 A long time ago, somebody told me that there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything and there's no difference when it comes to mental health and how you help someone that you care about. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health and what I like to do is pull different topics from the YouTube community to try to teach you how to improve your mental and emotional well-being. So if you're into that stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because not only do I pull things from the YouTube community, I also pull things from pop culture and social media in general. And a lot of you know that I am trying so, so hard to get to 10,000 followers on Instagram so I can get that stupid little swipe up feature. So if you're not following me on Instagram, go follow me at the Rewired Soul because as soon as I hit 10,000 followers, I'm going to be doing giveaways, giving away merch, mental health books, all sorts of cool stuff. So follow me over on Instagram and make sure that your notifications are turned on. So yeah, I've had a ton, a ton of requests to discuss Alexis Stone and it's interesting because I've had requests for a while and I'm just now discussing it and I'll explain in a minute why it's a good thing that I waited. So those of you who don't know the back story behind this, Alexis Stone is actually a man by the name of Elliot. Alexis Stone is his drag queen persona, looking amazing. And basically not long ago, I think it was a few months ago, maybe in the summer or in the fall, I started getting a lot of DMs saying, you know, hey, can you talk about Alexis Stone, Alexis Stone just got all this plastic surgery and it looks terrible and people are really worried about Alexis and, you know, all sorts of things. First off, I mentioned this in the James Charles video the other day. This is one of the reasons impulse control is very important and it's kind of interesting to like, because a lot of people look, oh, you just make these videos for views and da, da, da, da, but you gotta understand, I don't jump on every single topic going on for good reason. And this, this story was interesting after all the plastic, the quote unquote plastic surgery took place, but I held back and I didn't jump on that to discuss it. Dang good thing too, because Alexis Stone done bamboozled all of us. So those of you who aren't caught up to date, basically Alexis Stone removed the prosthetics and this was all a quote unquote social experiment. All right. And there's a lot of very valuable mental health lessons that we can learn from this. Um, I'm debating on doing a video about Elliot and his recovery because Tristan and I watched his video yesterday and he mentioned like during this process, he was in early sobriety and there's a lot of interesting topics about that because people have also asked, you know, do you think Alexis is addicted to, you know, plastic surgery and things like that. So if you would like me to do a video talking about the addiction aspect of this story, let me know down in the comments. Okay. But anyways, um, some of you who saw my Bobby Burns video, you know that my channel has been inspired by other channels such as wisecrack. So I absolutely wise, love wisecrack. If you don't know what wisecrack is, it's a channel where basically they are taking pop culture, like movies and TV shows and things like that and using it to teach you about philosophy. So over on my channel, I'm taking things from pop culture, sometimes movies, sometimes TV, but mainly YouTubers to try to teach you about mental health. Well, I've been behind on wisecrack. And the other day I sort of binge watching their stuff and they had a really interesting video about why villains have changed in movies. Really cool. If you're into like the history of cinema and just villains and superheroes and just movie, I don't know, whatever, like go check it out. But one of the best points that they brought up is how villains have evolved over the years, especially in cinema, where a lot of villains are trying to do good. They're just going about it in the wrong way. Today, our villains are the product of an increasingly divided America, bracing itself for impact with trust in government, media and religious faith at all time lows. Villains reflect America's innate skepticism towards systems, any systems, all the systems, villains simply embody solutions that are way too radical and usually mind bogglingly violent. The polar opposite of a 1950s villain who represented an evildoer infiltrating an inherently good system in hopes of corrupting it. Today's villains increasingly face objectively evil systems, which they want to change for the better. The only thing that makes these characters villains rather than star-eyed heroes is their means of carrying out that change. So something I'm always trying to teach you guys about is how perspective is such a just fascinating thing, right? I'm always talking about perspective because two people could be sitting in the exact same room and have two completely different experiences, right? And something that we're going to be talking about in this video is, you know, how to help somebody with mental health, tough love. That'll be the second half of this video. But what I want you to remember is everybody is a hero in their own story. OK, and part of that is our ego. Our ego is always telling us what we're doing is right. So when you look at, you know, what Wisecrack was talking about and I'm a big superhero Marvel nerd. My son and I love going to see all the superhero movies. I think we're actually going to go see Aquaman today for his birthday. We saw Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse for the second time. But anyways, when Wisecrack was talking about people like Kilmonger in Black Panther or Thanos and Avengers, like, they believe that they're doing this for the greater good, right? But they're going about it in a bad way. Well, what we see with the Electa Stone situation is that we see the same thing. So those of you who follow my channel, you know, I'm a big fan of tough love. But there's there's this not even a fine line. I think there's a really thick line between tough love and shaming somebody. So Alexis Stone, when when Alexis did this experiment, like there was so much hate, just so much hate, right? There's so much hate. People saying, oh, my God, what have you done? You were so beautiful before you've turned into a monster and just people just straight up hating. And time and time and time again, it's been proven that shaming people does not help. In fact, most of the time, most of the time it does the opposite. Now, I know there are exceptions to the rule every now and then, you know, just shaming somebody like gets their act together. But it's been statistically proven that it does not work in most cases. So a lot of you know that I'm a drug addict and alcoholic in recovery. And this is something that they actually used to do when trying to help people get sober, right? So back in the day, way back in the day before we have like evidence based treatment and things like that, they used to put drug addicts and alcoholics into a room, right? And people would just talk crap to them, just tell them they're awful, tell them they're terrible human beings and all this. And this was supposed to inspire them to change. But we saw that most of the time that didn't work. Something else they did before they realized how dangerous it was, was force people to detox cold turkey without any assistance. And hopefully that pain and that suffering would make them never want to do it again. Now, what's kind of interesting about that is that's actually one of the reasons why I'm clean today is because I went to a cold turkey opioid detox. But if any of you watch my videos about withdrawal, never, ever, ever do that, it can be very unsafe. All right. But anyways, this is this is a problem. So when it comes to, you know, mental health issues, whether it's addiction, whether it's, you know, overeating, whether it's anorexia, like the shaming of it is not helping. But I relate it to kind of what I was talking about in that wisecrack video, because I it's hard to explain, but there is a part. There is a part of these people somewhere deep, deep down inside where they care, they legitimately care, right? So someone who's a great example of how not to do this is Onion Boy. All right. Hopefully you know who that is, because I made a video a while back about how I'm not mentioning his name on my channel. But Onion Boy is somebody who shames people and sits under this this guy's that he's helping people. All right. So so I do know that a lot of people are coming from a place of concern, but they're going about it in the wrong way. So now let's talk about the right way. OK, tough love. And by the way, like the amount of support I've gotten from all of you lately, like on my Bobby Burns video, my Trisha Payness video, like it really, really warms my heart because one of my concerns is always that I'm not getting through to people, that people don't understand what I'm trying to do here and all of that. And those of you who are like my loyal subscribers or people who just see what I'm doing here, you know that I never do anything from a malicious point of view. I'm always doing things from a position of trying to help and trying to educate and trying to raise awareness. I try to take topics that people are already, you know, seeing and or hearing about and try to use it to help other people. And that's kind of what, you know, this tough love thing is for me. So like when it comes to helping somebody that you know, you have to always make sure that you're coming from a place of concern, not a place of judgment. All right. And by the way, let me know down in the comments below, like if you're somebody who struggles with any form of mental illness, let me know if you can tell the difference between somebody trying to help you through judgment or someone trying to help you through a place of concern and compassion. Right. Like I've made videos in the past about how to help somebody with depression, how to help somebody with anxiety, how to help somebody with addiction. One of my friends, Kay, my amazing friend, Kay, from the channel Bipolar Pug, she did a guest video a while back about how to help somebody with bipolar disorder. So we need to just let people know, like, hey, I'm just coming from a place of concern, like that is it. And then I have other videos about boundaries and things like that because at the end of the day, people can only get help if they want to help themselves. But when it comes to the shaming, like we have to understand that a lot of people who are struggling with mental illness, whether they're addicted to plastic surgery or eating or drugs or alcohol or, you know, they have an eating disorder or whatever it is. And you got to understand that a lot of their mental illness is already deep rooted in some type of pain. Right. A lot of people don't like themselves, so they self medicate with unhealthy behaviors. Right. So when you are sitting there and shaming them, you're not helping the situation. So when it comes to Alexis Stone, I think that that is the biggest takeaway from this whole social experiment. All right. But anyways, like I said, if you would like me to tackle this from the addiction aspect, because I definitely have a few topics that I would like to discuss if you're interested in it, let me know down in the comments below. All right. Anyways, that's all I got for this video. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram because giveaways are coming very soon. All right. But if you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I make a ton of videos and a huge, huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. You are all amazing. And if you would like to get exclusive perks and videos and other cool stuff, check out the Patreon icon right there. All right. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.