Learning to Soar: A Conversation With Artist Kev G Mor

Welcome to the Mad in America podcast. My name is Brooke Siem, and I am the author of the award-winning memoir, May Cause Side Effects. Today, I am with Kev G Mor, a Boston-based certified peer specialist and musician with 15 years in recovery from schizoaffective disorder.

Kev is a suicide survivor who grew up with early childhood trauma and has experienced homelessness as a teen, is a single father, and is now again in recovery. His work is about showing what staying well looks like on hard days and keeping it practical for people who live with psychosis.

I am very much looking forward to this conversation with Kev because I have been struck in my research by his honesty and vulnerability with whatever shows up at any point, because I know that, especially this time of year, it can be a little difficult for people.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Brooke Siem: I really respect the fact that you showed up here today and said to me, “I almost thought about rescheduling because I’m not having a great day and I’m dealing with some issues, but I didn’t want to hide that.” I think we’re just going to start there, so I would love for you to tell us what it is like to be you today, Kev?

Kev G Mor: First of all, thank you so much for having me on this podcast and speaking with me. Today, I am dealing with a week of being triggered by my PTSD. A lot of it is because I’m working on a memoir. I’ve gone through a lot of trauma in my life, and in working on that memoir, it’s bringing a lot of things to the surface.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and it was a very difficult day for me. I spent it with friends, and they helped me work my way up the emotional ladder with games and movies and helped me stay distracted and let me process on my own. Today I’m feeling a lot better, but I feel like my processes are a little slow. I feel like I’ve just been washed up on the shore, and I’m a little shaky and still a little naked.

Siem: I am very familiar with that feeling. I appreciate you showing up today. If you could spend just a couple of minutes giving us a little bit of background on how we got here, and the important parts of your history that will be relevant for the audience.

Mor: In my youth, I went through various degrees of abuse, neglect, and abandonment. The abuse was sexual, from strangers and on multiple occasions. Then, when I was 13, I was in my first locked psychiatric hospital. I spent two years going through various hospitals and group homes. When I was 16, I attempted suicide when I finally made it back home. By 17, I was kicked out of the house and homeless.

After a few years, I joined the army as a way of getting out of being homeless. I forgot to mention that at the age of 10, after my sexual abuses, I started experiencing psychosis. That’s why I went into the hospitals, for depression and psychosis, and so I spent some time homeless. I joined the army. I was only in it for a year, and then I got injured, and I got out.

I’m originally from the Boston area, but when I got out of the army, I went up to Alaska because nobody really wanted me to come back to Boston. At age 35, I was a single dad, and my son and I were homeless. I got arrested for shoplifting food, and I got put into the mental health court system, which got me a diagnosis. That was 20 years ago.

I got on medications, started going to therapy, started going to day programs, moved back to Boston, and I’ve been working on my recovery for about 20 years now. It’s been an up-and-down road. What has really driven me on was early in my recovery, I found purpose in the pains of my life by becoming a mental health peer specialist, which allowed me to use my story to help others who are there in the moment, feel less alone.

Becoming a peer specialist really gave me a lot of education on my own mental health because I was very uneducated about psychology in general. I got educated, and I started working in the mental health system for a couple of years, but I burnt out really fast. I ended up homeless again, 15 years into recovery, and I was living in a shelter again.

Since then, the VA has helped me out and given me a place to live. I took this time when I was in the shelter the last time to decide what I was going to do. I couldn’t be a peer specialist in a traditional way, but I still wanted to be a peer specialist. I wanted to share my experience, my strength, and my hope so that others may feel less alone.

I was looking on the internet for that, but I wasn’t finding what I needed. I was looking at all these mental health advocates, and I was seeing the top 10 coping skills on how to deal with the holidays, or the top five morning routines. I don’t need any of this. I have that education. I want to know how you get through every single day with all of this on your shoulders when life is throwing hard times at you, and you’re living in poverty. How do you do it?

I got out of the shelter and moved into where I am now, which is temporary housing. I started a vlog because nobody’s doing it. I wanted to make my own vlog of how I get through every day. I might not succeed. I might fail miserably, but I’m just going to do it. And I’m going to try really hard, and I’m going to create what I need. This is what I need is someone to show me how to get through every day, and nobody’s doing it. I’m going to do it and just see how it goes.

I’ve been doing it for two years now, and it has really helped me in my own recovery. I don’t have a large audience. It’s not really popular on the YouTube algorithm, but I do have a dedicated audience that gets a lot out of it and is pulling some useful skills from it.

Siem: You’re telling me this human story, which is, in some ways is so anti what we’re told we should experience in society, right? Your experience is most people’s worst nightmare, and it’s the thing that so many people are afraid of and trying to run from. But when I hear you speak about it, and when I especially hear your resilience and your determination to keep going and to find meaning and learn through this, all I can think of is what an advanced being I must be talking to right now, right?

Mor: It’s so funny to hear you say that. I have thought those same things, but I’ve never heard anyone voice that before, other than my mixed up head. But there are times when I feel like everyone’s playing life on a different level of difficulty, and I’m playing on a level of hard. I have my game set to hard.

Siem: Expert hard, level 99.

Mor: Yes. That’s when I kind of get proud of myself and say, “No, I’m not a millionaire, but I’m stable, and I’m doing great.” I feel like society says you need to get to stable, and that’s it for you. A lot of my vlog is trying to show there’s more to life than stability. It’s important to be stable, but then you can reach for your dreams.

I haven’t had any coaching on how to reach beyond my dreams. I tend to get motivated by the odds, and the greater the odds, the more motivation I have. The life that I choose, the odds are very difficult to be successful. I’m kind of carving my own neurodivergent path and hoping that there’s going to be success there at the end, but I don’t know if it’s going to happen.

Siem: The mental health world, really, what they’re asking people to do is not be a problem for other people.

Mor: Exactly. Don’t be a burden.

Siem: Yes, don’t be a burden. Be invisible to the extent that you go and just fit into it. They want you to be a cog. They want you to be a non-playable character in the world of video game analogies. We use the word stability a lot from the standpoint of what’s acceptable. I think a better metric would be that we’re not trying to cause destruction, right?

My base level definition of health and wellness is causing as little destruction as possible to yourself or people around you. But that leaves whole mountains of things to climb, experience, and goals to reach. Whereas stability to me feels very stuck, right? Stability is just trapped in a way.

Mor: When I was working in the mental health system as a peer specialist, I had a lot of people that I worked with. I think I had 27 people that I would visit in a week. The organization did not promote moving beyond stabilization. They promoted living in these group homes and not moving beyond them. These were all adults who lived most of their lives in group homes, who could have learned the skills and been motivated to move on and have a more fulfilling life, but they weren’t inspired to do so.

Siem: You said that it was at 35 that you first got your diagnosis and started understanding maybe what was happening or had words for it. That was 20 years ago. In some of our correspondence before we got on the call, you were talking about living without drugs. My question is, what has changed in your framework, given your 20 years in the mental health world? What do you believe to be true about yourself now versus what you thought was true then?

Mor: Medications stabilized me quickly. They gave me some strong medications, and they stopped my hallucinations. They stabilized my moods and things like that. But I also gained 60 pounds in three months, and it was not healthy, but I stayed on those medications. I wanted to change.

I went to my doctor, and I was brand new to recovery and psychology. I said, “This medication is making me really fat. Can we change to something else?” He said to me, “Do you want to be fat or do you want to be dead?”

I learned right away that in the system, you really need to advocate for yourself. I was on these meds for about 15 years, and they were doing okay. But in those 15 years, I was learning a lot. I was learning lots of coping skills, learning how routine is important to me, and how, in my brain, medication was something that I needed to stabilize me until I learned to keep myself stable. That’s how I went into thinking about medication.

After 15 years of struggling with weight issues, I was worried about my kidneys. I’ve had three heart attacks, and I just wanted to get off whatever medication that I could get off to be as healthy as I could. I went to my psychiatrist, and I said, “I want to cut out all this stuff.” We had a long talk about it, and this was my VA psychiatrist, and he respects my education, and he knows that I’m an expert on me, and we see eye to eye.

We slowly weaned me off of all my medications one by one. I kept a vigilant track of how I was doing with my moods and things like that. I was able to get off all of my mood stabilizers and antidepressants slowly over about nine months, using my coping skills and always monitoring my mood and where my mood’s going. I do that on a daily, hourly basis almost.

Then I got off my antipsychotic, but I quickly realized I needed it. Reality became very blurred, and I started seeing and hearing things, and life became terrifying again. I went back on my antipsychotics, and I haven’t needed to go on any of my mood stabilizers and antidepressants for about five years now.

I have added ADD medications because I have inattentive ADD, and that has been very helpful. The withdrawals from the medications were difficult because I was also going through food insecurity, and it was around COVID time and lockdown. I had no food, and I developed an eating disorder called ARFID, which is Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. I still struggle with that today on a daily basis. But the combination of withdrawing from all these meds and stuff, going through COVID, and not really having a support system, a social support system, and having no food, and lack of income, and things like that, all led to me getting this eating disorder.

Siem: I struggle with labels in psychiatry, with having people push into boxes, and then the expectation that that explains everything that’s “wrong” with them, and how people get trapped in those boxes. My sense from you is that you seem to exist in a sort of dualism where there’s something that creates meaning both in the diagnosis and also in rising above a formal diagnosis. I’m wondering if you could speak on that a little bit.

Mor: Getting the diagnosis was probably one of the most important days of my life, and one of the best things that has happened to me. I was 35 years old, I thought my whole life I was made wrong, and I was a bad person, and there’s no good to me at all, and I should have died a long time ago. Someone said, hey, you’re not a bad person, you just have this disorder, and you’ve been through stuff.

Getting this name, a disorder that is wrong with me that is causing me all this chaos, was really important to me, because it was telling me it’s not me, it’s not who I am. I’m not schizophrenic, I’m not bipolar, but those are things that I have are little badges that I kind of wear, saying, this is the weight I’m carrying today, and this is my game on hard. It makes me feel like, yeah, it’s something I want to rise above.

The odds are not in my favor, and that motivates me to be the one who makes it. I don’t know why that is. I don’t know why I’m driven in that direction, but I’m very grateful that I am, because it keeps my mindset on recovery, you know?

Siem: What does recovery mean to you? What does it look like? What is that goal?

Mor: I think recovery means something different to everybody. It used to mean stabilization. When I first started recovering, that’s what it meant. It meant no longer being a burden to everybody. That’s recovery. I’ve come to believe that for me, recovery is living a fulfilling life where I’m helping others. Living a fulfilling life requires some things, like being financially stable, having secure housing and food, and a general income. Those are things that I’m seeking in my recovery beyond stabilization. Stabilization would keep me right here where I am in this studio apartment until I die.

Siem: You’ve mentioned coping skills that you learned during those 15 years. Do you remember what the very first skill was that you learned?

Mor: Art. I quickly learned, around kindergarten age, that bad things were happening to me as a toddler that I didn’t have words for, and I didn’t know how to explain. But I found that through art, I could explain my feelings. I could express sadness, and I could express fear. With that, though, came an inner critic that you shouldn’t make such sad drawings. You shouldn’t make such angry drawings. Can’t you just make something nice and pretty and stuff like that?

Art really took me a lot of the way through my hard times through my teenage years and stuff. Then I picked up the guitar, and I picked up songwriting, and that overtook art really quickly. I was quickly out there as a teenager performing and writing songs. I think art and music took me all the way up through diagnosis. I picked up a lot of bad coping skills along the way, such as lying, cheating, stealing, and being in survival mode.

In my recovery, especially today, some of the coping skills that really helped me the most are that I have a morning routine that I do every day, and that is my bare minimum of the day. If I’m having a really bad day, sometimes it takes me the whole day to get through my morning routine. But that’s what I need to get through for my bare minimum, which is simply I get up a couple of hours extra early before I need to be anywhere. I have coffee, and I watch about an hour of comedy, because I wake up at an emotional zero, and I’m in panic, and I’m scared, and I’m teary, and my brain is going a mile a minute.

I watch some comedy, and the dialogues in my head get a little more lighthearted. The words they start using are a little funny, and so it changes the processes in my brain, and I’m not freaking out so much, and I’m having my coffee. I do that for an hour. Then I take my meds, take a shower, get changed, have something to eat, and I take a walk. I do that as a bare minimum every day. That’s my morning routine. I show it on my vlog every week.

Siem: You’ve mentioned sleep too. I know that sleep can be such a problem because when you’re on low sleep, it can make symptoms worse. But then one of the struggles is sleep in general. How do you manage low sleep, stress management, and just that anchor?

Mor: I do struggle with sleep. I have since I was a child. I go one to two days a week with no sleep. All my sleep issues have to do with trauma. I’m currently working with the VA on ways to get better sleep. They’re doing a study with me, and I’m working with my therapist on that. But it is something that I still struggle with. The best coping mechanism, actually, that I can think of is having an inner circle of support systems who understand.

I have an inner circle of friends who, when I say I haven’t slept in two days, they know how important that is to me and what to expect from me. Whereas the rest of the world, they see me going around and asking for things and stuff. They don’t know I haven’t slept in two days, and my grip on reality is very little. Having them very aware of what I’m going through is very helpful.

Siem: My dog has decided to enter the chat.

Mor: Hi, doggy. We could talk about how my dog was a great coping skill for me.

Siem: Oh, let’s do it. Let’s talk about pets.

Mor: Okami was my dog. She passed away two years ago, but I had her for 10 years. Around the time I was working as a peer specialist and my symptoms were very high, she was my emotional service animal. The way she helped me was that I could sleep well when she was with me. I felt very safe with her in bed with me. I went 10 years with really pretty good sleep.

She also helped me when my psychosis symptoms were high. Sometimes I would see people who weren’t there, and she was hypervigilant and would always acknowledge each person as they come and go. If she would not acknowledge someone, I would know that they were probably not real, or acknowledge a sound, a shadow, or something like that.

A lot of my hallucinations have to do with demons. If I’m seeing one and she’s not reacting to it, it’d make me feel safer that it’s just in my head. It helped me learn what was real and what was not. Now that I don’t have her here, I’m not having psychosis symptoms, but I have been having a lot of insomnia for the past two years without her here.

Siem: What is stopping you from seeking out another connection with another dog?

Mor: I live in a studio apartment. Okami didn’t really like living in this apartment because it’s small, and she was a hundred pound pit bull. I don’t want to bring another dog in here. I want to live somewhere that has a yard or something like that. I want my life to be a little more or less crisis-y and a little more grounded before I bring a new animal in. I want to be very secure.

I had a lot of living below the poverty line. I had a lot of trouble affording my dog, and she needed hospital visits and things like that, and people had to help me. I want to be able to be at a place where I can afford that on my own.

Siem: Yeah, that makes sense. But I think it’s fascinating that the sleep issues improved so much with a dog, which really just speaks to the true nature of the struggle, which is the safety issue.

Mor: It is a safety issue. It helped me realize that I am afraid of being attacked while asleep. It’s a very vulnerable position to be in. Having a hundred-pound pit bull on the bed probably made me feel a little safer.

Siem: Yeah. I mean, I bet even a five-pound Chihuahua, they’re mean. Maybe that’s the strategy. Go smaller, but meaner.

Mor: You don’t want to get near a five-pound Chihuahua.

Siem: When you’re working with other people who are going through stages you’ve been through, I’m wondering what is the most common thing you see in people you help that you wish you could get them to understand.

Mor: In working with other people in their recovery, where I get frustrated the most is finding a way to express a way for them to put some effort into something more. There’s a tool we used in peer specialists called encouraging discomfort or something like that. And it’s for people who are stuck in stabilization. We give them something to find discomfort in, like maybe that chair is not as the chair that you want. Well, let’s work towards a new chair, inspiring them to do something. That’s what I find most difficult: finding ways to inspire people to try to do something rather than go back to bed.

I find that I lose the battle sometimes, too, and that I end up back in bed. I think of my life as a game character that I want to develop every day and get somewhere. I get very frustrated trying to inspire that in others and getting them to see there’s more to life than this.

Siem: What do you think is the difference between someone with your attitude and someone who struggles to find more ambition to get better?

Mor: It’s going to sound weird, but I think my brain doesn’t think logically; it thinks illogically that I’m obviously going to make it. I think most people maybe don’t think that way. They think more realistically. When I want to inspire someone to start a YouTube channel on their own and they think, well, only one in a thousand get a thousand subscribers, and out of that, only one in ten thousand get monetization. If I had thought about that, I would never have started my YouTube channel, which is now both. It feels like for me, we can beat the odds, you just have to really work at it, and putting in that work, I think for a lot of people it often feels like it’s going nowhere and it does nothing.

Siem: I’ll share a little bit about my experience. My father died when I was 15, and I was pretty quickly put on a cocktail of psychiatric drugs, which stayed with me for the next 15 years, and very quietly but significantly altered my life and my life path. But I didn’t really know it was happening at the time because I had been medicated so quickly.

When I was 30, I got pulled off the psych drugs, and my withdrawal was horrible, and that sent me into what looked like a much more classical mental health crisis. The diagnosis I could have received during that year is wide and varied and many but it was drug-induced. It was the reaction to getting the drugs pulled away, and that’s how I’ve ended up on this path.

For me, I always go back to the time when I just wish that someone had suggested we give this more time. The instinct to medicate me happened so quickly, and there was such a fear that somehow if I was not okay, that my whole life was going to fall apart, and so therefore we needed to intervene very quickly, and drugs were the answer, and nobody questioned it. Nobody said, well, why don’t we let her grieve what has happened? Why don’t we acknowledge that maybe she’s not going to get the best grades right now? It was business as usual.

For me, if I had to pick any sort of intervention, I just wish somebody had said hey, we’re going to sit on this for a year and watch what happens and maybe try and do this in an unconventional way because I think I would have made it through that initial period and not lost so much of my life to this very, very quick decision. I wonder if you have a similar moment.

Mor: Well, I remember moments in my life where I advocated for people to step in. When I was 13, I went to my dad, and I’m sorry about your dad. I lost my dad when I was 17, and it was life-changing.

Siem: I’m sorry too.

Mor: But when I was 13, I went to my dad, and I said, “Hey, I’m using drugs every day. I’m drinking every day. I want to die every day, and I know I’m only 13. What do we do?” He got me, and I ended up going into a psychiatric hospital called Unit K. The ‘K’ was for kids. They put me right away on antidepressants, diagnosed me with depression, and said I had trouble adjusting to adolescence. What I was really dealing with was years and years of sexual abuse and psychosis that I couldn’t tell anyone about because I was afraid I would be locked up.

During my time, I was in that hospital for six months, in another hospital for six months. In those months, I learned nothing about feelings, about trauma, about abuse, about psychology. I left there thinking everything I knew about psychology was from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and being locked up and put into restraints. I was put in restraints a lot, and I don’t think they do that anymore, but they did back in the ’80s.

It was very traumatic, and I wish that I had gone somewhere where they hadn’t relied on just doping me up and making me stable enough to go home. That was the focus, make Kevin stable enough to go home. As soon as I got home 11 months later, I tried to kill myself. I had learned no skills, learned nothing about feelings. I still thought I was the problem, and I didn’t have a correct diagnosis because they didn’t ask me, “Do you see things?” I didn’t tell them that I saw demons and things like that. If someone had stepped in and chosen a different route, I think I would have healed a lot faster.

Siem: What in your mind is the connection, if there is any connection, between the abuse you suffered and the psychosis or the voices and the visions?

Mor: I grew up with a very ultra-religious grandmother who instilled the Bible into my brain as if it were reality. That there was an ongoing war between God and the devil, and I needed to watch it. At the same time, I was being visited by the shadow person at bedtime, a silhouette in my doorway, and then I would close my eyes, and I never knew who it was. Then I had these two instances, one during the public road race and one at a Boy Scout camp, where I experienced sexual abuse.

After the second instance, I went home, and I had a psychotic break, and I began hearing and seeing all these things, and I suddenly started seeing these shadow people and demons. I believe the whole demon mythology came from my grandmother, who was ultra-religious. I was walking to school and yelling at the devil and talking to the devil, and I would have this prayer ritual that I had and this shield of faith that I would bring up to protect from demons.

But my psychosis is very religious-based, although I do take antipsychotics, I still experience psychosis in the form that I get scared that there’s a demon in my room, even though I no longer believe in demons. When that symptom kind of is strong, and I’m alone at home, I get very scared, and I have to keep all the lights on, and I can’t sleep, and it comes from that religious Roman Catholic upbringing.

Siem: It primarily started after the abuse, or was it going on a little bit before?

Mor: At 10 years old is when I had those two instances of sexual abuse, and that’s when I experienced psychosis, yeah.

Siem: I very much just appreciate your candor with all of this, and I so hope that you are able to practice compassion with yourself as you go through this because you are, like I said, certainly doing it on hard mode, so there’s something real strong there

I should have asked you this before we started, see if you wanted to prepare, but I didn’t, and so you’re welcome to say no. But I’m wondering if you might close this interview out perhaps with a song or some music. I would love that.

Mor: I think I want to end with something a little hopeful. Before I went into the shelter this last time, the night before going into the shelter, I was feeling suicidal, and I turned to my coping skills, but they weren’t working. I turned on the playlist that would always help out and it wasn’t working. The songs that usually help weren’t helping. I decided, as a coping skill, rather than go out to the woods and hurt myself, I was going to stay home and write a song because I have been in this situation so many times in my life where I wanted to end it, and I’ve made it through, and here I am again.

I’m determined to make it through; I’ll probably be here again in my life more than once, and I want to end it. I want to write a song for myself for the next time I’m feeling this way. This is a song called “Before.” My hands are a little shaky.

[You can listen to the song in the audio version of this interview].

Siem: My goodness, that’s beautiful. Your voice is so strong when you sing; it is so sure and beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.

Mor: Well, thanks so much. Yeah, I appreciate that.

Siem: Where can people find you?

Mor: The best place is on YouTube. My Vlog is called “Living Daily Between Semicolons”. Just look up Kev G Mor on YouTube, and you’ll find me there, or just put my name into any of the social media and you’ll find me.

Siem: If you had one final message or ask of the listeners, what would you like to say?

Mor: I am so grateful for you, for all those people out there who are listening to podcasts and watching videos, and trying to help themselves be better and live a fuller, more wonderful life, and it gives me purpose in my life. I’m grateful for anyone who’s listening and trying hard today to soar.

Siem: Well, thank you so much, Kev. My hope for you in 2026 is more soaring and maybe, maybe a little five pound Chihuahua.

Mor: That would be great.