Living with severe depression and other mental issues is a very strange experience. For me it started early. I was about 14. But I hid it well. I was ashamed of my feelings, so I learned to bury them. That worked for a decade and a half. Then I just lost it. Complete nervous breakdown. Nervous breakdowns are a weird thing as well. I think they are probably different for everyone who has one, and if you haven’t, well, you just don’t understand.
For me it was like all my buried feelings coming out at once, like a burst sewage pipe spewing uncontrollably. I had zero filter left. Every negative thing that had ever happened to me, every mistake I had ever made, every bad thing I had ever done came rushing out. For a grown man who hadn’t cried since he was eight years old or so, it was embarrassing as hell.
I didn’t have much of a support network. My friends were all co-workers, and I wasn’t close to my family because I had been moving around so much the last many years between the Navy and my work in the oil field as an engineer. I just didn’t keep in good touch, which I regretted. Hell, that was one of the things that came flying out of my river of repressed feelings. I had a wife at the time, a clinical psychopath (yes I’m serious, but that’s a topic for another day), probably my only support, so I went to her. She didn’t understand. Her husband was a macho man who was supposed to take care of HER and HER only. She verbally berated me and told me to suck it up.
I was alone. Devastated. Lost. Full of self-hatred.
I cannot accurately report on the next few weeks. I worked. I slept. I know that. I cried a lot. I eventually decided to do something I said I never would: See a psychologist. I researched Google style on my computer. I finally ran across a page that just, I do not know why, clicked with me. So I called. And she said she could accept a new client which was good. There is a shortage of psychologists and psychiatrists, especially where I lived at the time.
I went to my first appointment. Nervous. Scared. Not sure what to say. But she, Doc H, was wonderful and understanding. After about 45 minutes of me rambling about I don’t know what, the reason I picked her came up, and she said, “Well, yes, I designed the website specifically to attract people like you.” This was a huge relief to me; not only did she, a full-blown doctor, accept me, she wanted me to be there. I know that may sound strange, I mean, you’re paying for someone to listen to you, so it sounds kind of disingenuous. But somehow Doc H didn’t make it seem that way. She genuinely cared, but she has to make a living too.
I started seeing her once a week when work didn’t interfere. I spoke of many things, not always related to my issues, but it was nice to have someone intelligent to speak to about whatever was on my mind.
After about a year, she told me I needed to see a psychiatrist as well. This was like a pound of bricks dropping on me. I HATE medication. It makes me feel dependent and weak. But she was insistent that my problems could not all be fixed by talking. I had a broken brain and it needed help. Doing something simple like placing an electrode in the brain is still out of reach. With current research and tests this works really well on severely depressed and bipolar patients who cannot be helped with medication and is very promising. Alas, for now, it is still considered experimental. So I had to find the only psychiatrist with an opening within an unreasonable driving distance. I went, begrudgingly doing the second thing I said I definitely wouldn’t do: Get psychiatric drugs.
Doc H called and primed him on me so he’d better understand my situation. On top of everything, he diagnosed me as bipolar. It took months to get the meds “right.” Which is really a misnomer: When it comes to these kind of drugs, they basically look at your symptoms and then look at the classes of drugs which might help. Then it is a guess which one is best; and if it’s not, and the first one rarely is, you try something else again and again and again, titrating every time for weeks. And they are NEVER perfect, no matter how hard you try.
It’s a painful process. And it made me feel weak and stupid and worthless. I spoke to Doc H about all this, of course. Today, I am on a number of meds. Too many in my opinion. We’ve eliminated a few, but any attempt to eliminate what I have is a disaster. I tried to continue with my “normal life.”
Is there a point to this rambling story? Maybe. In trying to hang on to the remnants of my pre-breakdown life, I had a horrible accident. I rolled my prized possession, a fully loaded Dodge Ram pickup truck, off of a cliff. Pro-tip: Drive safe and do not drive when you are violently sick and tired. The Flight for Life medics and everyone at the hospital kept saying, “Thank God you are alive.” To this I responded, once I was able, “No, thank the designers at Dodge for that truck.”
The left side of my body was now broken and useless to go along with two bad knees from crawling around on metal deck grating on two nuclear reactor plants for a six years, a broken clavicle, bruised ribs, and a damaged lung. My future employment in the oil business was over. I had to reinvent my future. And in order to do so, I had to find myself. In the famous words of Timothy Leary: “All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you’re unhappy where you are, MOVE.” And indeed I was very unhappy with my life and my work. Luckily, besides the medical help I was getting, my family and a few close friends stepped in to support me in my search for mental health. Also I have a chime on my phone that says three times a day, “Worthlessness is not a property of matter.”
So to sum it up, in the last three years, I have lost: my career, my wife, my physical health, my truck, two houses (including the one I custom built for a family), a whole lot of money on legal fees, and god knows what else.
But I have begun to heal my brain. There’s a line in a song by The Format’s “On Your Porch,” which I think about a lot: “What’s left to lose? You’ve done enough. And if you fail then you fail but not to us, I know these last three years, I know they’ve been hard, but now it’s time to come out of the desert and into the sun.” Did I mention during this series of disasters, I worked in Saudi Arabia? Yes, that’s a story for another time as well. Every time I hear that song, I think of my parents as though they were singing that to me. I guess I wish it was their words too.
I guess I don’t have a huge point to make other than get help for your mental problems early. Don’t wait until you have two nervous breakdowns. Yes, I know, I only mentioned one. I’m a slow learner. Don’t be ashamed. Get help. A broken brain is the SAME as a broken rib or foot or arm or uncontrolled bleeding. We completely downplay mental health in this country. We make mental issues taboo. We degrade people who need mental help, which is more than half the population based on some studies. But many aren’t getting help they need because they are scared like I was. Don’t be scared, ignore the naysayers, get help. The alternative is just too awful. Fools learn from their own mistakes . . . wise men learn from the mistakes of others. Your choice.
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Christopher Ryan Parent was a Colorado native and an ex-US Navy nuclear engineer. He spent time as an instructor at a land based prototype nuclear reactor as well as serving as a senior electrical engineer on the nuclear attack submarine USS Columbia. After his eight years in the Navy, he became a wireline engineer for Schlum Berger, the world’s largest provider of oil field services. After setting a world record for fracking stages and being a project director in Saudi Arabia, he quit engineering due to health issues and went back to school to get a degree in neuro-psychology. He died at the age of thirty-two of cardio-pulmonary complications.
