Saddle Up Segment: From Struggle to Purpose: Attorney Mark Astor on Mental Health, Addiction & Taking Responsibility

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Welcome to this week's Saddle Up segment.

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I am Lisa Koski, and I'm glad that

you're here because on this saddle

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up segment, I'm gonna just highlight

something from Tuesday's podcast.

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It was.

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So helpful if you know or love

someone who has mental health

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issues or addiction issues.

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Mark Astor is the only attorney

in the United States who deals

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with these cases and he deals

with them in a really unique way.

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He is in Florida, however.

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He is working to help people

all over the United States.

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Um.

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And I'm just gonna say, if you have

someone you love and care about and

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you are at your wits end, um, go

back and listen to that podcast.

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Reach out to Mark and find out how

Florida can capture this person and

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really give them the help that they need.

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So it was such a great episode,

and we, we went on tangents.

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Um.

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I don't always like to talk about the

breast cancer thing, but it popped up

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again and it was interesting because he

brought up the correlation between, like,

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he used the example of how my family felt

as I was going through breast cancer.

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I actually didn't even really

think about this, but, and think

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about if you have a loved one.

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I, of course, was willing to get

treatment, but think about if you

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had a loved one who had a sickness

and they were unwilling to get help.

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He said it is the exact same thing.

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For those families who have someone who

have mental illness or addiction issues,

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um, you know, the family wants 'em to

get help so bad and they're refusing.

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And so we put it on kind of an even

playing field and help me to see that

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a little bit, a little bit better.

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And then this is, so this week I

took a little clip 'cause it was

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a longer episode, it was about 45

minutes, and I don't usually do them

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that long, but I grabbed a clip.

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That I really loved because if y'all

know me, you know how I love to talk

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about taking responsibility for, um,

taking responsibility for your life.

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And attorneys are no, no different.

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And he tells, he shares his story.

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Now, I didn't.

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Put everything in there about, I mean,

he failed the bar a couple times.

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He was trying to figure out

what the heck am I gonna do?

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And he was struggling.

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And then he said he took responsibility

and pulled up his big boy pants.

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And so that's the clip

that I've got here because.

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That's another lesson embedded in this.

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I mean, it's here to help you

through mental illness, but it a,

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also speaks highly of how he made

the decision to do the work that he

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does and how he took responsibility.

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He knew people that needed help.

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Well just listen on, and here,

it's not a long clip, but it's

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really impactful and good.

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Speaker: meanwhile friends and

family were telling me, you're

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supposed to be in Florida, you're

not listening to the universe.

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Yeah.

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Open up your ears.

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Um, and then I met somebody that basically

changed the, the, the path of my life.

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So I met a, I met.

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I met a guy, his name is Arjan Robbins.

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Arjan Robbins runs a company in Miami

called How to Manage a small law Firm,

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and they teach lawyers the business

side of being a lawyer, which is not

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something they teach you in any law

school anywhere in the country, but at

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the very core of how to manage, they are

a personal growth company for lawyers.

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Can you believe that postal growth

for lawyers and God, we need it.

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And I, I, I, I saw him present

to a group of lawyers about

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being an entrepreneurial lawyer.

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And after seeing him speak,

I begged him for a job.

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'cause I didn't have, I wasn't, I

was unemployed when I came back.

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Yeah.

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Um.

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I spent a year working for him.

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Learned about the business side of

being an entrepreneurial lawyer,

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but it was also a year for me to

really grow up and put my big boy

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pants on and take a hundred percent

responsibility for my crappy life, right?

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That was why I had no money in the

bank, nothing going on professionally,

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nothing going on personally, and

I took responsibility for it.

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And when I really thought about it, I

realized I had close family members and

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friends who had issues primarily related

to drugs, but some with mental illness.

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And I said, okay.

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That's who I'm going to help.

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And I didn't know how

I was going to do it.

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I didn't have a business plan, but

I sat myself down in the library

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and just wrote a, compiled, an

Excel spreadsheet of all the people

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that I had ever had contact with.

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And I just started, you know, smiling and

dialing and making contact with people.

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Um, I had read about the Marchman Act,

which is a statute unique to Florida,

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which we still use to this day in the

office, which is designed to give a

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family the ability, the legal authority.

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To place somebody into treatment

for chunks of 90 days where there

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is a primary substance use disorder.

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Now, at the time there were

only two lawyers who were,

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who were using the March Act.

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One was south of me and he sued

nursing homes and one was north

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of me and he was a family lawyer

and the guy south didn't go north.

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The guy north didn't go south.

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They kept it quiet,

they made lots of money.

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And then I came along and spoiled

the party for them and started

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talking about it on social media.

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Speaker 4: Thanks for joining me on

this ride through the saddle up segment.

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If you liked what you heard, go

back to Tuesday's episode and

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listen to the whole podcast.