Let’s talk about mental health: Jambo

“I want to heal the scene because the scene helped heal me. It was people who were being open about these things, people who were hurting and vulnerable, that allowed me to be hurting and vulnerable. They gave me a reason to push, a reason to find help, and a reason to still be here. I want other people to have that too.”

— Jambo, Twitch streamer and HeartSupport fundraiser

In 2019, Jambo’s world seemed to be ending.

She started the year with a stable job, a fiance, and a slowly growing streaming audience on Twitch. By October, her engagement had come to an end, she’d lost her job, she didn’t have the heart to stream, and she ended up in the ICU following a health event.

“Every life event that you could imagine collapsed in a four month time period. That was the lowest I've ever been in my entire life,” Jambo remembers. “When I got out of the hospital, I was like, ‘I can't stream anymore. No one's going to care about this. No one's going to remember me. I haven't been consistent. Who cares?’”

While convalescing, she planned a final stream to tell her audience she’d be logging off for good. Even saying that much felt like too much. She had a history of feeling silenced on her own streams.

“Unfortunately, I had somebody that I knew in the streamer space who really hammered into people that if you cry, you're manipulating people to feel bad for you. You're supposed to be a positive person. They want to escape with you. No one wants to hear that stuff. I was naive. I believed it,” Jambo admits.

But when November 2, 2019 came, Jambo decided she had nothing left to lose: she would just tell the truth. 

She says, “I started stream that day. I'd been streaming for two and a half years, but for the first time, I had a complete breakdown and I unloaded everything that had happened.”

She shared about how her mental and physical health were suffering, including facing medical bills while unemployed. She explained she’d stop streaming, working instead to find another more traditional job. 

The streamer expected that she would find her audience dropping off, tuning out, sending her off to keep facing her difficulties alone. But instead of leaving, they showed up.

“My community paid my hospital bills, which were $3,600. I didn't have insurance. I had lost my job. So they paid that day,” Jambo says in disbelief. “And that month, between November 2 and the end of November, I went from 72 Twitch subs to 3,600.”

This sudden surge in community totally changed Jambo’s life.

Jambo reflects, “I kept looking for a job. I spent three months searching. The same support kept coming through. They were like, ‘Please don't quit. Don't give up. Don't leave.’”

“Finally that January, I was like, ‘I can't find a job. I don't know what to do,’” she continues. “And they were like, ‘Why don't you just try full-time streaming?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I don't want to rely on you. I don't want to put that pressure on you to keep me afloat. I am not your responsibility.’ But they said, ‘Why don't you just try it?’ And I was like, ‘OK, but if it doesn't work out, then I'm going to get another job.’ Here I am now, almost five years from that moment: still full-time streaming.”

While Jambo had been going through such seismic life upheaval, she’d also been starting to notice a growing nonprofit that she stumbled on while scrolling Instagram. As a rock fan (her favorite band is Bowling For Soup), Jambo had some ties to the music scene. That’s how she found HeartSupport.

At the time, she was still untangling her own experience with mental health struggles. She didn’t have a lot of language to explain what she’d been through. But she did know that mental health mattered tremendously. So in early 2020, now her audience had grown, she did her first fundraiser for HeartSupport. 

“I knew a lot of people that had fundraised for HeartSupport,” she explains. “Mental health has always been something I've struggled with. So organizations supporting mental health resources or anything in that realm were very important to me.”

Specifically, Jambo had learned firsthand how important it could be to break the silence. Through her own mental health ups and downs, she had often found herself alone, unsure if anyone else felt the way that she did. 

“Growing up, I think there was a stigma about mental health, stigma about ADHD. I don't think that parents really understood how those things can impact children until now,” Jambo muses. “That's why I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until 2020. I didn't get an official anxiety diagnosis until four years ago, or an official depression diagnosis. I just got diagnosed with a form of OCD back in January, and I have been going through therapy for PTSD this last year. All of these things, I didn't know how to approach them.”

Being able to name them has proved to be the first step in approaching them.

The advocate says, “Seeing front-facing organizations like HeartSupport who are having those hard discussions regularly, who are actively fundraising, who are a part of what I did for my job, who are a part of in the spaces that I occupy, was such a big help for me recognizing that there was something wrong with me. And I know that that's not the verbiage that people want to use, but it's the verbiage I'm going to use because that's how I felt: I felt like there was something wrong with me.”

The openness invited through the Twitch community and HeartSupport helped Jambo start therapy in 2021. Three years in, she’s still unpacking her experiences, understanding that she deserved help and support all along. 

“Once you can understand what's happening, it's so easy for you to start to identify your behaviors. It starts to feel less overwhelming,” she says, going more in-depth into her experience. “It's less of this big curtain that's over your whole life. You can see through it now. You can peek around those corners and understand where those things are coming from.”

She’s determined that everyone else will feel that same clarity around their struggles.

“I feel like if I had people that openly talked about these things earlier in my life, I would have addressed them sooner. I didn’t have that. And I'm not a therapist, I'm not a doctor. But talking about your own life experience can really help somebody hear, ‘This is normal. You can do something about this instead of just constantly feeling like there's something wrong with you,’” Jambo says earnestly.

Several years after her first stream fundraising for HeartSupport, Jambo is continuing to partner with the organization and be courageously vulnerable about her own mental health story. That approach is actively reshaping the world she lives in. She’s not stopping any time soon.

“Being able to directly support people who need it has always been and will always be an important thing to me. I mean, clearly, I've built part of my platform on it,” she says honestly. “Having a platform like I do is a privilege that I am well aware of and that I don't take for granted any day of the week. It's so massive being able to crowdfund support for organizations and nonprofits, especially one that helps with mental health and mental health resources. Especially in the society that we live in now, where these things are still looked down on. For various reasons, people need that support now more than ever.”

Despite the real weight of that urgency, Jambo looks towards the future with a lot of hope. She believes in HeartSupport’s ability to truly transform the world, to keep changing the conversation around mental health. She wants others to understand the power of that potential too.

Describing the organization’s impact, she says, “HeartSupport offers a lifeline to people who might not have had it. They give people the ability to feel that hope, to feel like there is someone out there who cares, to have ease of access to support so they can find their path and experience what I did: someone validating what is going on with them. Knowing that they're not broken and that there is somebody out there who cares about them and wants them to find peace, wants them to find the diagnosis, wants them to find another reason to keep going. I think that passion from HeartSupport drives passion in other people like me, who then want to drive passion in others to donate and to help that continue.”

That ripple effect is community-based mental healthcare at its best: a way of operating where each person’s hope creates more hope for others, a chain reaction of life-giving empathy. Jambo has exemplified that model. And even when telling her own story, she takes a moment to encourage others in theirs.

“You can find help, you can afford help, you can get help, you can feel better,” Jambo concludes. “There's a reason to stay here. There's a reason to keep going. It doesn't have to end because it's it feels bad right now. You've already made it through 100% of your bad days. You can make it through the rest.”

If you want to join the chain reaction of encouragement that Jambo is a part of, you can donate to HeartSupport today to help heal the scene. Consider becoming a monthly donor to provide real, sustained support for those who need it most.