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By early 2014 I was 25 and had been in EMS for 9 years. This isn’t really where the story starts, but it’s when I realized something was wrong. I was in the middle of a crippling depression. My anxiety was off the charts. I was having frequent (and serious) thoughts of self-harm. I was literally hearing voices in my head telling me I was worthless, hopeless, that I should end it all. 

One day I was at the hospital off-loading a patient when it finally hit me that this isn’t normal. I called my insurance company from the ambulance bay to see if they covered therapy… they didn’t. Oh well I thought, I’ll just see my PCP and get some happy pills. Everyone else at work takes them. 

Meanwhile things got worse. The depression, the suicidal ideations, the anxiety… sleep disturbances so bad that I’d cry, whimper, scream, and even once tried to strangle my wife in my sleep. Flashbacks and intrusive thoughts. The voices were still there too. I’ll never forget just standing in another hospital's ambulance bay listening to all those terrible things about myself.

So I went to my primary care provider. She prescribed SSRIs, anxiety meds, and said I need to see a therapist to be evaluated for trauma exposure. So I bit the bullet (almost literally more than once, bad pun) and paid out of pocket to see my new therapist.

My therapist was, and is, absolutely awesome. Within about five minutes of walking into her office, I had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Ok, so now we know what’s wrong, right? Well more on that later too.

So long story short, a year of talk therapy, art therapy, and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and most of the trauma symptoms began improving. It would take years of therapy to mostly resolve them, yet crippling depression remained, often for months at a time. It’s also important to note that I was HEAVILY self medicating with alcohol for years, a process that was very difficult to unlearn.

But it wasn’t always that way. Sure, I’d struggled with episodes of depression and ideas of self harm since my teens. But I’d also felt normal, and even great, and I mean GREAT for weeks at a time! Grandiose ideas, plans, ambitions, weeks or even a month where the moon and stars seemed in reach!

So we kept cycling through every SSRI and SNRI in the book to try to break the depression. Nothing helped. Well therapy marginally helped. But the meds? They made me worse. Impulsive, enraged, irritable, not what they were meant to do.

Finally my therapist convinced me to see a psychiatrist. I had an inkling of what was wrong with me by this point, but I didn’t want to hear it. So far I had accumulated diagnoses of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and ADHD. I didn’t need to add to that list. But off to the psychiatrist I went. This was no cheap task- $750 out of pocket for the initial and $250 for every follow up was a price that would be a barrier to many, yet my hypertension was covered no questions asked.

When I got to his office, I was terrified. I sat in the waiting room and was called back. He asked a million questions, and the questions all had one answer: bipolar disorder. No ifs ands or buts. Out I walked with prescriptions for antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. I cried on the way home.

I thought my life was over. I’d lose my job, I’d get worse and lose my wife, I’d never be normal. My life was over. But I kept going to work and living with my secret shame, doing the best I could. 

Shortly after my diagnosis I had my first and only real problem. my psychiatrist had me on three drugs, an SNRI or SSRI, lithium, and onlanzepine. They didn’t play nice together. I developed serotonin syndrome at work and had to be transported to the hospital by ambulance. I spent two days there and am told I had many visitors. I remember almost nothing of this. I told people who asked I had too many energy drinks and too much coffee and got SVT. Some grains of truth… I was ashamed.

We played medication roulette for years. No more antidepressants though. But antipsychotics and mood stabilizers? We mixed it all up. Stimulants for the ADHD too. It wouldn’t be until 2022 that we’d perfect the cocktail. It also wouldn’t be until 2022 that I found a psych provider my insurance covered, and not until 2020 or so that therapy was covered by my insurance.

I had learned to drink as a coping mechanism for my mental illness. I knew I had a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, but I had no other way to cope. Even after things got better psychiatrically, I kept drinking, heavily, most days of the week. Finally I realized I was destroying my life. I swallowed my pride and told my wife I was done. I am an alcoholic. I told my closest friends too. With the support of these people, I took control of my life. I was no longer a slave to alcohol. I nearly lost everything to the bottle, but as of this writing, I am 7 months sober. Not a long time, but maybe by the time you read this, it will be 7 years!

I lived with the shame and guilt of secretly having mental illnesses for almost 10 years. Yet the truth is there’s no shame in it. Not to be immodest, but I’ve accomplished a hell of a lot in spite of my health issues. I’m a husband, a father, an educator; I graduated with a 4.0 and Suma Cum Laude with my Bachelors, and I’m a captain in one of the busiest EMS services in the nation. And I’d like to think I’ve done those things well.

- Ken