Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Eric Smith: From Music Prodigy to Mental Health Advocate
Tue, 13 May 2025
Send us a textEric Smith shares his remarkable journey from child piano prodigy to mental health advocate after battling psychosis and addiction. His story reveals how finding the right medication after a decade of failed treatments transformed his life from hospitalization and FBI involvement to becoming a Texas Judicial Commissioner on Mental Health.• Displayed extraordinary musical talent from age three, studying under world-renowned pianists and performing with Grammy winners• Experienced early warning signs when grades declined in middle school, with a psychologist predicting future psychosis• Developed full-blown psychosis after getting sober, believing he had decoded assassination plots involving world leaders• Contacted the FBI about his delusions, leading to multiple meetings before his parents sought help from his former psychiatrist• Required three hospitalizations over several years before finding success with Clozapine after more than 10 years of failed medications• Experienced a profound moment of clarity two weeks after starting Clozapine when the "noise" in his mind quieted• Returned to education, maintaining a perfect 4.0 GPA through graduate school• Now serves as a commissioner with the Texas Judicial Commission on Mental Health and runs his own consulting business• Advocates for better access to effective treatments like Clozapine, which international guidelines recommend after two failed antipsychoticsVisit www.ericwtsmith.com to learn more about Eric's consulting work or to contact him directly.https://tonymantor.comhttps://Facebook.com/tonymantorhttps://instagram.com/tonymantorhttps://twitter.com/tonymantorhttps://youtube.com/tonymantormusicintro/outro music bed written by T. WildWhy Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
Chapter 1: How did Eric Smith's journey with music begin?
So right around age three, a little kid living at home with my mom and dad, they had an old school upright piano, small home, small piano. I have memories of this, and there's photos of it somewhere here. Music was such a driving force in my life. I remember getting ready for a bath one night.
I had this melody in my head from The Sound of Music, and it was, you know, it's the famous Doe A Deer Female Deer song, if anyone's familiar with that. And I had this in my head, and I remember the bath is being drawn, and I just run, run, run out to the piano. And I'm there not playing some expert version of it, but I'm sitting there. Key is C, no flats, no sharps for the musicians listening.
So it's one of the easier keys to play. And I sit down and it's like the notes. Do, a dear, a female. And I'm doing it. My parents are like, you got to be kidding me. Like he's transferring melody to the piano at such a young age. And the picture to which I'm referring that still exists is me sitting with a, I've still got my sweater on, but I've got like no bottoms on.
So I'm just sitting there at the piano, just kind of like going all out, trying to play. as a musician. And I think at that point, it became very apparent to my parents that nurturing my creative music side was a good idea because it was something I was gravitating to in the first place. So let's fast forward to like third, fourth grade type stuff. I am in what were advanced classes for the time.
I was in advanced math, advanced English. I had a lot of friends, which will be relevant to a later part of the story where I did not have a lot of friends. But for this time, I had a lot of friends and I was studying music. It was a huge part of my life.
And it got to a point where at the start of fifth grade, when I moved to Texas, there was my piano teacher who eventually became for the next several years, my teacher. And I'm happy to share her name, Anya Grykowski, who is a world renowned classical pianist. I started studying under her and within a very short period of time,
I ended up starting to learn pieces that were like college entrance and college exit pieces. But I was like in middle school at that point. It truly became clear that this was more than just a hobby for me and something that I was excelling in. Fast forwarding to high school, my sophomore year was the last full year of high school because I dropped out of high school my junior year.
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Chapter 2: Why did Eric Smith stop playing music in high school?
And that's relevant to note because right around that same time, I opted to stop playing music. And this is after I had had the local CBS affiliate do a primetime news story on me about my musical achievements and the accolades and whatnot.
It was after that I had the pleasure of performing on stage with William Warfield, Grammy Award winner from famously known as singing Old Man River from Show Boat. And everything looked like it was a line where I'm going to succeed and be a musician.
You left high school. You stopped playing music. What changed for you to do this?
Serious mental illness and addiction threw a huge wrench in it. And I don't want to get too lost in the weeds of it, but... I felt very creative when I was seriously mentally ill, very creative. Part of it was the mania, part of it just straight up the psychosis.
There were periods of time I'd stay awake for a day, a day and a half, just recording music, writing music, tightening up the lines, changing up the lyrics. It was making my symptoms worse.
After I finally got sober in 2006, and after I finally found sanity some years later, I was afraid to get back to playing music, performing it, writing it, because it was so closely tied to my addiction and serious mental illness. And I don't want to do an injustice by saying music is bad. I'm saying for me, it scared the hell out of me.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Eric Smith face with mental illness and addiction?
that it was so tied to my addiction and my serious mental illness that I was afraid to have it be an element in my life again. And I've only recently, for the first time ever, performed publicly again. It was small. I'm a member of the board of directors for the Schizophrenia and Psychosis Action Alliance.
And a good friend of mine and colleague, Dr. Rob Leitman, you may have heard his name before, he's there and he serves on the board as well. So he gently coaxed me into playing there for the board of directors and the people who were there for that meeting. And it was nice. I turned around, everyone had their cameras out, lots of applause.
And it was the first time I'd performed publicly since before I fell ill with psychosis. And I know that was a long answer to your question, but I'm trying to help you understand how much music meant to me and also how much it scared me due to how my life unfolded.
Not a problem. Music is a very powerful instrument. It can bring back the best of memories. It can bring back the worst of memories. So I totally get that. What happened that got you off track for everything that you were doing at the time? You mentioned psychosis. With that said, what path did your journey take you to next?
For me, I was a straight edge kid. Like I had never been drunk or high of any kind prior to my sophomore year of high school. But because my grades started to dip in middle school, there were parent teacher conferences called and the teachers were concerned that I went from being in advanced classes to barely passing and then eventually ultimately failing, having to go to summer school.
For a teacher, it's easy to look at a couple of red flags to explore. Is there fighting going on at home? Which was not the case. I grew up in a very loving family. Or is Eric using drugs or alcohol? Which, up until the point I was a sophomore in high school, wasn't true. So you just had teachers trying to just figure out what in the world is changing in Eric's life. My brain chemistry.
Like, I'm no doctor, but I do know what it's like to start falling ill with serious mental illness.
With all this happening, what did your parents and teachers come up with? Did they get any answers?
My parents just, they rearranged their entire schedules, trying to take me in to get help, take me into tutoring, seeing counselors, psychologists, all of that.
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Chapter 4: How did Eric Smith's mental health diagnosis evolve?
Doctor was like, his answers are consistent with it and would explain some of the high highs he's having and some of the low lows he's been having. The piece I'm about to say, this is actually what for the first time really had me questioning the validity or reliability of psychiatry and counseling because what he said next was both wild and would later prove to be true.
That's an interesting point of view for your age. What did he have to say?
He said, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, don't be surprised if at some point later when your son is in his 20s, if he also falls ill with psychosis or some sort of psychotic spectrum disorder like schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. At that point, I could collectively feel in the room like my mom, my dad and me, not necessarily in denial, but just in disbelief. Like, what are you doing?
Like for sports fans out there who remember like Babe Ruth famously like pointing out to the stands and then cracking one out there. Come on, like for a doctor to look at someone who's in his young teens and say, hey, don't be surprised if you're psychotic in your 20s. That was a wild thing to consider at that time. That is exactly what happened.
Fast forwarding kind of through my teens where I drop out of high school in my junior year. I get a general equivalency high school degree, and I try college. I do okay my first semester. I failed spectacularly out of it in my second semester. The years go by. The mental illness gets worse. The addiction gets worse. As a point of relevance here, I did get sober in 2006.
I did not get full-blown psychosis until about three years later. It's worth saying when you're asking me this question, you asked me here a little ago, like what contributed to things going off track? Like what made it happen? Some of it was choice, right? Like I chose to start using drugs. The addiction thereafter was not my choice, but I definitely made a choice to start using drugs.
You made that choice. That happens. The other part of this is your doctor brought up bipolar and mental health illness in the future. That wasn't your choice. What happened next?
The worse the illness got and the worse the symptoms got, the less control I had over any of it. I went through a period of more than a decade's worth of trial and error with antipsychotics, antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, SSRIs, like the whole gamut of everything, and things kept getting worse.
So I finally got to this dangerous point rooted on deeply, deeply flawed logic, but made sense to me at the time, which was this. If I had any of these diagnoses that all of these meds are designed to treat, when I took them as I did, things should have started getting better, but things kept getting worse.
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Chapter 5: What role did the FBI play in Eric Smith's story?
And for the rest of my life, I will be spending it trying to help other people also find that life it is that they want.
That's a great thing to do. Now, you brought up the FBI and other agencies. Can you expand on that and what part of the journey that was for you?
That's both interesting and terrifying, what happened. Right, so I appreciate the question. It was like 2007, 2008, right around the time
twitter first came out and i will assume for the sake of this discussion that people know what twitter is if they don't it's famously called x right now here's why it's relevant to this conversation it was brand new at that time it was like the wild west social media was not how it is right now where everyone's walking around with a smartphone and cameras and followers and all of that social media existed but it was fringe like facebook was established mostly for college age kids
MySpace existed and it was, for the most part, like an established user base of emo kids and musicians. It wasn't like it looks right now. And here's why that's relevant. We are now living in an era where musicians, models, writers, world leaders, they have tens of millions of followers. At that time, people had a few thousand followers because it was so new.
And because there were so few people on the platform, it was huge if you had like 10,000 or 20,000 followers. And I remember John Mayer, I think was the most followed guy on Twitter for a while. And he had like 15 or 20,000 followers at the time, just to put that in perspective. So I'm getting on Twitter at a time where it's very easy to throw a tweet out there at somebody and they'll see it.
And like within like a day or two, they'll write back. Unfortunately for me, because I was so unstable at the time, I started to feel this inflated sense of importance where like, I remember I tweeted at Paul Wall, who's a famous Texas rapper. And he tweeted back a few times. I remember I tweeted at Wyclef, Will.i.am and other famous musicians that you might know out there. And they wrote back.
Wyclef, he retweeted something I wrote to all of his followers. And I remember right around that time, I was like, man. This is a guy I grew up like listening to and I love his music. And now it feels like I've made it. It feels like I've arrived. So the stuff that I'm doing now, whatever music I'm writing, all of it, it all matters. Like I'm elevated.
I'm on this new level where people are just paying attention to me. Unfortunately, that was accompanied by paranoia that had long been bubbling up. And it went from me being excited about people kind of knowing who I am and paying attention to me feeling like things were almost Truman Show-esque. If you're not familiar with the movie, we're like, I thought there were
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Chapter 6: How did Eric Smith's life change after finding the right treatment?
And I want to say, like, I...
i understand both sides of that and i think this is important for your audience to hear i was very difficult to treat the meds were not helping up to that point uh the paranoia and the psychosis were making it where i was very rude to everyone i was interacting with even if they were trying to help me so like in session with my mom and dad with the psychiatrist there he'd seen me rude to my mom and dad he'd hear me being rude to him he'd
his staff didn't like the way that I was talking with the secretary. I was very rude to her and she didn't like that. So yeah, I get why he stopped seeing me as a patient. Didn't like it. I do also want to say, playing devil's advocate here for a minute, or just talking other side of things, psychiatrists
much like people, like let's say working in a jail or a prison, should expect certain things. And if you're going to work with people who don't like have it all together, particularly folks with serious mental illness, you should expect individuals who are going to be rude and not understanding or caring about what's going on around them, right?
So I don't want to give this psychiatrist the pass that he just fired me for being difficult to treat because that kind of comes with the territory. But I do understand him ultimately deciding that he didn't want to treat me anymore. But to his credit, My parents contacted him while all of this was going on because my parents knew. I told them about these assassination plots.
They knew how out of it I was. So they called that psychiatrist and they were like begging and pleading with him. They said, look, we know our son is not your patient anymore, but you are the most recent professional to have ever interacted with him. What can we do to get our son help?
That was really good for him to have that discussion with them on the situation that you were in. What did he advise them?
This is what he told my mom and dad. He told my mom and dad that my best bet to get treatment, given the fact that he didn't believe I would meet that very high bar of involuntary care at that time, because it's not illegal to be crazy, right? He also understood I could not be on my own. He told my parents this.
I mean, this is earth shattering cosmic stuff that is fuel for all the advocates out there and people who want to make a change. also families who have loved ones locked up right now, or if you happen to be locked up in listening, this is what he told my parents. He said, your son's best bet is to get arrested for a nonviolent low-level offense.
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