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A H5N1 Case Study In Fear

Sometimes my work writings crash head-on into this blog. Last week I wrote a post in CSO’s SaltedHash blog about how I thought scientists were reckless to mutate the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

While there’s the obvious security component, part of my feelings on the subject go back to my years living with fear and anxiety.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/-q-MorIES5I

This isn’t a post to say I’ve changed my mind about this strain of bird flu being tweaked into a human scourge that, if released, would kill many, many people. It IS about listening to other people’s opinions and opening the possibility that I could change my mind if educated further.

This comes up after someone from the scientific and security community sent me this tweet:

“Have you seen the NYT article on the A(H5N1) yet, and does it make you re-evaluate your hasty blog post?”

My response:

“It does not make me re-evaluate my opinion. I still believe this was reckless; some things in nature shouldn’t be messed with.”

To that, she replied:

“Ahh okay, understood. I’ll cross your name off the list of people interested in the vaccinations then.”

Later, I found that she posted my SaltedHash post in her Facebook timeline with this comment:

“I really wish Bill Brenner would stick to writing about subjects he is actually knowledgeable about – like eating too much god or whatever.”

When someone throws barbs at me for something I write, I don’t get upset about it. If you don’t want to be disagreed with, you have no business writing opinion pieces. Also, when it looks like someone smart and sensible is flipping me off, I take notice, because whenever I express an opinion, I always understand that I could be wrong.

Some people change their minds about things out of political expediency or because they can’t bear the thought of someone calling them out in a public arena. But under the right circumstances, a person changes their mind because they remain open to other points of view and, after more research and soul searching, they come to believe their original, well-intentioned and honest view was wrong in hindsight.

I’m not at that point yet, because when it comes to H5N1 I simply don’t trust humans no matter how good their intentions.

I have no doubt scientists were as careful as possible and that security was paramount, as one article said. I also believe the scientists are acting with good intentions. They want to understand what makes this flu virus tick so we can be better at identifying mutations in the wild and developing vaccines that will save countless lives. I applaud those intentions.

But scientists are human like the rest of us, prone to make mistakes and fail to understand what they are toying with.

That’s the thing that makes me uneasy.

Is my view tainted by the raw fear I used to carry around? I’d be stupid if I failed to acknowledge the possibility.

As I’ve written before, fear and anxiety were byproducts of my particular brand of OCD, just like my addictions were a byproduct.

The fear meant a lot of things. Working myself into a stupor over the safety of my wife and children. An obsession with cleanliness, which was interesting since depression always meant my personal hygiene took a dive.

In 2005, I had a long panic streak over the bird flu in Asia, which was predicted to be the next great pandemic, deadlier than the one that killed off a significant segment of the population in 1918-19.

I would read every magazine and every website tracking all these world events as if my personal safety depended on it. If a hurricane was spinning in the Atlantic, I would watch with deepening worry as it edged closer to the U.S.

When did all this stop? It’s hard to pin an exact date or year on it.

I only know it stopped.

One day the anxiety attacks stopped. Then I started to crave all the experiences I once feared. Not the terror attacks, plane crashes and pandemics, mind you, but the traveling, the public speaking and more intensified writing. One day I started craving those things with the same vigor with which I craved all the junk I polluted myself with.

Therapy — years of it — and Prozac definitely played a role. So did my deepening Faith.

But while news that H5N1 was mutated in a lab didn’t send me into panic like it would have six years ago, I still remembered everything I read about what this thing could do as a human, airborn virus. The reaction resulted in that SaltedHash post I linked to at the beginning of this post.

The person who called it “hasty” and not the stuff of a knowledgeable writer is looking at this with all the potential good of the research in mind. I welcome the opportunity to be proven wrong.

If I am wrong about this, I’ll be the happiest idiot on the planet and I’ll say so publicly.

Time will tell.

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Because It’s Not All About Me

A friend nominated this blog for a Liebster Blog Award. I had no idea what it was until I looked it up, and it seems I may not qualify. But many others do, and I’m going to tell you about five of ’em.

Mood music:

First, a few words about this award: It’s meant for blogs with less than 200 followers that a fellow blogger feels deserves more attention. As part of getting nominated, you’re asked to pay it forward, nominating and linking to five other worthy blogs.

I constantly keep an eye on the page views here to see what topics people are most interested in but I usually overlook the follower count. When I got nominated, I figured I wasn’t at the 200 threshold. But with this, I decided to have a look.

Followers: 2,931

That seemed freakishly high to me, then I saw a breakdown: 55 WordPress.com blog followers. 90 WordPress.com comment followers. 2,786 Twitter followers. So, I may or may not qualify, depending on how you spin the numbers.

But I don’t care if I qualify or not. I’m paying it forward anyway, because it’s not all about me, and because I get a lot out of so many blogs that I’m dying for you to check them out.

Let’s start with the friend who nominated me. I’ve been friends with Linda White a long time. Her kids are in the same classes as mine. She always shares the amusing stuff her kids say, and finally, after years of her friends suggesting she do a blog, she started one: Crud my kids say: http://crudmykidssay.wordpress.com/

Her kids — “The Girl” and “The Boy” — are a riot and are sharp as knives. I always smile when I read about them. You will, too. Now to start nagging Linda to write a second blog about the hilariousness (to those of us on the outside) that ensues when you work for a big retail chain.

The second blog is a new one by another mom with a razor-sharp wit and the talent to capture it in a blog. I don’t think she wants her name out there yet, so I’ll simply guide you to “Not Now Honey. Mommy Has To Blog” — http://notnowhoneymommyhastoblog.com/

Read it and you’ll see the makings of a modern-day Dr. Seuss.

The third blog is from my old friend and Rockit Records colleague Christian Campagnia called “Caffeineandcookies” — http://caffeineandcookies.com/

Christian has a wit that’s one-of-a-kind and there’s a rawness and honesty that keeps me coming back. A couple weeks ago I had the honor of spending the day with him during a visit to Hollywood. He got in the passenger seat while I drove around to a bunch of famous Hollywood murder sites. I think he feared my driving more than where we were going. Either way, it was a lot of fun.

The fourth blog is from Dr. Annabelle Rc, author of “A Life Lived Ridiculously” — the companion blog being “Crazy In A Crazy World” — http://www.ridiculouslife.net/crazy-in-a-crazy-world.html

She’s an authority on OCD and has fed me many ideas for my own blog.

This fifth blog is Ocdbloggergirl (http://ocdbloggergirl.wordpress.com/), written by Lisa Burleson. Like me, she writes in an attempt to sort out the daily challenges of life with OCD. Her observations are raw and unflinching, and reading about her challenges makes you realize how so alike we all are. When you realize you’re not alone, life’s big challenges become less insurmountable.

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To A Woman Under Attack From Crohn’s Disease

A friend asked me about good Crohn’s causes she could donate to because a friend of her daughter is gravely ill from the disease. I shared my thoughts, but wanted to reach out directly to the person suffering.

Mood music:

I hear you are really going through the meat grinder right now and that you face life-threatening surgery. I’ve been there, so this is my attempt to give you some peace of mind.

I experienced all the things you are now — the massive loss of blood, the knifing pain in the gut, sleepless nights in the bathroom, and more blood. But looking back, I must say that in the long run it’s been more damaging to my mental health than my physical health.

It screwed up my brain and pushed me toward an adulthood of addictions and other hangups. I had a couple transfusions in the late 1970s. This left me scared to death in the 1980s and 1990s about AIDS, because many people got it from tainted blood transfusions. Fortunately, I’ve been tested many times for it and that didn’t happen. I was lucky.

A couple times, I’ve been told, the doctor’s came close to removing the colon. Too much of it was under siege and they didn’t know where to start in terms of targeting it. But it never came to that.

The pain was pretty intense. I really don’t know how my parents were able to get through it. I think it would cause me more anguish to see one of my kids suffer than to go through it myself. That had to hurt. Especially since they lost another child along the way. It also couldn’t have helped that I would be in the hospital for six-week stretches in 1978, 1979, 1980 and 1981.

As you have probably discovered by now, the most popular drug to treat it is Prednisone, which comes with a long list of side effects. In fact, the drug screwed with me much more than anything else. More on that in another post I wrote called “The Bad Pill Kept Me from the Good Pill.”

But I’m here to tell you there’s no need to write yourself off as doomed. There’s the spiritual argument for this, where you put all your trust in God. I’m a true believer and subscriber of that argument.  I also know that in your darkest moment, there are always people to help you through it.

A lot of people helped me survive a childhood of brutal Crohn’s Disease: My parents, great doctors, school friends who helped me catch up with my schoolwork and rooted for me whenever I got out of the hospital, and a great therapist who helped me sort through the mental byproducts of illness.

I think you’re going to get through the current attack and that you will be able to move on to a better life. Again, I lean on my personal experience.

I’m probably one of the luckiest Crohn’s patients on Earth. The last bad flare up was in 1986 and I haven’t had once since. I still go through frequent periods of inflammation, but nothing that requires drugs or hospital stays. The colon is checked out every other year to make sure the layers of scar tissue don’t run wild and morph into cancer.

Had the doctors removed the colon when I was a kid, I think things still would have worked out. I would have learned to live with it. Whatever you have in front of you, I think you can make the best of it and push through.

Good luck and God Bless you.

–Bill

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THE OCD DIARIES, Two Years Later

Two years ago today, in a moment of Christmas-induced depression, I started this blog. I meant for it to be a place where I could go and spill out the insanity in my head so I could carry on with life.

In short order, it snowballed into much more than that.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/IKpEoRlcHfA

About a year into my recovery from serious mental illness and addiction — the most uncool, unglamorous addiction at that — I started thinking about sharing where I’ve been. My reasoning was simple: I’d listened to a lot of people toss around the OCD acronym to describe everything from being a type A personality to just being stressed. I also saw a lot of people who were traveling the road I’d been down and were hiding their true nature from the world for fear of a backlash at work and in social circles.

At some point, that bullshit became unacceptable to me.

I started getting sick of hiding. I decided the only way to beat my demons at their sick little game was to push them out into the light, so everyone could see how ugly they were and how bad they smelled. That would make them weaker, and me stronger. And so that’s how this started out, as a stigma-busting exercise.

Then, something happened. A lot of you started writing to me about your own struggles and asking questions about how I deal with specific challenges life hurls at me. The readership has steadily increased.

Truth be told, life with THE OCD DIARIES hasn’t been what I’d call pure bliss. There are many mornings where I’d rather be doing other things, but the blog calls to me. A new thought pops into my head and has to come out. It can also be tough on my wife, because sometimes she only learns about what’s going on in my head from what’s in the blog. I don’t mean to do that. It’s just that I often can’t form my thoughts clearly in discussion. I come here to do it, and when I’m done the whole world sees it.

More than once I’ve asked Erin if I should kill this blog. Despite the discomfort it can cause her at times, she always argues against shutting it down. It’s too important to my own recovery process, and others stand to learn from it or at least relate to it.

And so I push forward.

One difference: I run almost ever post I write by her before posting it. I’ve shelved several posts at her recommendation, and it’s probably for the best. Restraint has never been one of my strengths.

This blog has helped me repair relationships that were strained or broken. It has also damaged some friendships. When you write all your feelings down without a filter, you’re inevitably going to make someone angry.

One dear friend suggested I push buttons for a good story and don’t know how to let sleeping dogs lie. She’s right about the sleeping dogs part, but I don’t agree with the first suggestion. I am certainly a button pusher. But I don’t push to generate a good story. I don’t set out to do that, at least.

Life happens and I write about how I feel about it, and how I try to apply the lessons I’ve learned. It’s never my way or the highway. If you read this blog as an instruction manual for life, you’re doing it wrong. What works for me isn’t necessarily going to fit your own needs.

Over time, the subject matter of this blog has broadened. It started out primarily as a blog about OCD and addiction. Then it expanded to include my love of music and my commentary on current events as they relate to our mental state.

I recently rewrote the “about” section of the blog to better explain the whole package. Reiterating it is a pretty good way to end this entry. You can see it here.

Thanks for reading.

"Obsession," by Bill Fennell

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Is It Bad That Two Family Members Are In Therapy?

If more than one member of the same family is in therapy, is that a sign that the family is seriously screwed up?

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/iFAweWkqqjk

That’s the question we are asking ourselves these days. As the reader knows by now, I’ve been in therapy for OCD and related issues for seven years. Duncan sees a children’s therapist to help him work through his ADHD.

Is this family a basket case? In my opinion, it’s exactly the opposite.

I wouldn’t be enjoying the equilibrium I have today if not for the years of therapy.

Meanwhile, Duncan is learning a lot of helpful techniques to help him focus and control his anger.

I’m a staunch advocate of therapy as a tool for mental health. I think too many people are embarrassed when it’s suggested that therapy would do them some good. People who stay away from therapy because they feel it’s a mark of weakness have no idea what they are denying themselves. That makes me sad.

It’s a funny thing when I talk to people suffering from depression, addiction and other troubles of the mind. Folks seem more comfortable about the idea of pills than in seeing a therapist. After all, they’re just crazy “shrinks” in white coats  obsessed with how your childhood nightmares compromised your adult sex life, right?

I’ve been to many therapists in my life. I was sent to one at Children’s Hospital in Boston as a kid to talk through the emotions of being sick with Chron’s Disease all the time. That same therapist also tried to help me and my siblings process the bitter aftermath of our parents’ divorce in 1980.

As a teenager, I went to another therapist to discuss my brother’s death and my difficulty in getting along with my stepmother (a wonderful, wonderful woman who I love dearly, by the way. But as a kid I didn’t get along with her).

That guy was a piece of work. He had a thick French accent and wanted to know if I found my stepmother attractive. From the moment he asked that question, I was done with him, and spent the rest of the appointment being belligerent.

That put me off going to a therapist for a long time. I started going to one again in 2004, when I found I could no longer function in society without untangling the barbed wire in my head. But I hesitated for a couple years before pressing on.

The therapist I started going to specialized in dealing with disturbed children and teenagers. That was perfect, because in a lot of ways I was still a troubled kid.

She never told me what to do, never told me how I’m supposed to interpret my disorder against my past. She asked a lot of questions and had me do the work of sorting it out. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what a good therapist does. They ask questions to get your brain churning, dredging up experiences that sat at the back of the mind like mud on the ocean floor. That’s how you begin to deal with how you got to the point of dysfunction.

She moved to Florida a year in and I started going to a fellow who worked from his house. I would explain my binge eating habits to him, specifically how I would down $30 worth of McDonald’s between work and home.

“You should stock your car with healthy foods like fruit, so if you’re hungry you can eat those things instead,” he told me.

That was the end of that. He didn’t get it. When an addict craves the junk, the healthy food around you doesn’t stand a chance. The compulsion is specifically toward eating the junk. He should have understood. He didn’t. Game over, dumb ass.

The therapist I see now is a God-send. He was the first therapist to help me understand the science behind mental illness and the way an inbalance in brain chemistry can mess with your thought traffic. He also provided me with quite an education on how anti-depressants work. Yes, friends, there’s a science to it. Certain drugs are designed to shore up the brain chemicals that, when depleted, lead to bi-polar behavior. Other meds are specifically geared toward anxiety control. In my case, I needed the drug that best addressed obsessive-compulsive behavior. For me, that meant Prozac.

That’s not to say I blindly obey his every suggestion. He specializes in stress reduction and is big on yoga and eliminating coffee from the daily diet. Those are two deal breakers for me. Yoga bores the dickens out of me. If you’ve been following this blog all along, I need not explain the coffee part.

I also find it fun to push his buttons once in awhile. I’ll show up at his office with a huge cup of Starbucks. “Oh, I see you’ve brought drugs with you,” he’ll say.

Our relationship has settled into this banter back and forth, and it continues to serve its purpose. We go over everything happening in my life at that given moment, and if he suspects I’m thinking in unproductive ways or lying to myself, he calls me on it.

I’m better for it.

All that is the long way of saying I think it’s absolutely healthy if multiple members of one family are in therapy at the same time.

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A Lesson From Gabby Giffords

I recently watched Diane Sawyer’s interview with Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly. To say I was moved would be an understatement. Hers is the story of a spirited fight back from near death.

If you ever get the feeling you can’t do something or overcome big challenges, you should watch this. It will show you that nothing is too big to overcome.

http://youtu.be/VOZgta88L5A

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Should I Be Upset About This Report Card?

I’ve gotten word that a reader and dear friend was upset over last week’s post, “Reading Between The Lines Of A Bad Report Card.” She shouldn’t be.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/qga5eONXU_4

She said that she would never have sent such a bad report card to her adult child. I think she was also upset at the suggestion that my parents weren’t paying adequate attention to me back then.

I don’t mind, though. In fact, I’m happy to have that old report card. It put things in perspective for me. It was a snapshot of a difficult time. I used to get angry when thinking about those days. I had a lot of hate in my soul over it.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I think everyone did the best they could with the tools they had back then. The problem was that the tools weren’t that great.

But everything turned out fine.

Below is the original post. Have a look and tell me if you would be upset if such a report card were sent to you.

And to my friend: I appreciate your reaction to the original post very much. Yours is a friendship I treasure, and I don’t want you to worry about this one. Hence the sequel post.

Reading Between The Lines Of A Bad Report Card

My mother found my fourth-grade report card the other day and mailed it to me. On the surface it shows a chronic C student who doesn’t give a damn about anything.

But when I read between the lines I can see exactly where my 10-year-old head was at.

If you look at it on the surface, you see a straight-C student who occasionally sinks to a D in social studies and math. On the back of the report card are comments each quarter from my teacher, describing me as a kid who puts no effort into anything.

My first thought on reading it was that this teacher didn’t like me, and that the feeling was mutual. In reality, I don’t think she disliked me. I think she saw a kid adrift and was trying to scare my parents into a more rigorous study routine at home.

Unfortunately for her and me, she wasn’t the type of teacher who was going to get through to me. She took the academics very seriously, but did little to appeal to the more creative side of me. Teachers before and after her would have a lot more success in that regard. She didn’t get me and I didn’t get her. A troubled kid needs nurturing personalities to intervene.

Even as an adult who has enjoyed a fair amount of career success it’s the same:The more nurturing bosses get more out of me. The ones who shove a 13-point plan in my face and tell me to do it get nothing but trouble. Luckily for me, I’ve only had a couple bosses like that along the way.

I have been both types of boss myself, and I’ve found that most people do better with supervisors who are nurturing souls.

In the 1980-81 school year at Theodore Roosevelt School in the Point of Pines, Revere, Mass., I needed a lot of nurturing.

My parents divorced in the summer of 1980 and it was not a civilized, amicable process. The yelling and instability sent me on to such soothing pursuits as lighting things on fire and shoving the garden hose into an air vent on the side of the house.

I was also sick most of the time with Crohn’s Disease. If you look at my attendance record, there’s a 20-plus day absence in the fourth quarter. That was for one of my extended hospital stays. I missed the class picture shoot that spring, which is probably for the best. I wasn’t a pleasant site.

 

Erin was pained to look at my report card. She never got grades so consistently bad. She felt sympathy for the teacher, who was obviously trying to get my parents’ attention. But in the raw wake of divorce and the illnesses me and my older brother suffered from, they obviously were distracted. I don’t blame them.

I suppose I should have felt sad looking at the report card, but I don’t. I see it for what it was — a snapshot of a difficult period of time. I survived it, and turned into an excellent student once I had a couple years of college under my belt. I would argue that despite it all, I turned out just fine.

What makes me even happier is that at least to date, my children do well academically. Duncan has some ADHD-related challenges, but his grades are mostly good and he has a heart I didn’t have at that age. That heart will take him far.

Sean is currently the same age I was when I brought home that report card. He’s razor-sharp academically, though like me at that age, he often rushes through his homework, the most notable evidence being his sloppy penmanship. We can work with that.

I’d like to think that their better academic luck reflects that we’re giving them a good home life — better than mine was, at least.

To me, the big lesson is that when a kid brings home a bad report card, it’s not enough to just look at the grades and brand the student a success or failure based on the letters and numbers alone.

There’s always a story behind the grades, and taking the time to know the story is key to helping that child going forward.

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To The Guy Killing Himself With Food

There’s a guy I used to work with who was always a pleasure to be around. I loved his humor and work ethic, and, thanks to Facebook, I get to stay in touch with him. But I’m worried by what I see right now.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:7Foti4A082iVkY8Az1hvlX]

By now this guy has probably figured out that this will be about him. He need not worry. I’m not going to name him or the place where we worked together.

He’s gone through a rough patch in recent weeks and his depression is bleeding all over his Facebook page. That happens with most of us. But he keeps talking about losing himself in his food. I’ve been down that road, and need to do what I can to knock sense into him.

From this point on, I’ll be speaking directly to him:

My friend, you don’t want to hear any of this, but you need to. You’re slowly killing yourself because life has hit a rough spot. You’ve been through rough periods before and got past them. This will be no different.

You say food is your first great love, the one who doesn’t argue and gives you back everything you put in. I used to think that way. It’s a lie — the same lie alcoholics and heroin addicts fall for.

People have this stupid notion that you can’t call yourself an addict unless you drink too much or take drugs. But addiction covers anything we think we can’t live without. That includes relationships.

People like us walk around with a hole in our soul. We think we can fill it with things that give us a few moments of pleasure and solace. But it never works. The hole gets bigger, because the stuff we’re addicted to is really a corrosive agent, eating through the core of who we are.

Everyone struggles with something.

Everyone struggles with relationships. Everyone looks for comfort in certain behaviors: Eating, drinking, smoking, sex, spending, Web surfing, music, exercise, mountain climbing, gum-chewing, TV.

Just about everyone struggles with the difference between having enough of the items I just listed and not knowing when it’s enough. People eat too much all the time and casually make note of it. People get drunk and the headache they wake up with the next morning tells them they went too far.

There’s a tight parallel when it comes to mental illness, the main focus of this blog. Everyone struggles with times of depression, anxiety, mental fatigue, personality conflicts. Those very things are what usually drives a person to addictive behavior.

It’s all part of being human. That’s why the readership of this blog keeps growing. Everyone struggles and relates to the cause and effect.

But when does addictive behavior become the stuff of evil — a cancer that takes you over body and soul until satisfying the itch becomes the priority over all else?

That’s where we try to separate the so-called normal people from the crazies. I say try because one person’s crazy is another person’s normal.

We all think we know the difference between normal and crazy. But most of the time, we don’t know shit.

I can only tell you where my sense of normal crossed over into insanity. I’ve told you in a million different ways in this blog already.

To me, the key to recovery is partly about identifying when a behavior makes life unmanageable. Not the typical idea of unmanageable, where a person might always be scattered, nervous, hyper or lazy, thus becoming difficult to be around.

No, I’m talking unmanageable in the sense that your life is like a car speeding out of control, where one tire is flat, the engine has run out of oil and the back bumper is hanging off and causing sparks as it drags on the ground. The vehicle is ready to fall apart, and yet it keeps going faster and faster.

The addictive behavior that does that to your life is the insidious devil whose head must be ripped off if you’re going to make it.

For me, clinical OCD has always been a driver of my addictive behavior. I had to bring the OCD to heel before I could even begin to deal with the addictions. The 12 Steps of Recovery are key to my ability to manage both.

I’m not saying the 12 Steps is what you need. It works for me, but there’s more than one way to skin this beast.

I’ve broken my addictive behavior into categories that have more to do with what makes me insane than what is simply considered good or bad for you.

I love cigar smoke. Smoking is bad for you.

I love coffee. Some say that’s bad for you, though I don’t really believe it.

I love spending money on things. Who doesn’t? But spending too much can ruin you and those you love.

I love music. Some days I’d rather sit around listening to rock and roll than doing any number of other things I should be doing.

All of that can be considered addictive behavior. But binge eating, followed closely by alcohol and third by the prescription pills I used to take for back pain — those are the things I craved so badly that at one point I was willing to let everything else in life go to hell.

That is you with the food right now.

You are better than that. I’ve seen it.

It’s time to take control of your life again.

Thanks for listening.

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Death Of A Second Sibling

Fifteen years ago I lost the friend who had become my older brother and rudder. A vicious cycle of depression destroyed his body, but it failed to kill his soul.

Mood music:

For a lot of my more religious friends, that has to sound odd, if not foul. We’ve been taught that suicide is a mortal sin, the kind that sends the soul straight to hell. I used to believe that. Now I think that line of thinking is wrong, stupid and even a little dangerous. It makes us give up on people who were good to the core, whose only fault was an inability to climb out of the black fog depression smothers the mind with.

Here are a couple brief paragraphs on the day he died:

In the weeks leading up to his suicide, I knew he was badly depressed. I even had a feeling he harbored suicidal thoughts. I just never thought he’d do it. Or it could be that I thought I had more time to be there and help him through it. Instead, I stayed wrapped in my own world as he deteriorated.

On Nov. 15, 1996, he decided he’d had enough. It was a sparkling, autumn Friday and I was having a great morning at work. But early that afternoon, I got a call at work from my mother. She had driven by Sean’s house and saw police cars and ambulances and all kinds of commotion on the front lawn. I called his sister and she put his wife on the phone. She informed me he was dead. By his own hand.

I hated him for years after that, failing to comprehend why he would leave us that way, especially since he knew suicide meant a damned soul. That’s what we were taught.

But I’ve had my own battles with OCD-fueled depression over the years, and despite all the pain that goes with it, I’ve gained wisdom. I understand now what happens to a mind on the ropes.

I know now that when you’re in the grip of an out-of-control mental illness, you lose all sense of right and wrong. I think you enter a sort of dementia. Not in every case, but a lot of cases. You lose the ability to make reasonable decisions.

In that state of being, I don’t think a person can be held responsible for the damage they inflict on themselves, because they are not acting with a fully-functioning brain. I could put it another way and say a person in that state is no longer dealing with a full deck, but you should get the point by now.

My friend Linda, herself a person of strong Catholic Faith, recently sent me a passage from the Catechism of the Catholic Church that shows that suicide isn’t the trip to eternal damnation many in the church would have us believe:

“2282 Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide. 

2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.”

Nothing is as black and white as we’d like to believe.

Now that I have the peace of knowing that Sean Marley’s soul didn’t die on that confused morning, I’m able to focus on what he did for me.

–He filled the role of older sibling when my own older brother could no longer do so.

–He taught me that it’s OK to question the status quo at all times, to never take things at face value.

–He taught me that it’s OK to be different, and that being different is even something to celebrate.

–He taught me that the world is bigger than the neighborhood you grow up in, and that you need to see something of the world to understand it.

–He taught me to be a fighter.

And now for some of the cool things you may not have known about him:

–He was a gifted guitarist. He could learn to play just about anything, and could write great musical bits when he wanted to. He gave me my first guitar for Christmas in 1986. It was an Ibanez strat model. He had what I think was a Guild electric guitar with a dark blue or black body. I sold the Ibanez several years later and it’s one of my biggest regrets. Sean was pissed but forgave me. I sometimes wonder whatever happened to his guitar. I hope someone’s putting it to good use.

–He was a great writer, and was a very disciplined diary keeper. He showed me several entries over the years, but I haven’t read them since his death. I know they are in safe hands, though.

–His hair went through more changes than Hillary Clinton’s, in both style and color.

–He reveled in listening to bands that weren’t as well known. He was listening to Kix several years before they achieved moderate success. He turned me on to T-Rex, Thin Lizzy and Riot (not Quiet Riot. This band was just called Riot).

–He loved the sea as much as I did, which makes sense, since his father Al was the one who really taught me to appreciate the ocean.

–He was a vegetarian who could not understand why people had to kill animals for food or any other reason. I never caught on, but I respected him for it.

–He was a very spiritual man who was always seeking. He eventually rebelled against the Catholic faith he was brought up on, but he was always reading, writing and exploring who exactly his higher power was.

–He used to find a lot of bizarre z-grade horror movies for us to watch. I can’t remember half the titles, though the Toxic Avenger was in there somewhere. One movie involved aliens who drank their own vomit. He thought that was especially funny.

–He was a Libertarian way before it was the popular thing to be. In fact, in the 1988 presidential election we both voted for a practically unknown politician named Ron Paul. He was the libertarian candidate. Sean voted for him because he was a true believer. I just didn’t want to vote for Bush or Dukakis.

–He was always taking classes, studying and studying some more. He had a serious, deep academic mind. He never stopped learning.

Thanks to him, I’ve never stopped learning. Though he probably didn’t intend it, he also taught me lessons about dealing with suicide. That may seem absurd, but if not for his death, I never would have embarked on the journey to understand.

For those dealing with a suicide in the family, I have a few things for you to consider. I’ve written this down in a few other posts, but it bears frequent repeating. Read it and then get on with your life:

–Blaming yourself is pointless. No matter how many times you replay events in your mind, the fact is that it’s not your fault. For one thing, it’s impossible to get into the head of someone who is contemplating suicide. Sure, there are signs, but since we all get the blues sometimes, it’s very easy to dismiss the signs as something close to normal. When someone is loud in contemplating suicide, it’s usually a cry for help. When the depressed says nothing and even appears OK, it’s usually because they’ve made their decision and are in the quiet, planning stages.

–Blaming each other is even more pointless. Take it from me: Nerves in your circle of family and friends are so raw right now that it won’t take much for relationships to snap into pieces. A week after my friend’s death I wrote a column about it, revealing what in hindsight was too much detail. His family was furious and most of them haven’t talked to me since. They feel I was exploiting his death to advance my writing career and get attention. What I’ve learned, and this is tough to admit, is that you’re going to have to let it go when the finger pointing starts. It’s better not to engage the other side. Nobody is in their right mind at this point, so go easy on each other. Give people space to make their errors in judgment and learn from it.

–Don’t demonize the dead. When a friend takes their life, one of the things that gnaws at the survivors is the notion that — if there is a Heaven and Hell — those who kill themselves are doomed to the latter. I’m a devout Catholic, so you can bet your ass this one has gone through my mind. What I’ve learned though, through my own experiences in the years since, is that depression is a clinical disease. When you are mentally ill, your brain isn’t firing on all thrusters. You engage in self-destructive behavior even though you understand the consequences. A person thinking about suicide is not operating on a sane, normally-functioning mind. So to demonize someone for taking their own life is pointless. To demonize the person, you have to assume they were in their right mind at the time of the act. And you know they weren’t. My practice today is to simply pray for those people, that their souls will still be redeemed and they will know peace. It’s really the best you can do.

– Break the stigma. One of the friends left behind in this latest tragedy has already done something that honors her friend’s life: She went on Facebook and directed people toward the American Association of Suicidology website, specifically the page on knowing the warning signs. That’s a great example of doing something to honor your friend’s memory instead of sitting around second guessing yourself. The best thing to do now is educate people on the disease so that sufferers can help themselves and friends and family can really be of service.

–On with your own life. Nobody will blame you for not being yourself for awhile. You have, after all, just experienced one of the worst tragedies there is. But try not to let it paralyze you. Life must go on. You have to get on with your work and be there for those around you.

Life can be a brutal thing. But it IS a beautiful thing.

Seize it.

Posted on

Give Veterans More Than Lip Service

People on Facebook and Twitter are honoring U.S. veterans with words of gratitude and awe. All well and good, but not nearly enough for the countless vets who suffer in silence.

Mood music:

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In so many ways, we continue to treat our veterans like shit. We let so many of them live on the streets, without proper shelter or medication for the mental illnesses they caught from watching comrades get ripped apart by shrapnel on the battlefield.

We look down at veterans every day as lazy, crazy, smelly vermin who prowl the streets scaring our children. We have no idea of what they’ve been through to get so scarred, and a lot of us don’t really care — even if we say we do.

Flashback: September, 2010:

 I’m walking the streets of Brooklyn on a beautiful night, and a guy comes up to me. He has a hole in his head where his left eye used to be and burn scars up and down one arm.

I’m smoking a cigar, so he approaches me for a light. He tells me he was maimed in Afghanistan during military service and asks for some change so he can get a train to somewhere. He tells me he’s in New York looking for work and was stranded without money.

I give him the change from my pocket and then he’s gone.

Is he telling the truth? I have no idea, and I don’t really care. He just looked like a guy in pain who needed a few quarters to survive the next few hours, and that’s all that mattered at the time.

Flashback: Late April, 2011:

I’m on Facebook one afternoon and I see a friend commenting that he’s disappointed that some of his friends have decided to “like” a page that makes fun of a fellow known in Haverhill, Mass., as Crazy Mike.

In any city there’s a guy like “Crazy Mike.” The stereotype is usually a long beard, ratty clothes and the fellow is usually living on the street. He talks aloud to no one in particular and falls asleep on playground equipment. People like to laugh at him.

A lot of these so-called crazy guys are homeless vets whose luck ran out somewhere between the battlefield and the hard re-entry into society.

After a few seconds of thinking this through (admittedly, a few seconds is never enough time to really think things through), my temper reaches full boil and I pound out a blog post called “Liking The Crazy Mike of Haverhill Page is Sad and Stupid.”

Discussion follows online, with a big question being if Crazy Mike was in Vietnam and, as a result, sick on the streets with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One reader insists he is indeed a veteran, and that other homeless people keep stealing his medication. Someone else says she knew the family fairly well, and that Mike is not a veteran. He’s simply a guy who has a serious mental illness.

To me, it doesn’t matter if he was in Vietnam or not. Instead, two realities have my mind spinning like a top on fire.

One is that a lot of people assume he is a veteran, but treat him like shit anyway.

Another thing is that there are a lot of homeless who ARE military veterans, and most days we don’t give them more than a few seconds of thought before we walk on by.

It’s almost as if we honor them on holidays to make ourselves feel better about being the assholes we often are.

I say this as a guy who is admittedly one of those assholes. I’ve made my share of fun of people like this, and in the rear-view mirror, looking back at my own struggle with mental illness, it makes me feel ashamed.  Back when fear, anxiety and addiction had me by the balls, I used to walk or drive the other way when these guys approached. It makes me the last guy on Earth who would be fit to judge others for poking fun at someone less fortunate.

It’s not just the homeless vets who get shafted every day. It’s also the ones who have managed to stay off the streets but need special medical attention. Every day, the system set up to help them fails them instead. Sometimes the intent is good, but the message doesn’t get out to those who need to know.

Here’s an example, courtesy of my friend Magen Hughes, who once volunteered for the Compensated Work Therapy (CWT) group:

What they do is they provide vocational therapy, training, etc. to veterans who are not only homeless, but also those who suffer from addictions of various kinds as well as mental disorders.

The group isn’t really well known (or at least, that was my impression while I was at the VA Hospital), so a lot of the veterans who could benefit from the vocational therapy are left continuing down the path that they’ve always known, no matter how destructive it may be. Or they are shoved in one of the psychiatric wards or the nursing home.

That was probably the most heart-breaking part about volunteering, was seeing that there was a service that could help them out, but no one either knew or cared enough to really do them any good. I vaguely recall even being chastised once when bringing up CWT to a nurse as an idea for one of the patients.

They didn’t think that there was a group like that at the VA and I shouldn’t be worrying about “adult stuff like that.”

Veterans need our undivided attention, every day. A holiday here and there is not enough.

Maybe we can start doing better by not ridiculing the guys that have to sleep in our playgrounds and town commons.

I count myself among those who need to do better.

I’ve driven past these guys many times. I don’t go to memorial services on Veteran’s Day like I should. I certainly didn’t adequately appreciate my grandfather’s valor when he was alive.

We all have work to do.