SPECIAL | HPE
Tony Griffey, as the slow-witted Lennie, starred with Brandi Icard in the opera “Of Mice and Men.”
One day he’s Anthony Dean Griffey, the world-renowned, four-time Grammy Award-winning singer whose majestic tenor voice brings audiences to their feet and can move them to tears. The next day he’s Tony again, the compassionate son trying to care for his mentally ill father.
From the Kennedy Center to the psychiatric ward.
“That life in itself is a bit schizophrenic,” says Griffey, who will be the keynote speaker next week at the annual meeting of the Mental Health Association in High Point.
Griffey’s presentation, titled “Anthony Dean Griffey: Singing and Speaking From the Heart,” will feature the High Point native singing a few songs and sharing an intimate view of his journey through the underworld of mental illness – caring for a father and brother who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and battling his own bouts of depression.
“It’s time for me to break the silence and talk about this issue, because it’s something I’ve had a passion for and something I’ve been dealing with since I was a child,” Griffey says. “I’ve been given a singing voice, but I was also given a speaking voice, and I don’t feel like I have a choice about speaking out on this issue. It’s what I have to do.”
Griffey says a few friends discouraged him from sharing his story.
“I’ve had people say, ‘I’d be careful if I were you – people may look at you in a different way,’” he says. “Well, I don’t care how they look at me. If I can help one person, then my job’s done.”
According to Griffey, his father was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 23 and was institutionalized for a time at a mental hospital in Butner, forcing Griffey to grow up in a hurry. Even as a child, Griffey says, he became a caregiver for his father, privately fighting for his rights as a patient while publicly covering up for his erratic behavior and sometimes lengthy absences.
“It’s a lot of responsibility to be the caregiver,” Griffey says softly, “but in me being the caregiver – for my father and my brother – you also have to know that the genetic pool for me to become depressed is there, and I have had to fight that battle, too.”
At the urging of his voice teacher at The Juilliard School, Griffey went into therapy – and stayed in therapy for about a decade – to help him overcome his shyness and cope with the up-and-down life of a performing artist.
“It was the best advice anyone had ever given me,” he explains, “because as a performing artist, you’re constantly on a roller-coaster ride. Some people will think you’re the best thing since peanut butter, and some people just will not care for your style of singing, and as a person I had to learn that my gifts are separate from who I am as a person.”
It’s been a struggle for Griffey – who grew up a shy, overweight child ridiculed by classmates – and it remains a struggle.
“My Achilles heel is eating,” Griffey says. “I’m not a drinker, I’m not a smoker and I don’t do drugs, but to numb the pain that I deal with, I eat, and that’s something that I have to battle daily.”
Having been around mental illness most of his life, Griffey knows firsthand the stigma associated with it. He remembers the terror he felt in 1998 when a New York Times article about his background and his budding career exposed his father’s and brother’s schizophrenia.
“It was frightening,” Griffey says. “There were some people who said it was going to ruin my whole career because of the stigma, and that people would look at me in a different way because they would think that I had schizophrenia, and they would be afraid to hire me or I wouldn’t be able to do my job. All of that is not true, of course, but at the time it was terrifying to read that in the newspaper.”
Now, as Griffey prepares to share his story locally, and in much more detail, he admits to being nervous – much more so than he is before, say, a performance at the Metropolitan Opera – but he’s determined to speak out.
Griffey’s candor can go a long way toward helping erase the stigma of mental illness, says Ellen Cochran, executive director of the Mental Health Association in High Point.
“The mentally ill are our family members,” she says. “They’re not in institutions. They’re our friends, our neighbors, our wives and husbands, our brothers and sisters, our moms and dads. And it’s critical that we have an understanding of that. The only way people are going to get it is if they realize they don’t have to hide anymore.”
jtomlin@hpe.com | 888-3579
Post a Comment
