territory of the Squamish, Muscriham and Slighwey Tooth nations around Vancouver.
(25:19):
Bc RTM was one of the first radio programs to
focus on mental health issues here in Canada, in an
area swamped with statements from therapists rooted in colonial ideas
about mental health and trained in the DSM. RTM works
to ensure that the voices of those with lived experience
have agency and opportunity to define who they are and
(25:42):
what is true for them who listens to us. Beyond
those with lived experience, our audience includes their friends and partners,
along with therapists, counselors, and students of psychology. Since twenty
twenty two, all of our programs have been uploaded to
the Mental Health Radio Network and can be downloaded it
from all podcast platforms. So if this show was of
(26:03):
interest to you, you might find the rest of our
programs informative as well. You can find them by searching
for rethreading Madness wherever you listen to your podcast.
Speaker 6 (26:12):
Eyeh, turn you up. Quigate Yuons Queen sna Hi, everybody,
my name is quigate Yuwon's. I'm a member of the
Squamish nation and the yagolanis klan of the Hyda Nation.
You're listening to co Op Radio cfro O one hundred
point five FM. We live, work play and broadcast from
the traditional, ancestral and unseeded territories of the Musquiham, Squamish,
(26:34):
and Slavetooth nations. Ah you hang out this A lot
of people call this a.
Speaker 7 (26:44):
Rock and roll.
Speaker 8 (26:47):
Swings.
Speaker 9 (26:49):
This is going be all.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Let's see with the left hand, yeah, and the right
hand fits in with something like this, Yeah, here.
Speaker 10 (26:56):
We go now.
Speaker 9 (26:59):
Yeah called rock and roll, and you can hear all
about it on Rock Talk Discover the hidden but enchanting
side of the music Friday mornings at nine o'clock.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
Oh. If that isn't enchant thing, nothing is.
Speaker 10 (27:17):
Go ahead, Jess.
Speaker 8 (27:18):
Dance go crazy.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver called Radios FR
one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernadine Fox and today
I get the pleasure of talking with David Chalk. I
met David Chalk at the twenty to twenty five Courage
to Come Back Award gala, where he was given an
award for mental health. David lives with dyslexia ADHD and
(27:43):
something called pras pagnosa. I think I may have said
that very slowly, but maybe correct. I did look it
up and I did practice on how to say. I'm
not sure I said it right. David believed with the
belief about himself that he would never succeed and it
was something that was instill in him by the school
system and all of those who live with disabilities, whether
(28:05):
their physical or emotional disabilities, often face the same thing,
but David had something that not everyone has. He had
a mother who always believed in him. So welcome, David.
Speaker 8 (28:16):
Welcome, good to hear your voice again, and thank you
for having me on your show today.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
My pleasure. Can you start by describing for our audience
what dyslexia, ADHD and proSP pagnosa are and how they
impact on a child in school?
Speaker 8 (28:33):
Oh my god, Okay, sure, I'm sure many of your
listeners have it themselves or in their family. It's probably
if you put all those together, thirty percent of all
people have either one or most prosopagnaesia. The last one
is the most complicated and complex, very rare, but it
is the inability to recognize the human face. Our brain
(28:56):
can do many magical things, and one of them is
it can have an unlimited amount of memories for recognizing
people and the emotion and the look on the face.
We believe nature put it in place so that a
baby could recognize the mother with all the different facial
looks it could give them. Because there's someone not understanding
(29:17):
that might look like a different person. Well, that one
is enough to throw me into a loop. Most of
the time I can see someone in ten minutes later,
I don't recognize them. I recognize voices quite well, but
you can imagine what it's like in the business world,
so that one has really kicked me in the gut
a few times. ADHD is a way in which the
(29:41):
brain is very active. It's hyperactivity for the most part,
but it doesn't have to be hyperactivity. We tend to
focus very hard. We tend to need constant excitement in
our life. Most people Richard Branson would be a good
example of someone with ADHD and dyslexia because we are
(30:01):
risk takers. Very common in entrepreneurs. My god, probably forty
percent of all entrepreneurs have it because it drives you
to want to do things. Now, Dyslexia, which is a
term we do here quite often for learning disabilities, isn't
really a thing. What it is is a name given
to a child that can't seem to learn to read
(30:24):
for whatever reason. And the reason really behind that is
what we call neurodiversity. Neudiversity means prosopagnesia, ADHD, dysgraphia. There's
about one hundred things that can be wrong with the
brain that has it not wire properly. These are not
mental deficiencies. They are just a different way of wiring
(30:45):
the brain. And it so happens that in the first
years of school, grade one to three we are taught
to read. One to three is taught to read, three
to twelve is read to learn. Now, a child going
into school prior usually has a pretty good childhood. They're curious,
they're happy, they're joyful, they play, they walk into the classroom,
(31:09):
and now there is demands on them, pure pressure, feedback.
Children all sorts of activity, about fifty to sixty percent
of them get anxiety. It is very natural. We all
get anxiety, but when you're only five or six years
old and it triggers you hard, it actually shuts down
(31:30):
a part of the brain that is required to learn
to read. And if you are already a little bit
neuro divergent and that anxiety kicks in, well, then the
likelihood of learning to read drops off by about eighty percent.
That's who I was, and that's what happens to about
fifty four to fifty six percent of all children in
(31:52):
North America.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
So all children, not just ones that live with a
disability of some kind.
Speaker 8 (31:58):
No, And this is what makes it so interesting, because
you know there's a couple of ways. You can go
into grade one. You've had an incredibly good life and
you transition in and you may or may not get anxiety.
You could have had a difficult home life, so you're
already one step backwards going to the classroom, and you're
much more likely to have a setback a trauma experience.
(32:22):
And then there is the learning divergent, which do have
a wiring condition and they are highly likely about eighty
percent likely to have a fight or flight response happen.
The interesting thing is in the numbers, about twenty to
thirty percent of children a neuro divergent one way or another.
Yet nearly sixty percent of children fail to learn to
(32:44):
read or literally fail through the education system, indicating one
more time that it is the environment. The fighter flight
response for survival triggers corozol and adrenaline. Brain kind of
shuts down. We want to get out of there and
and learning becomes secondary.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
It's interesting because I have a child who has ADHD
and probably mild autism. It's actually my grandchild, but I've
been raising her and she could speak in full sentences
at nine months, but she couldn't read. And by the
time she hit you know, halfway through grade two she
still couldn't read. She still couldn't get the idea, and
(33:26):
we were taught that it was probably because of her
not thinking in terms of a word, but thinking in
terms of sentences. But now what you're tolling me makes sense,
because she actually didn't learn to read in school. She
learned to read by video games.
Speaker 8 (33:45):
Yes, and you kind of hit it there. Let me
just give you the quick overview because I'm sure many
people in your audience would love to understand this. We
learn through sound pattern recognition. Think of a child from
early ages, like eight months or so, up to grade five,
before they go into school, they learn more than four
(34:05):
thousand to five thousand words nouns, adjective pronouns. They haven't
been taught anything. They know how to conjugate a verb, run, running,
have run. Everything came from what we call pattern recognition,
or the other turn for is statistical learning. When you
go into the classroom, what you are required to do
is take the sounds you learned and put them on paper,
(34:28):
record them, and then lift them off the paper. That
is the most complicated thing for a human brain to do.
There's no circuitry, so we have to learn this pattern
symbol relationship. You know, just under half children do pick
it up, but any neurodivergency errors on the side of
I want it to be a sound and I don't
(34:50):
want to attach it to a symbol, which is a
letter of the alphabet. So you saw that. So many
parents say they were wonderful before they went to school,
and then all of a sudden, it's as if they
lost half down almost intelligence. Because it's not intelligence, their
inability to learn. And that is it. Because the brain
can't do it. And if for any reason fight or flight,
(35:10):
which is our need to survive, it overacts. It puts
these hormones in the body, and those hormones are basically
telling the brain after millions of years of evolution, we
don't need to think about this. You need to get
the heck out of there. And that numbness or that
lack of oxygen it gives to the frontal cortex is
enough to have reading, not updake, and that underlies everything.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
It's interesting as I've always known that video games were
the thing that solved this problem for her, and once
she learned to read, once she figured that out, she
went from you know, being in grade two, to reading
at a grade four level by the end of it,
to reading at a grade eight level by the time
she finished elementary school, to reading at a university level
(35:57):
by the time she hit grade nine. So it was
it was just finding the way that she learned and
allowing that to be and not impose some other form
of learning on her.
Speaker 8 (36:12):
Well, you actually solved it another way too, the fact
that she accelerated so much. I think parents should know this.
When you go into fight or flight, you got cortisol
and adrenaline. When you go into curiosity and excitement, you
have dopamine and a seat of colin. And when we
trigger that a video game.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Oh interesting, When.
Speaker 8 (36:31):
You trigger dopamine, you excite the brain to want to learn.
If you start to integrate learning or reading into that,
the dopamine and the seta coline continue to occur. And
now reading actually does that. So you answered the question
and you solved the problem. Excitement, attention and focus drive
(36:52):
dopamine that drove her to want to learn to read.
Reading became excited and she accelerated. You literally, you were
balancing the neurochemicals of the body without most people knowing
it and resolving the entire reading and literacy problem yourself.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Well, I wish I could take credit for it. I
would have to give it all to her. My only
job was to not let anybody talk me out of
letting her play video games. So anyways, supported her I did.
I always do, so it is my job. So you
ended up graduating from school having had these disabilities all
(37:30):
the way through. Were you able to read by the
time you finished school?
Speaker 8 (37:35):
No, not at all. When I was tested at sixty two,
I read at a grade three level. When I was
graduating high school, I was called into the counselor's office
and I was told, David, people like you end up
on welfare, on the street, in jail or dead. You
don't have much of a future because you can't learn,
(37:56):
and no idea. What was causing me not to learn?
The science wasn't there back then It is there today
with things I just told you. But this is what
children go through. Fortunately, as you said, I have had
a mother who would not quit like you. She supported
me with unconditional love and with that, as I told you,
when you get the brain chemicals moving into an excited
(38:19):
mode of belief oneself, you can do anything regard whether
you can read.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
And you did do anything because you did not fulfill
your principles ideas of what was true for you. You
ended up being actually highly successful even though you couldn't
read after leaving school, and very quickly after leaving school.
So can you tell folks about that.
Speaker 8 (38:44):
Yeah. The first thing I did right after graduating, well,
I wanted to be an aerospace engineer, but I wouldn't
be able to get into university. So I thought, okay,
rather than fly rockets, I'll fly plane. So it became
an airline pilot. My ADHD kicked in. I couldn't sit
in the cockpit, so I thought, okay, technology, she's moving.
I'll get into computers. They were new. I bought an
Apple to computer. I took it apart, I saw how
(39:05):
they worked, started building them, and I created Yeah, the
company went well over one hundred million dollars. I had
a few companies like that. Just did it out of
passion and desire. But I want to make it clear
for parents who have children who are suffering reading, it
is not intelligence. It is how the brain is working
(39:25):
and wired. I have lots of knowledge and educational components,
so I can tell parents how they can get around it.
The one thing to know, you could have one of
the most brilliant children on the planet. Einstein, Edison, Picasso,
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. They all have these issues, except
(39:45):
they got support the right way. So if there's one
thing I can tell your listeners, if you have a
child suffering in school, I actually bet if we look
down the road, you support that children child the right way.
They've got an incredible future awaiting them of technology.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Yeah. I do believe that we have some weird ideas
about what success is and who can do what. And
I always liked those stories about, you know, somebody coming
along who who was expected not to do anything and
you know, ended up being just as you said, brilliant
(40:26):
and doing incredible things, like somebody who's in a vegetative
state who was given a computer finally and wrote an
award winning screenplay those things. Yes, yes, yeah, exactly. So
you where he became an entrepreneur, You created several businesses,
you were highly successful, but you still couldn't read.
Speaker 8 (40:49):
That's right. Reading is a way of bringing information in
that we said at the beginning. Sound is another way
to do it. So I learned through sound. I listen,
and I spoke. That's why I do a lot of speaking.
Reading is just extracting information off a page that has
been stored there. Now, the ability to read can make
(41:11):
life wonderful because you can power through information. You can
read contracts easy, you can do all sorts of things.
But it does not limit creative thinking. So for me,
it did not hold me back. Yes, I felt like
a fraud. I carried trauma and shame at levels people
can't even comprehend. But I hadn't lost my self esteem.
(41:33):
And with that I just pushed forward and said, damn
the torpedoes. You can't read. You don't even know what
that sign says, but you can probably go build one.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
True. All of that is true. So where did you
go from there? Like, at what point did you because
you now know how to read?
Speaker 8 (41:55):
Oh God, I read voraciously. I love reading. I wish
people would understand and that when you solve the problem
of reading, you open up a portal to the world
of excitement. Oh I love it and I loathed it
Before what happened was COVID. I was doing consulting, coaching,
business mentoring, public speaking, and all of those went down
(42:18):
the toilet. I was sixty two years old. We didn't
know where the world was going. And I thought, you know,
I need to solve what's wrong with me. And I
got tested and I was told I have all these
issues wrong with me. And I contacted someone who said,
you know, there's a gentleman in the US, John Cochrany's
a very famous man who has dyslexia, and he's creating
(42:40):
a documentary and they can't find any adult that is
willing to show that they can't read on camera in public.
And they believe they can teach you how to read.
And if you want to do it in front of
a camera, there's a Hollywood production. It was called The
Truth About Reading, or is the Truth about Reading? If
you will do that, you have the opportunity to learn
to read well. I had nothing to lose, and across
(43:03):
the border during COVID, I had to get special clearance.
I flew to Michigan. I had a private tutor and
they taught me a way of reading that is never taught,
is unknown. It is almost like a secret code. And
with that, within eleven hours, I read at a post
university level.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah, that's just I mean, I heard that the night
of the gala as you said it, and I thought,
oh my god, I mean this is that's an incredible statement.
Can you share with us how that happens?
Speaker 8 (43:35):
Yes, I will, because I'll give it to you another way.
We are electrochemical machines. We are run by hormones and chemicals.
As I said earlier about your granddaughter, the most powerful
thing in our brain is the amygdala. It is fight
or flight. It looks for safety, and it's constantly firing,
(43:56):
having us on edge. Well, for any one that's got
a difficulty, that isn't going to cross over the other way.
But what I did say is that we learned through patterns,
and that was where the magic was. Because my brain
could not take reading in the way another normal person could.
I was overloading. But the area of a brain called
(44:20):
the pattern recognition area is where the knowledge goes. When
we learn guitar, piano, chess, extreme sports, anything that is
pattern related. Well, lo and behold. The English language is
a friggin pattern twenty six letters, forty four sounds. If
we learn it not as reading, but learn it as sound,
(44:42):
and then you are given examples of how you take
that sound and code it onto the page, which is spelling.
The rate of learning is so fast, and because it
was done one on one with tutoring and it was
happening quickly, I was so excited. I went into a
state called flo which is hyper learning, and literally by
(45:03):
the hour. By the fourth hour, I broke down because
I could feel it, not physically but emotionally going into
my brain. By the eleventh hour, we had gone through
hundreds of words, coding them onto the page. When they
gave me a book to read, I didn't see it
like a bunch of letters. I saw it as patterns
(45:24):
that I could pull together very quickly, and the reading, well,
that was it from I came home after that and went, Okay,
something happened there and I got to figure that out
solve it for the rest of the world.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
So can you give me an example of a pattern.
Speaker 8 (45:38):
Yeah, a pattern is a chair, because any chair is
a chair, and a table or a tree, or a
cat or a dog. We learn it because we have
what's called an extraction of it. Our brain understands what
it is when it comes to words, and they are
made up of symbols of letters. Every time you change
(46:01):
the order of the symbols, you have a new meaning.
The brain doesn't like that it wants to see a
symbol a certain way. When we are young. Patterns are
the repetition of a parent saying or a guardian saying
certain words under certain conditions. It's how we learn about nature.
It's how we learn everything in our life except reading
(46:24):
breaks the breaks the mold. Every time you change the pattern,
it has a different meaning. And that is the dilemma,
and that is the crisis that when we teach reading,
we teach it as memorization. The brain cannot memorize thousands
of words. You are taught look at the word, sound
(46:45):
it out, and put it in your memory. Well, some
children can do that to various degrees. But when you
completely flip it the other way around, and you don't
look at what the word is, but you say the word.
We know hundreds of words. We work on the words
we know, and we learn how to code them onto
the page. It changes everything. Science proves it. Neuroscience firmri machines,
(47:08):
the ones that scan your brain and looking at lighting
up areas, they can see that the pattern, recognition, understanding
is going to the same part of the back of
the brain. We're complex things, as I said, like chess
and piano. Think about it. If you play guitar, you
don't even know what your fingers are doing half the time,
or piano, you're playing chords, they're tending typing. I should
(47:33):
use that example more often. But think about a touch typist.
If you ask them how they do it, they go,
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
I type one hundred and sixty words a minute and
I don't even have to think it's it's and it
is patterns. It is all about stuff that you're talking about.
Speaker 8 (47:48):
For that example, because I type at about seven words
a minute, pick and pack, I've never truly taken the
time to learn the patterns you did. And look at
the power it gives you. It doesn't matter what you're typing.
You don't even have to think about it. That is
a region of the brain called the basil ganglia, which
is the technical term for it. And when we teach
(48:10):
by pattern and there is focus and there's a tension,
and there's an excitement about doing it, there's no limit.
One hundred and forty or more. You are an exceptional
typer and you are using the exact part of the
brain that I am putting reading into. So imagine some
child neurodiverse dyslexic autistic ADHD that triggers that part of
(48:36):
the brain learns to read through pattern recognition. They can
do it. And that's how as an adult eleven hours
a child, you know it's going to be a couple
of weeks or a month, and then we're going to
move along with them and get them into more advanced language.
But that is the power of it. The brain is
an amazing machine. We use it the right way, we
(48:57):
can do amazing things with it.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Yes, while reading is so important in our world. So
you have taken your own life experience and your own
experience putting together businesses that are highly successful in your
public speaking and mentoring and coaching, and you've packaged it
all together into creating an infrastructure to help other people
(49:22):
learn to read in the way that can you talk
a little bit about that.
Speaker 8 (49:27):
It's a big endeavor. I have a good friend of
mine that has been in AI like me for decades,
and Kevin Barbruski. When I got back from learning to read,
I said to him, Kevin, something changed. I didn't understand
about the brain the way I'm telling you. I had
to learn and read. I went down to Stanford did
everything I could, and I said, you know what happened
(49:51):
when they taught me pattern recognition. That's how you actually
teach AI. You teach it patterns. You've seen how they
give it cats and dogs and words. And then the
most important thing they do is they correct it right away.
They make sure the AI doesn't get a wrong inference. Well,
when I had the tutor there, she corrected me immediately.
That doesn't happen in the classroom. So as we started
(50:12):
putting two and two together and ten and twenty together,
we found about forty things that didn't happen in the classroom,
and we realized the two most important things are you
must teach pattern recognition. You need one on one tutoring
for that. And you must be emotionally empathetic and understanding
and have a safe environment. Well, those two things we
can do with AI. We can teach AI to understand
(50:35):
human emotion in the eyes, the face, the voice, the
dilation of the eyes. We're programming that into it. The
pattern recognition. We look at the language and we break
it down into the patterns, and because I learned how
to do it, we program the AI on that. I'm
building out the technology. We've done all the basics of it.
I still need to raise another two million dollars to
(50:57):
do it, but when we've done it, be able to
deploy it like getting water into your home or electricity
globally that anyone with an Internet connection will be able
to learn to read with emotionally attentive AI on a
pattern recognition basis that will meet them exactly where they are,
(51:18):
communicate with them in multiple languages if they don't already
speak English, and for probably eighty percent of the world,
we can give it to them for free. Impoverished, those
in prison, those veterans, those in war torn count for
North America, there's some people that can afford forty seven
dollars and they'll pay for it. But this is transformative.
(51:40):
Reading is not a subject for the classroom. It is
a skill. We're not saying school isn't the most important
thing there is, because you need to learn. But if
you don't know how to read, you can't learn, or
you don't want to learn. We're like scess holding. We'll
take a child that is four to five years old
how to read at a grade four level. By the
(52:00):
time they're in grade one, when they go to school.
They'll have the most enjoy wonderful experience of learning that
a child could have. Everyone's ad playing field.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
This just teach English.
Speaker 8 (52:15):
Well, yes, and that's part of it. Down the road,
it might do many things. But we've got seven hundred
million people on the planet Earth that are suffering trying
to learn English. In North America alone, one hundred and
eighty million people and all of them reading below grade six,
can barely read a book to their children. So we
have a massive development here to do English, but it
(52:40):
will understand eighty other languages and bring them over to English.
We're not teaching other languages because English has now become
the de facto language of science, technology, artificial intelligence, transportation, airlines, communication,
so other people can do it. We'll show them how
to make the technology. I want to get it in
(53:03):
children's hands before they go to school and stop the
suffering and trauma that occur.
Speaker 1 (53:09):
That's wonderful. So if people want to know more about
what you're doing, how can they reach you.
Speaker 8 (53:15):
Well, the technology is not available yet. It is called
reading Road and there's not really a website that has
technical specifications of it, but it's reading Road dot ai
because it is artificial intelligence. I'll give you my email
address if they contact you. Most people think I'll never
respond to them, but I do parents who are worried,
(53:37):
concerned not just about what I'm building, but how they
can help their children. My email address is David. My
first name, Chalk my second name, so David at Chalk
and then Corp Corp. David at Chalkcorp dot com. Email me.
You'll be surprised you'll hear back. I do this out
(53:58):
of passion and love and desire because I learned, unfortunately,
what hell can be like when you don't fit in
and you don't suffer in those early grades from trauma,
and you learn to read. Reading is a symptom. Those
who can't read have difficult lives. If you look at
(54:18):
the incarceration, eighty percent of all incarcerated people read below
grade three. It's called the pipeline to prison. So when
we see reading falling off, we know there's trauma. What
we have to do is pick the reading up, so
self esteem comes up, the negative thoughts about themselves start
to go away, and they contribute to life. They become curious,
(54:42):
and again, if they're neurodivergent, they have a possibility of
being some of the most creative and intelligent contributors.
Speaker 1 (54:51):
Absolutely, I so agree with that. That is so true.
And two million dollars is really in this day and
age and in this world, is really a nice things.
So let's hope that two million shows up in your
bank account.
Speaker 8 (55:04):
I don't minimize it, but yes, you know you're hearing
tens of millions, hundreds of millions. It's because we know
what we're doing. It's very focused. We can build it
with AI. And again, this is going to be so
robust in the prisons. Our first prison test will be
San Quentin, so understand how serious this is in the
gold of which we have to build it.
Speaker 1 (55:24):
Yeah. Well, thank you, David. I so appreciate you coming
and chatting. That award you received is so well deserved.
I am happy to have you on and chatting about this.
So I look forward to hearing about it, hitting it
out there and helping people.
Speaker 8 (55:41):
Thank you, I received it for all those other people
that deserve it.
Speaker 1 (55:46):
I understand that. Thank you.
Speaker 4 (55:48):
David joined Gnargie with guest hosts every Monday from one
to two point thirty in the afternoon.
Speaker 7 (56:00):
It comes a live.
Speaker 4 (56:04):
When Spirit Whispers is where we explore treaties in BC,
residential school stories, foster care, and ideas about truth and
reconciliation in Canada plus news on the news.
Speaker 7 (56:17):
You'll stop but one you listen to me because you
might believe what you have seen and which you don't
believe that what takes the great.
Speaker 4 (56:24):
Don't miss this great opportunity to become familiar with your
first Nations people and the very pride that has kept
us strong. When spirit whispers Mondays at one pm.
Speaker 3 (56:36):
Like a trip, Zack, catch what I'm saying, like a trip.
Speaker 11 (56:39):
More than you, and there's more than me, and there's
plenty more online if you don't believe, and if you
need some more convincing, let's spend then not alone in
a resident school building comes a.
Speaker 1 (56:55):
And that's our show. My thanks to the Courage to
Come Back Award winner's Rachel Fair and David Chalk, who
demonstrate every day that we are not defined by a
mental health diagnosis and are able to continue to do
extraordinary things in our lives that benefit so many. And
to our listeners, our thanks for joining us today. Stay
safe out there. You've just listened to Rethreading Madness, where
(57:19):
we dare to change how we think about mental health.
We air live on.
Speaker 10 (57:23):
Vancouver co Op Radio CFRO one hundred point five FM
every Tuesday at five pm, or online at co opradio
dot org. If you have questions or feedback about this program,
or want to share your story, or have something to
say to us, we want to hear from you. You
can reach us by email rethreading Madness at co opradio
(57:43):
dot org.
Speaker 1 (57:44):
This is Bernardine Fox. We'll be back next week. Until then,
will ever been fir?
Speaker 2 (57:53):
God? What the hell I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1 (57:58):
When I can seem to.
Speaker 2 (58:00):
Find my way under or over to just when I'm
ready and give up the fight? They are when we
turn out the lights in It's all right, it's all right.
(58:22):
Don't you really be alright?
Speaker 7 (58:28):
Why do I always believe but when you're.
Speaker 2 (58:31):
Jolley, everything's gonna be out right?
Speaker 7 (58:38):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (58:44):
Why don't I wonder how you know? Surely you don't
have all of the facts.
Speaker 11 (58:54):
You could be just making it up.
Speaker 2 (58:59):
Whow I ever think of that?
Speaker 1 (59:04):
It's some kind of magic in the.
Speaker 2 (59:06):
Words that you breathe saying, baby.
Speaker 7 (59:11):
Take it from me.
Speaker 1 (59:13):
It's all right, it's all right.
Speaker 2 (59:17):
Don't to have real be alright?
Speaker 7 (59:23):
Why I always believe that when.
Speaker 2 (59:26):
You tell me everything's gonna be ofright, everything's gonna be
off right than anyone else.
Speaker 11 (59:41):
It's such a cliche, just words people say to be
nice somehow, and nan far from you.
Speaker 7 (59:54):
I'm convinced you're
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