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41 Years

Some people get depressed on their birthday. Not me. The fact that I turn 41 today is a freak of nature. But a year into my forties, I know I have more cleaning up to do.

Mood music:

Item: When I was sick with the Crohn’s Disease as a kid, I lost a lot of blood and developed several side ailments. I’m told by my parents that the doctor’s were going to remove the colon more than once. It didn’t happen. They tell me I was closing in on death more than once. I doubt it was ever that serious. Either way, here I am.

Item: When the OCD was burning out of control, I often felt I’d die young. I was never suicidal, but I had a fatalistic view of things. I just assumed I wasn’t long for this world and I didn’t care. I certainly did a lot to slowly help the dying process along. That’s what addicts do. We feed the addiction compulsively knowing full well what the consequences will be.

When I was a prisoner to fear and anxiety, I really didn’t want to live long. I isolated myself. Fortunately, I never had the guts to do anything about it. And like I said, suicide was never an option.

I spent much of my 30s on the couch with a shattered back, and escaped with the TV. I was breathing, but I was also as good as dead some of the time.

I’ve watched others go before me at a young age. Michael. Sean. Even Peter. Lose the young people in your life often enough and you’ll start assuming you’re next.

When you live for yourself and don’t put faith in God, you’re not really living. When it’s all about you, there no room to let all the other life in. So the soul shrivels and hardens. I’ve been there.

I also had a strange fear of current events and was convinced at one point that the world would burn in a nuclear holocaust before I hit 30. That hasn’t happened yet.

So here I am at 41, and it’s almost comical that I’m still here.

I’m more grateful than you could imagine for the turn of events my life has taken in the last six years.

I’ve learned to stop over-thinking and manage the OCD. When you learn to stop over-thinking, a lot of things that used to be daunting become a lot easier. You also find yourself in a lot of precious moments that were always there. But you didn’t notice them because you were sick with worry.

I notice them now, and I am Blessed far beyond what I probably deserve.

I have a career that I love.

I have the best wife on Earth and two boys that teach me something new every day.

I have many, many friends who have helped me along in more ways than they’ll ever know.

I have my 12-Step program and I’m not giving in to the worst of my addictions.

Most importantly, I have God in my life. When you put your faith in Him, there’s a lot less to be afraid of. Aging is one of the first things you stop worrying about.

So here I am at 41. feeling a lot better about myself than I did at 31. In fact, 31 was one of the low points.

But I’d be in denial if I told you everything was perfect beyond perfect. I wouldn’t tell you that anyway, because I’ve always thought that perfection was a bullshit concept. That makes it all the more ironic and comical that OCD would be the life-long thorn in my side.

I just recently quit smoking, and I’m still missing the hell out of that vice. I haven’t gone on a food binge in nearly three years, but there are still days where I’m not sure I’ve made the best choices; those days where my skin feels just a little too loose and flabby.

I still go to my meetings, but there are many days where I’d rather do anything but go to a meeting. I go because I have to, but I don’t always want to.

And while I have God in my life, I still manage to be an asshole to Him a lot of the time.

At 41, I’m still very much the work in progress. The scars are merely the scaffolding and newly inserted steel beams propping me up.

I don’t know what comes next, but I have much less fear about the unknown.

And so I think WILL have a happy birthday.

OCD Diaries

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When Playing It Safe Makes Things Worse

I had coffee with a friend from the security industry yesterday. I thought I was coming to offer feedback on something having to do with the profession. Then he told me about a mental-emotional problem.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4DA95pyBe6QORPGvTEuMWQ]

He told me he had a bunch of medical tests and they discovered that a small corner of his brain doesn’t work as well as it should. The result is that his short-term memory frequently takes a dive.

There are far worse problems to have. But his main concern is that it’s keeping his career from going where he wants it to.

We went back and forth about whether he should make his condition public or whether he should pursue other medical options.

As I sipped my iced Starbucks it became clear that something else was going on.

His biggest problem, I discovered and told him, is that he’s held back by fear — fear of what might happen if his short-term memory acted up in the midst of a job he really wanted to be doing.

He admitted that his recent career moves have involved a lot of playing it safe, doing things where there’s the least opportunity for failure at the hands of his mental tick.

I’ve been down this road before. And you know what? Playing it safe never helps. In fact, it just makes things worse.

Several years ago, when it became clear to me that my brain didn’t work normally, fear engulfed me until my self esteem was reduced to an ash pile. I held back in my work as night editor of The Eagle-Tribune. I tried playing it safe, never going toe to toe during disagreements with other editors.

Then I decided that the solution was to get out of there and find something less stressful to do. I opted to go back to straight reporting and went to TechTarget. Fortunately, the job turned out to be far more challenging than I expected. I realized this right at the time I decided to tackle my mental illness head on.

Luckily, my boss was a nurturing soul who was willing to let me go for the throat and get better. Miraculously, my work didn’t suffer. In the years to come, in fact, my workmanship would get better.

Now I do a lot of stuff in my job that’s out of my comfort zone. I give talks in front of groups of people. I get on airplanes. I venture an opinion on topics that I know will draw heavy disagreement. I give my boss a hard time when I don’t agree about something.

A few years ago, the very idea of doing those things would have scared me into an emotional breakdown.

I’ve screwed up along the way. But I’m still here.

I do my job well enough, often enough. And the more I succeed, the more confident I get.

Had I played it safe because of the things that might have gone wrong because of my OCD and anxiety, I wouldn’t be doing what I love today.

It’s not worth worrying about the mistakes you might make. You WILL make mistakes. And most of the time, you’ll be the only one to notice.

When my kids worry about making mistakes, I play them some Def Leppard and remind them that a one-armed drummer makes mistakes, but that all you can hear is him driving the heartbeat of the song despite a missing limb.

He could have retired from music and that would have made his life worse.

But he took a chance and designed a drum kit that helped him get past his problem.

Call me overly idealistic. Tell me I’m blowing sunshine up your collective asses.

It’s what I believe. Because I’ve been down this road.

My life today is far from perfect. It can get messy at times.

But it beats the hell out of playing it safe.

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Fear and Self-Loathing in San Francisco

Just got to my hotel in Santa, Clara, Calif., with a few random memories shifting around in my head — memories that illustrate who I was and who I am now.

Mood music:

It was July 1991 and I was with Sean Marley on my first trip to the west coast. I didn’t really want to go because I was afraid of everything and everyone. But Sean was red h0t about the idea, and back then I was always out to impress the man.

So off we went, on a 10-day California trip that would take us as far north as Eureka and as far south as Los Angeles. We lived in the rental car the whole time except for L.A., where we stayed in a friend’s apartment.

I remember the plane going in for a landing. I looked out the window and saw the Bay Bridge below. It was a gorgeous sight from that height, with the bay glistening in the summer sun. I saw the same view this morning and felt warm and energized. Back then was different. I thought of the Bay Area earthquake two years before, with TV coverage that included a live shot of a piece of the bridge collapsing and a car driving off the newly created edge into the abyss.

I knew we’d be driving over that bridge at least twice.

Terror.

I was afraid of talking to strangers.  I was afraid to go to clubs at night for fear we might get mugged so far from home.

In L.A., we hooked up with a guy who used to live in the Point of Pines in Revere. I didn’t remember him, but he and Sean were tight as kids. Michael was his name. Michael took us to visit a couple of his friends who were living the stereotypical Hollywood lifestyle. They had a band, but sat in their cramped bungalow all day, surrounded by towers of empty beer cans and cigarette boxes, watching all the bad daytime TV they could feast their eyes on.

One of them asked me where we were from. The Boston area, I told him.

“Dude,” he said through the cloud of cigarette smoke encircling his head. “That’s a pretty long way from here.”

The statement filled me with more terror.

A pretty long way from here. From my safe place in the basement apartment at 22 Lynnway, Revere, Mass.

Terror.

That’s pretty much what the trip was. Sean ate it all up and had the time of his life, despite me.

I didn’t know back then that I suffered from OCD-induced fear and anxiety. I was still many years away from the therapy, medication and spiritual conversion. I had no idea what the 12 steps were when I was 21. Too bad, too, because I SHOULD have had the time of my life on that trip, too.

But that’s what fear does. It robs you blind. Robs you of everything that should make life worthwhile.

Thank God I’m done with that shit.

I’ve made this flight many times since then, always on business. But I’ve gotten the chance to enjoy the surroundings and experience the culture along the way.

In small steps, I’ve tried hard to make up for lost time. That gets me in trouble sometimes, because I forget to pace myself. That happened last time I was here in February, and my family paid the price.

Let’s see if I can do better this time.

And maybe one of these days, instead of coming here for work, I can come here for fun. Maybe Erin will live out of a rental car with me for 10 days.

What do you say, honey?

OCD Diaries

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Back Story Of THE OCD DIARIES

Since I’ve been adding new readers along the way, I always get questions about why I started this thing. I recently expanded the “about” section, and that’s a good starting point. But more of a back story is in order.

Mood music:

Before I started THE OCD DIARIES in December 2009 with a post about depression hitting me during the holidays, I had always toyed with the idea of doing this. The reason for wanting to was simple: The general public understands little about mental disorders like mine. People toss the OCD acronym around all the time, but to them it’s just the easy way of saying they have a Type-A personality.

Indeed, many Type-A people do have some form of OCD. But for a smaller segment of the population, myself included, it’s a debilitating disease that traps the sufferer in a web of fear, anxiety, and depression that leads to all kinds of addictive behavior. Which leads me to the next reason I wanted to do this.

My particular demons gave me a craving for anything that might dull the pain. For some it’s heroin or alcohol. I have gone through periods where I drank far too much, and I learned to like the various prescription pain meds a little too much. But the main addiction, the one that made my life completely unmanageable, was binge eating.

Most people refuse to acknowledge that as a legitimate addiction. The simple reason is that we all need food to survive and not the other things. Overeating won’t make you drunk or high, according to the conventional wisdom. In reality, when someone like me goes for a fix, it involves disgusting quantities of junk food that will literally leave you flopping around like any garden-variety junkie. Further evidence that this as an addiction lies in the fact that there’s a 12-Step program for compulsive over-eaters called Overeater’s Anonymous (OA). It’s essentially the same program as AA. I wanted to do my part to make people understand.

Did I worry that I might get fired from my job for outing myself like this? Sure. But something inside me was pushing me in this direction and I had to give in to my instincts. You could say it was a powerful OCD impulse that wasn’t going to quit until I did something about it.

I write a lot about my upbringing, my family and the daily challenges we all face because I still learn something each day about my condition and how I can always be better than I am. We all have things swirling around inside us that drive us to a certain kind of behavior, and covering all these things allows me to share what I’ve learned so others might find a way out of their own brand of Hell.

I’m nothing special.

Every one of us has a Cross to bear in life. Sometimes we learn to stand tall as we carry it. Other times we buckle under the weight and fall on our faces.

I just decided to be the one who talks about it.

Talking about it might help someone realize they’re not a freak and they’re not doomed to a life of pain.

If this helps one person, it’ll be worth it.

When I first started the blog, I laid out a back story so readers could see where I’ve been and how personal history affected my disorders. If you read the history, things I write in the present will probably make more sense.

With that in mind, I direct you to the following links:

The Long History of OCD

An OCD Christmas. The first entry, where I give an overview of how I got to crazy and found my way to sane.

The Bad Pill Kept Me from the Good Pill. How the drug Prednisone brought me to the brink, and how Prozac was part of my salvation.

The Crazy-Ass Guy in the Newsroom. Think you have troubles at work? You should see what people who worked with me went through.

The Freak and the Redhead: A Love Story. About the wife who saved my life in many ways.

Snowpocalypse and the Fear of Loss. The author remembers a time when fear of loss would cripple his mental capacities, and explains how he got over it — mostly.

The Ego OCD Built. The author admits to having an ego that sometimes swells beyond acceptable levels and that OCD is fuel for the fire. Go ahead. Laugh at him.

Fear Factor. The author describes years of living in a cell built by fear, how he broke free and why there’s no turning back.

Prozac Winter. The author discovers that winter makes his depression worse and that there’s a purely scientific explanation — and solution.

Have Fun with Your Therapist. Mental-illness sufferers often avoid therapists because the stigma around these “shrinks” is as thick as that of the disease. The author is here to explain why you shouldn’t fear them.

The Engine. To really understand how mental illness happens, let’s compare the brain to a machine.

Rest Redefined. The author finds that he gets the most relaxation from the things he once feared the most.

Outing Myself. The author on why he chose to “out” himself despite what other people might think.

Why Being a People Pleaser is Dumb. The author used to try very hard to please everybody and was hurt badly in the process. Here’s how he broke free and kept his soul intact.

The Addiction and the Damage Done

The Most Uncool Addiction. In this installment, the author opens up about the binge-eating disorder he tried to hide for years — and how he managed to bring it under control.

Edge of a Relapse. The author comes dangerously close to a relapse, but lives to fight another day.

The 12 Steps of Christmas. The author reviews the 12 Steps of Recovery and takes a personal inventory.

How to Play Your Addictions Like a Piano. The author admits that when an obsessive-compulsive person puts down the addiction that’s most self-destructive, a few smaller addictions rise up to fill the void. But what happens when the money runs out?

Regulating Addictive Food: A Lesson in Futility. As an obsessive-compulsive binge eater, the author feels it’s only proper that he weigh in on the notion that regulating junk food might help. Here’s why the answer is probably not.

The Liar’s Disease. The author reveals an uncomfortable truth about addicts like himself: We tend to have trouble telling the truth.

Portable Recovery. Though addiction will follow the junkie anywhere in the world, the author has discovered that recovery is just as portable.

Revere (Experiences with Addiction, Depression and Loss During The Younger Years)

Bridge Rats and Schoolyard Bullies. The author reviews the imperfections of childhood relationships in search of all his OCD triggers. Along the way, old bullies become friends and he realizes he was pretty damn stupid back then.

Lost Brothers. How the death of an older brother shaped the Hell that arrived later.

Marley and Me. The author describes the second older brother whose death hit harder than that of the first.

The Third Brother. Remembering Peter Sugarman, another adopted brother who died too early — but not before teaching the author some important lessons about life.

Revere Revisited.

Lessons from Dad. The author has learned some surprising lessons from Dad on how to control one’s mental demons.

The Basement. A photo from the old days in Revere spark some vivid flashbacks.

Addicted to Feeling Good. To kick off Lent, the author reflects on some of his dumber quests to feel good.

The lasting Impact of Crohn’s Disease. The author has lived most of his life with Crohn’s Disease and has developed a few quirks as a result.

The Tire and the Footlocker. The author opens up an old footlocker under the stairs and finds himself back in that old Revere basement.

Child of  Metal

How Metal Saved Me. Why Heavy Metal music became a critical OCD coping tool.

Insanity to Recovery in 8 Songs or Less. The author shares some videos that together make a bitchin’ soundtrack for those who wrestle with mental illness and addiction. The first four cover the darkness. The next four cover the light.

Rockit Records Revisited. The author has mentioned Metal music as one of his most important coping tools for OCD and related disorders. Here’s a look at the year he got one of the best therapy sessions ever, simply by working in a cramped little record store.

Metal to Stick in Your Mental Microwave.

Man of God

The Better Angels of My Nature. Why I let Christ in my life.

The Rat in the Church Pew. The author has written much about his Faith as a key to overcoming mental illness. But as this post illustrates, he still has a long way to go in his spiritual development.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. The author goes to Church and comes away with a strange feeling.

Running from Sin, Running With Scissors. The author writes an open letter to the RCIA Class of 2010 about Faith as a journey, not a destination. He warns that addiction, rage and other bad behavior won’t disappear the second water is dropped over their heads.

Forgiveness is a Bitch. Seeking and giving forgiveness is essential for someone in recovery. But it’s often seen as a green light for more abuse.

Pain in the Lent. The author gives a progress report on the Lenten sacrifices. It aint pretty.

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RSA 2005 (Fool in the Rain)

As I cover RSA Conference 2011, I can’t help but think back to my first RSA trip in 2005. This isn’t about security trends then and now. It’s about my state of mind back then.

Mood music (because I was listening to this one a lot back then):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGshAiRp64Q&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

I had been writing for SearchSecurity.com for less than a year, and I was in the middle stages of an emotional breakdown. I just didn’t know it at the time.

Here’s what I do remember:

–Back then I was so afraid of the world that the very thought of getting on an airplane to cover this event made me stagger. I had several anxiety attacks in the month leading up to the trip.

–The plane ride was rough, and I had a four-hour layover in Denver. By the time I got to San Francisco, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

—Pleasing my bosses and proving to them that I was the golden child was everything to me at that point, and I approached the conference with a “produce 10 stories or die trying” attitude that was wrapped in the fear of falling short.

–It rained constantly during the entire trip, and another thing I didn’t realize then was that bleak weather fueled my depression.

–I was sick for most of the trip. On the first full morning I woke up with a 102-degree fever and wondered how I would get out of bed. What got me up was a desire to spend as little time in that hotel as possible. The place was all concrete and brick, and I remember being terrified of what would become of the place in an earthquake. I wrote more than a couple stories that day.

–I was listening to Motley Crue’s comeback compilation, “Red White and Crue” nonstop for comfort.

–Once I got home, I was emotionally and physically sicker than ever. And in response, I binged and binged until I had packed on nearly 30 extra pounds.

That period was the lowest of the low.

In hindsight it was an important year in my growth as a human being, because I was finally starting to deal with the fact that something was seriously wrong with me and that I had to do something before I tore myself and my family apart. 

Today, I’m staring out a rainy window from the 14th floor of the hotel I’m staying in. The rain still has a depressive effect, but my program of recovery is keeping it manageable. My eating is strict and clean, and while I have done a lot of writing so far for the job, I’m not doing it to please the masters. I’m doing it because this is what I do and I love it.

I do miss my wife and kids, but that’s always the case when I’m away.

In any event, I’m in a much better place now than I was six years ago.

I’m grateful to God and everyone around me who makes it possible.

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Snake on the Plane

Tomorrow I get on another plane to another city — this time San Francisco. It’s time to go cover the RSA and B-Sides security events. I used to be a raving lunatic the day before a flight. Not anymore. Still, I feel uneasy this morning.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwzGvMwO-yg&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

My mind has been raw all week for a multitude of reasons. Mostly, it’s a case of winter getting to me. The sun is setting later each day, which is good for me, but the cold and snow have done their damage and plunged me into a depression.

I’ve pushed myself hard with work and at home I’ve been a slug. I forget to do simple things and I just want to collapse on the couch. I sigh a lot and swear even more.

It’s not fair to my family. But I can’t seem to help it.

On a positive note, I’ve kept my recovery intact. That’s real progress, because this kind of mindset used to make me binge my brains out. Those days were so much worse.

That doesn’t make me satisfied about my current state of mind.

On one hand, I’m excited for the coming trip. I love the fast and furious writing and the copious networking that gets done. I love seeing friends I usually only see on Twitter and Facebook.

On the other hand, I feel terrible about abandoning my family for four days.

It’ll all work out. I know this. But the uneasiness is still there.

I don’t dive into bouts of self-hatred in moments like this like I used to, and that’s very good. I’ve learned to see this mood for what it is: A mild-to-moderate depression that hits after a serious lack of sunlight. Duncan suffers from it, too, though not in the same ways.

It’s just something we have to keep working on.

The depression hit me later this time than it usually does in winter. The happy lamp, proper Prozac dosage and program of recovery have served me well. But I’m starting to realize I’ll probably never be able to go an entire winter without feeling this way.

Tough shit. That’s my cross to carry, and I just have to keep getting better at managing the load without complaint and without becoming useless to those around me.

My Faith will see me through. 

My wife and kids will see me through, even if they’re not happy with my impending travel at the moment.

The 12 Steps of Recovery will see me through.

And once I get to San Francisco, the work at hand will see me through.

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Never Trust a Sushi Place Built into a CVS

Last night was one of those dinner experiences that tests someone in my type of addiction recovery program.

The scene: I’ve just checked into my hotel room in Washington D.C., where I’m attending the ShmooCon security conference. I venture downstairs in search of dinner.

I run into a group of friends from the security industry and they invite me out with them for dinner. I’m glad to see them and I’m hungry, so I accept.

I have a pleasant 1/2-mile walk to the restaurant. After 14 hours riding an RV through five states, it’s good to stretch my limbs.

We arrive at the location to see a CVS drug store. On second glance, the restaurant is literally a hole in the side of CVS’s wall. But we’ve eaten at odder places, so in we go.

They keep us waiting what seems like a long time for a table that looks like it’s been clean and ready for awhile now. OK, maybe they have their reasons. And I am enjoying the company I’m with.

But it’s been a long day and I’m really starting to fade. Dinner after 8 is risky when you’ve been up since 4 a.m. One friend notes that I’m quieter than usual.

We finally sit down and I look at the menu. There seems to be very little I can eat with my food program, but I chalk it up to not being well versed with sushi. I play it safe and go for a pork dish, because it seems like the best choice at the time. It’s waaay after 9 p.m. before they put a narrow plate in front of me with two tiny skewers of pork and a bowl of rice.

Meanwhile, I look at some of the sushi dishes my friends have ordered, and I realize some of those selections would have been a much better fit for my program. I fidget with my phone, because in a situation like that I get particularly fidgety.

I sit there feeling like the dope that I am at that moment. I’m also pissed because it got too late to call my wife, who I hadn’t seen since the night before. When I’m away, we almost never miss catch-up time on the phone.

I did what I needed to do: Paid for my part of the meal and got out of there as fast as I could.

The night ended with my program intact. But it was a reminder that when you can only eat certain things, you have to plan ahead.

A wise person once told me that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

I’ll add a new one for you: If you see a restaurant built into the side of a drug store, walk past it and choose someplace else.

The night still ended on a high note. Like I said, I enjoyed the company of my dinner companions. I got to run into some old friends later on in the hotel bar.

And I lived to fight another day.

 

Sometimes, that’s how I roll.

But it was a close call for a reformed compulsive binge eater.

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Somewhere in New Jersey

Last time I made the drive from Boston to D.C., we got lost in New Jersey (See: A New Jersey State of Rage).

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6_bp97glBw&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

This time I’m not driving, so we’ll probably be fine this time.

We’re 8-plus hours into the journey. It was a slow start with the snowstorm, but we seem to be going at a good clip now. Google Maps says we have about 5 hours to go until we reach the site of ShmooCon 2011.

There are eight of us on the RV. Nobody is throwing punches yet. In fact, we’re all getting along nicely. 

For lunch we stopped at a McDonald’s. This scared me a bit, because back when my binge eating was out of control, that was the drive-thru of choice. I ordered a salad with grilled chicken dumped haphazardly on top. No bread.

So far, the sobriety and abstinence are intact.

I’ve let the OCD run wild on my security blog, though. Six posts since leaving Boston. I’m enjoying myself writing, though.

Writing is something I remain happy to binge on.

Time for a nap.

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We Have Lift-off

Aboard the ShmooBus en route to Washington D.C. for the ShmooCon security conference. In a snowstorm. What could possibly go wrong?

So far, so good, though. I got shoveled out and my friend Jack Daniel got the RV to me. Let this character-building exercise begin!

And to think a few years ago this type of adventure would have reduced me to a pile of water. If you live with fear, anxiety and depression, let this be proof that you can get past it and live again. 

Damn.

Now I’m starting to sound like one of those bullshit late-night infomercials.

I better get offline for now.

Seize the day.

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Midwest Center for Fraud & Bullshit

Cleaning out the trunk of my car yesterday, I came across a stack of cassette tapes from a period in my life when I was so desperate I’d spend stupid sums of money on anything to remove my fear and anxiety.

These tapes were part of a program that cost me some $450. Each tape, sold by the Midwest Center for Stress & Anxiety, is designed to help people learn the skills to defeat anxiety and depression without medication.

images

I ordered the so-called free trial in 2006 after seeing all the late-night TV infomercials with Lucinda Bassett, mastermind of the program. I worked the program diligently. But overall, the program wasn’t even close to what I needed.

I called the Midwest Center before the free trial period was up to tell them I’d be sending the tapes and DVDs back. No go, an impatient phone rep told me. They had already charged the card number I gave them. No refund.

Meanwhile, I received a package of vitamins in the mail with ingredients designed to reduce stress and balance the brain chemistry. At first it struck me as odd, since the concept on paper was a lot like other pills the center typically railed against. They weren’t anti-depressant-caliber pills like Prozac. They were just vitamins. I saw them for what they were: an expensive placebo.

I never asked for the vitamins. Yet there they were, and they were charging me extra for something I didn’t order or want.

The phone reps basically told me too bad, they had already charged my card and there were no refunds. I should have read the fine print.

So, the program to attack anxiety and depression simply made those things rage within me even worse than before.

At some point, I dumped the tapes in a box in my trunk, forgot about them and moved on. I found more lasting tools to manage my OCD and the resulting fear, anxiety and depression, and that was the end of it.

When I found the tapes, I chucked them in the trash along with the rest of the rubbish I was clearing out of the car.

When I came back inside, I found myself looking up articles about the Midwest Center and found some surprising items.

First, I found obituaries for Lucinda Bassett’s husband, David Bassett, co-principal of the self-help empire. The various reports were that he committed suicide in June 2008. Having lived through the horror of loved ones committing suicide, I’m reluctant to say anything bad here. I feel badly for Lucinda Bassett. To lose someone you love that way is one of the worst things you could ever go through.

Still, I couldn’t help but find it sadly, painfully ironic that THIS GUY would end his own life.

Here’s something I found that was written shortly after Bassett’s death. The author is STEVE SALERNO, author/essayist, musician, teacher, and blogger. (Check out his SHAMblog) He wrote:

This past June 7 (2008), 53-year-old David Bassett walked onto a California beach and ended his life with a shotgun. This took place not far from the home he shared with his wife, Lucinda. If the names sound vaguely familiar, it’s because David and Lucinda Bassett were principals in the Midwest Center for Stress & Anxiety.Not a few of those who left their thoughts were refugees from the Center’s in-house discussion forum, where their critical remarks had been expunged or edited; a few claimed to have been banned altogether. Collectively, they seemed to feel they’d been abused, if not conned. The gist was that the Center had used misleading claims and credentials to charge them a lot of money for programs that didn’t work (or at least hadn’t worked for them). To be fair, a number of Center apologists also weighed in, and for a while we had a spirited, thought-provoking give-and-take going.A prospective customer might reasonably ask: If the Center’s programs can’t even prevent one of the Center’s owners from killing himself…?

I also found a site known as the Complaint Board, where a fellow by the name of Alfred logged his complaints about the Bassett empire:

Lucinda and David Bassett flood late night infomercial TV with their overpriced Attacking Anxiety and Depression schlock program. They advertise a ’30-day risk free trial’ for just $9.95, the so called ‘shipping/Handling charge’ (inflated as any typical infomercial ripoff), the hook being that the S/H charge is all you pay for the 30 day ‘trial period’.Then when you aren’t magically cured by this collection of cassette tape in 30 days, send it back with no obligation to pay the $75.00 a month that they bill your credit card for the next 6-7 months. Do not believe this CRAP for a minute. They start ripping you off immediately with the inflated shipping charge and then start removing your money 30 days from the ORDER DATE which typically is 10-14 days BEFORE the 30 day trial period STARTS. By the time the ’30 day trial’ is over they have already taken the first FULL payment of $75.00 (+ tax) by 2 WEEKS, even when you decide you don’t want to buy this craprogram. One of Lucy’s top-secret cures is to ‘Drink 8 glasses of water everyday’ and ‘quit smoking and drinking’ DUH!! Gee for such wisdom it only costs 450 bucks! If these amateur Pyschobees had a grain of credibility would they operate so Don Lapre-like? It will take weeks to get your refund (if ever) A wiser approach would be to work for the Bassett’s. Then you can buy the ‘program’ for $20 and save yourself $425 just 90% off the ripoff price they charge everyone else.

That sounded a lot like my experiences with the program.

To be fair, this program probably has worked for people. I’ve seen plenty of positive reviews over the years. It’s just that there is no one size fits all. What works for one won’t work for another. It’s the same with medication. What worked for me won’t necessarily work for the next guy or gal.

There’s always that roll of the dice.

I just don’t think it should cost someone $450 to handle the dice.

Here’s the real problem, though:

You can tell a person to read the fine print, but a depressed, anxious person isn’t thinking about the fine print when they’re up at 3 a.m. watching those infomercials.

A person like that is desperate, and when they see a TV program telling them how easily the program will work in their lives, they’re not thinking about the fine print. They hear the words “free trial” and dash for the phone with credit card in hand. They figure the credit card number is just a placeholder. They don’t expect to actually be charged. Sure, they’re engaged in stupid thinking. But when you’re mentally and emotionally sick, stupid thinking is a way of life.

That’s what this program is: A money-sucker that preys on desperate people.

The lesson here is that you can’t go for anything packaged as a quick fix.

Nothing — and I mean NOTHING — will cure you in 15 weeks or even 30.

Getting truly well is a process that takes years. And you are never cured.

That’s my personal experience, anyway.