Actor John Turturro details his decade-long journey as caregiver for his brother Ralph, who suffered from severe mental illness requiring electric shock treatments and antipsychotic medication after being diagnosed at 16. Following their mother's death in 2005, Turturro managed Ralph's volatile behavior, including a home fire, while navigating the U.S. healthcare system's lack of family support and stigma. He became Ralph's legal guardian, enduring significant financial and emotional tolls until Ralph died at 70, yet found resilience through art and advocacy. Ultimately, Turturro highlights the urgent need for systemic reform to better support families in the mental health crisis. [Automatically generated summary]
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Coping With Family Struggles00:14:31
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Actor John Chatturo discussed mental health during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.
He talks about his personal connection to his advocacy, caring for his brother who struggled with mental illness.
This is about 25 minutes.
Good afternoon, everybody, here at the Global Conference.
With me, as you can see, is the amazing actor, director, and producer, and a lot of other things, John Taturo.
And we are here to talk about the mental health imperative.
John, thanks so much for sitting and talking about this very topic.
It is not one, I think, that when you started your career, and you've had many, that you probably necessarily thought that you would be sitting up here talking about.
No, no, I guess a lot of these situations people inherit.
Yes.
Yeah.
And tell us about that.
Your journey, we see you on Silver Screen.
We see on our screens no matter where we're at over the decades.
But this is something that people may not know about you.
And your journey with being a caregiver, with living with someone that you love dearly, and your brother, got you into this discussion that we are today, which is about mental health.
Can you tell me about your brother?
Yeah, well, the first time I spoke about it was at the Moth, they call it the Moth Radio Hour, but it's a presentation where people tell stories 12 to 15 minutes long.
And I told a story about my brother who suffered from mental illness and my mother and a particular day when there was a blackout in 2003 and he was in a hospital.
And it's a pretty interesting story and there's a lot of humor in it too.
But then I was always helping my mother with my brother.
My father died in 88 and this was something that happened from the time he was sort of 16.
He was five years older than me.
So I was always involved in it.
And then I, of course, when my mother passed away in 2005, I became his caretaker.
And it took me, the first time I spoke about it really publicly was in 2015.
And I realized that there are a lot of people in the same situation as I am as a sibling.
And I didn't want to sugarcoat it and say, oh, everything's going to be okay.
Because basically what you're trying to do is find a place for the person and to have something that's, there's a modicum of peace.
If people with mental illness live long enough, usually they sometimes they plateau their symptoms decrease.
And also we found a good medicine which he could take, you know, a shot, and it would be good for a month, and he wouldn't have to take it every day.
But the effects of antipsychotic medicines on a body, you know, if people live to 50, it's considered long.
He lived to 70.
But anyway, I thought it would be something to share with people because a lot of people, most people don't speak about it because of the element of shame.
And you're embarrassed.
But it's an asseminal relationship.
I've learned a lot about my capacity to withstand certain things and also to find the humor in it and to see the person as a whole person.
I don't usually like fictional stories about the subject matter because I think they do a disservice to the entire being of a person because there's a whole human being there and who's full of all kinds of different aspects, you know.
And they can be really smart and really manipulative, really perceptive.
They can be lustful, very funny, and also can be really intimidating to be around.
When was your brother officially diagnosed?
When he was 16.
When he was 16.
When he was 16 years old.
And you were 11?
I was 11, yeah.
He had electric shock treatments.
Sometime he was taking a lot of drugs and things at the time, sort of self-medicating.
And it usually rears its head.
Maybe, you know, he always had the tendency towards that.
I happened to be born with a much more calm disposition.
And so I became sort of the person in the middle.
I'm the middle child.
When you were 11 and you saw your brother, how did you...
What were your eyes taking in at that moment?
I was just taking in someone who was really suffering a lot.
And sometimes my father was a World War II veteran.
He had PTSD.
He didn't have the nervous system to deal with.
It went on to my mom mostly.
And sometimes my uncles tried to help out.
But, you know, I've witnessed a lot of volatile and violence in my life, even within our family.
And, you know, you learn, you know, you either run away or not.
I found what I do in life as something that was an outlet for me, for my creative energies, and to put a lot of these things in a creative and a constructive way.
And we're going to get into that.
Cooper Union was your coming out day.
Yeah.
I basically came out of the closet as someone who was, you know, is a sibling of a mentally ill person.
And people from around.
2015.
Yeah, people from that's taped.
You can see it.
And, you know, it's part of a book.
But people from around the world have really responded to it because I told a story that they understand, that they understand.
And you have to, you know, you're balancing your own personal life, your professional life, the family that you came from, how much, you know, I had to learn.
It was a psychologist who learned, who taught me to protect myself a little bit because I didn't know how to do that, you know, family, you know, because people know how to push your buttons and things.
And so I really didn't know how to do that.
And it's a labyrinth traveling through the mental health system.
I finally found an advocate, this wonderful woman called Heidi Levy, and she was really helpful later on in Ralph's, my brother Ralph's life.
And it was really, I was basically running, when my brother was let out of the hospital, I was running basically a hospital, you know, with an apartment, with caretakers.
Yeah, it wasn't with my house because that I couldn't do.
I had to sort of protect my family, you know, enough.
And so, I mean, my wife eventually was a wonderful actress.
She went back to school and she's a social worker.
And I think, you know, partly from watching me deal with all of these things.
And you see what you're made out of.
You see, because you're not getting positive reinforcement for doing something that's selfless.
Sometimes you're getting the lunch you deliver to someone thrown right in your face, you know, and you're sometimes covered with food or whatever.
But it's not something you have to be on your toes.
You don't know what's going to happen.
There is the constant unknown.
And since my brother has passed away, I have to say there was a part of my brain that was always on high alert wherever I was, the Ukraine, Rome, France, Hungary, what's going to happen.
Because something always did happen.
And so I've had many encounters with police, with all kinds of things.
And this is what families go through.
And most families, when I went to court to become his legal guardian, which I kind of was anyway, there was other family, other people who were going to be wards of the state, and there was no one representing any of the families.
They were just lawyers from the city.
I was the only family person in that courtroom when I had to go up and they interview you or interrogate you.
Why do you want to do this?
And I had a little trepidation about that because I thought, well, I'm the only one.
The judge was very complimentary, but I was thinking, I hope I'm doing the right thing.
What was the most difficult point for you in that long journey with your brother?
It started at 11.
Well, I think the level of destruction, the level of the potential of violence, the violence that could happen.
I mean, when my father died, I renovated my mother's house with one of my best friends, Brandon, because he's really handy, and I'm somewhat handy.
And my brother, one day, right after Christmas, left a burning cigarette, and he, I don't know if he did it on purpose, or he was testing whether it would go on fire, and he basically burned the house down.
And then that had to be rebuilt.
So when you go through stuff like that, I mean, no one died.
There was no overt tragedy to it.
So I thought this is going to be a hard thing for my mother to survive from.
But I think the unknown of that, and I think there's not a system that's built for people.
When you go to a mental institution, if it's a state institution, they used to have an animal farm.
They had many more activities instead of just antipsychotics.
And those have been shrunk down.
That's from the era when there wasn't antipsychotics.
But they don't train people to be productive.
And that I think is a big problem.
And I also think why you see so many homeless people is that families are exhausted.
They can't withstand it.
And I also had the capacity financially to get help from myself.
And they just, they run away.
You know, they just can't.
That still wasn't enough.
John Toturo, famous actor.
No, I didn't run away, but I had that.
But when I see those people, that was my fear to see my brother on the street.
I was like, I can't let that happen to him.
And we did have a very close relationship.
And that he was very peaceful in the last part of his life was wonderful for me to see.
Why was he peaceful?
I think he was on the right medicine.
And I also think it plateaued a little bit, whatever he had.
He didn't have the same urges, you know, to shock you.
A lot of it is to shock you out of your comfortability.
You know, you're saying you're comfortable, you're successful, but what about me?
I'm not.
And they feel that way, and sometimes they, you know.
But he was a very perceptive person, and he could find your sort of vulnerability within like 30 minutes.
Speaking of which, that perceptibility also meant different emotional expressions and reactions to that.
Oh, yeah.
And one of the things that I, in my caregiving for my father over eight, nine years, I always tell folks as I was flying from New York to California that, you know, I never learned, I learned how to cry differently.
Yeah.
And I learned how to laugh differently.
That's right.
Tell me about how you learned to cry differently.
Well, you know, you can't just like break down and say, you know, poor me and stuff like that.
But it is, you are really isolated.
I mean, many trips I would go, I would take the subway home and I would put on Hamilton, you know, on my headphones and just go, take me somewhere else.
You know, just let me come back to reality.
You know, I think you learn ways of coping.
What worked for you?
Playing Hamilton?
Yeah, you know, music, being constructive, being with my family, you know, and also when there were good visits and times where we could connect or whatever, you felt like, okay, I'm doing something.
But sometimes you didn't get that.
Finding Strength In Nature00:06:47
And the thing is that you just had to say, I'm either going to stay or I'm not.
And I think that has to do with your nature.
I think we're the, you know, the good parts of our nature, that's great for us, but we're also, you know, you also suffer from whatever it is.
It's also the weakness, you know, that you can't.
And did you admit to your weakness that your inability to do as much as you wanted to do for your brother?
Did that take a while?
I did.
I mean, taking care of my brother was like sending someone to an Ivy League school without a scholarship and they never graduate.
And that's what it was, the cost of it.
I was almost like I was an employee of his.
That I almost worked for him.
He used to tell me, well, I'm retired, you know.
And I would be like, you know, like, yeah, of course you're retired.
I said, well, what am I?
You know what I mean?
I'm like the window washer here.
You're a good window washer.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, you're the beneficiary of your nature, and also you have to suffer the consequences of your nature.
And that's for good and bad.
Did I fight him back?
Yeah, there were times I was, you know, really angry and out of my, you know, my mind, you know, because your life is going before your eyes.
And sometimes I'd be going on stage and someone would call the police are at your brother's place.
And I was like, how am I going to function and perform for 2,000 people?
What did you do?
I called it.
By that time, I had gotten someone to help me.
It was a revolving wheel.
And I said, well, you'll have to handle it.
But I've, believe me, I've been in some very funky situations.
He was, you know, sometimes policemen can be really rough with, and sometimes the EMS workers, they have more experience.
But I've been put up against the wall and all those things.
And, you know, you are, you know, that's your experiences, your life experiences.
And that's not exceptional.
That is not exceptional.
You're one of one billion globally that are caring for somebody.
So I wanted to talk about it because I thought people need to know that they're not alone and to try to put a spotlight on it because it still has a long way to go to take the stigmatism away from it and also to try to create somewhat of a system that people aren't just discarded like containers.
And that's what they are.
They're just discarded.
And so I think my brother probably had as much effect on me as my mother and my father did.
You know what I mean?
And he used to tell me, like, you really, you get a lot of material, you know, from me.
So, you know, he was right.
He was right.
You know, he was, he would, he would do, you know, he would, he could perceive like who was going to win an election very easily because he knew he was like who was the most entertaining.
Yeah.
You know, who was the funniest.
You know, he would say, well, yeah.
But it's, and then this goes to other people who have to deal with, like with you, with your dad.
You know, that's, it's, we all face these things in life, but none of us are trained for it.
We don't go to school to be a caregiver, to be a parent.
They don't teach us these things.
When did you start calling yourself a caregiver of your brother?
Clearly 2015 is when you told the world.
I didn't think myself I was a guardian or whatever.
And I was thinking like, I don't really want to be a guardian.
I just want to be like, you know, somebody's brother or something.
You know, it's, I never put that title on me.
I was.
I was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I did it.
Since you were 11, you think?
Yeah, in different ways.
Yeah, I did it.
You were.
Yeah, I did.
You were.
I always helped my mom and stuff.
And she needed help.
She needed help.
And someone had to help her.
And I think some people are, they just don't have the capacity.
They don't have the strength to withstand the punishment that you're going to get.
You're not going to get applause.
You're not going to get an award.
They should give awards to me.
They should acknowledge me.
I'm all up for that.
Yeah, you know what I mean?
This person lasted.
This is a long, you know, you lasted 20 years doing it.
So what you're sharing with us is you're very, I mean, you're in the public, you're a famous person, but you have this private life that you had kept for the majority of your life.
That's right.
And what was that like to have that dual life, that dual role that many of us do personally that we're hiding this other part of what we're doing?
I used some of that stuff, you know, in my work and stuff.
And there were times I used it.
I was in so many rooms with therapists and psychiatrists and psychologists that I didn't ever wanted to go to one of those because I was like, I have had enough of this.
I don't want to ask anyone what's going on inside of me.
I want to put it into something that's creative and show it and tell a story.
And I think storytelling is an essential part.
People have been doing it since the beginning of time.
And so that was a lifeline for me.
It really, truly was.
And I didn't realize at the time how much of that I used in my earlier work.
And then eventually decided, I don't need to do that all the time or whatever.
But I could not talk about it.
When I mentioned it once in an interview, my mom got mad, right?
She was like, do not talk about that.
And that's the problem.
No one talks about it.
The level of shame is immense.
It's immense because you're like, you're trying to make yourself into something.
And then this is a different force that goes against it.
Well, you've admitted Ralph has made you, in essence, a better artist in some ways.
Well, you know, he was an artist in his own.
Very talented guy.
Yeah, yeah.
The Shame Of Silence00:03:40
And he had a big presence.
Well, I want to show the pictures of him again.
And you've mentioned this before about joy pockets.
Oh, yeah.
And when we're talking about this journey of mental health and mental illness, similar family, two different things.
When we look at the pictures, we can show them again of your brother.
I'm very interested in some of the joy pockets.
Oh, he was when you look at this picture of him.
Everyone in his neighbor in the neighborhood where he lived, everyone, you know, he'd say hello to everyone.
He knew everyone.
He bought me that baseball uniform.
That's all three of us.
That's his first communion.
He was a very good brother.
He really protected me.
He protected you.
That's right.
And he took care of me.
Yeah, that's right.
And he was a very bullion person.
He liked people and he liked making fun of people and stuff.
And he was a very good musician, really good musician.
If Ralph were sitting right here, what would he think about you standing here talking about something?
That mom didn't want to talk about.
Oh, no, he'd be happy that I was.
What would he say to you?
He'd be really happy.
What do you say, John?
Yeah.
Maybe he'd get bored.
Maybe he'd walk out.
Then he'd come back in.
Then he'd walk out.
That's how he was.
But he was proud when he saw me in movies and stuff.
He'd get excited and stuff.
So I'm sure he'd participate, but from there, from the audience, or he'd come up with a good story.
Basically, he had a nickname for everyone.
So when I wrote this one film, Romance and Cigarettes, I made a list of all his nicknames of all our relatives and friends.
And I used every one of them in the film.
Because he wouldn't come up with these names that didn't even make sense.
And like my father, he calls him like there used to be the Spider-Man show, Spidey.
Sips and Slides.
So he used to sing to somebody.
He used to call my father Murder Man or something.
Murder Man.
To Spider-Man theme, and he'd sing it, you know, Murder Man.
Murder Man.
Sips and slides.
Through the holes.
He'd do all these.
He had names for everyone, including me.
Sometimes I would get very upset.
What was your name?
I don't want to say it.
No, no, give me one.
We can bleep it.
Or paraphrase.
It was different things, you know, because I had soft skin.
He would call me Burger.
Burger.
Constance.
And, you know, my mother was, I don't know.
Oh, my God.
The names he had were just for like one of my cousins whose name was Don and he looked like Humphrey Bogart.
So he was either Bogart.
But then he had to get new teeth.
So he was Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde.
He was also Bo Diddley, Candida, Distiller the Knight.
This was all one person.
You know what I mean?
So it would say the Still of the Knights here.
You know what I mean?
He had names for just about everybody.
My uncle was called Tony Rome.
He was a creative for sure.
It was very, very funny.
Well, John Berger, Constance Toturo.
Wow, first person who's ever said that.
Thank you so much.
Did I get it right?
I get it right.
Thank you so much.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Former NFL quarterback Tom Brady and former NBA player Shaquille O'Neal discussed sports, business, and entrepreneurship at the Milken Institute's Global conference in Los Angeles.