Okay I've been on this forum long enough and written enough articles now that a good amount of you know me either on a casual level or a personal one. I decided to write this topic on our amazing Star Trek forum because I feel many of us have made a close bond with some of the people on here and it seems more fitting to talk about such a sensitive topic with people who we can trust will accept us and understand. I know this is a topic that can get very personal and emotional for a lot of people so if you are not comfortable please don't feel like you NEED to tell your story. I don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable at all! With all of the prerequisites taken care of I would like to start this forum with my own personal story.
When I was six years old my father walked out on my mother and me. I was little so I knew nothing of what was transpiring other than the fact that my father wasn’t around anymore. I remember my mom packing up our stuff and telling me we were going to move to Maryland to take care of my grandmother who had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. Once there we moved my grandmother in with us and my mom married her second husband Raul. After a few months of living in Maryland my father and I reestablished a relationship and he began to become part of my life again. Pretty soon I was flying out to Nashville to visit him and after a while he decided to move back to Maryland to be closer to me. We began seeing each other every week and pretty soon things felt like they were back to normal. Then something happened. After nearly ten years without a drink, my father, who was a prior alcoholic, relapsed. He began drinking every day.
I remember one day when I was a kid shortly after his relapse, I was visiting him and I had said something to him that upset him. He went into his room and didn’t come out. After about two hours I went in to check on him and saw him in bed with an empty twelve pack next to him. He was sobbing hysterically and started saying that I didn’t love him and there was no point in him even being around anymore. I kept trying to tell him I loved him but he just kept saying over and over that I would be better off if he wasn’t around. Pretty soon after that episode he decided he wanted to move back to Nashville to pursue his music career. I didn’t understand why he would just leave me again. I thought maybe I had done something wrong or disappointed him somehow. This really affected me and I started getting really sad.
When I was about ten years old my mom took me to a doctor. She complained that I was exhibiting “odd behavior” and was concerned for me. She said I wasn’t behaving like a typical ten year old and she didn’t know what was wrong. The doctor asked me a few questions and referred my mother to a counselor in town. After a few weeks of monitoring and counseling sessions I was diagnosed with clinical depression. As a ten year old I had no idea what that meant, all I knew was that my mom was visibly upset by whatever was going on with me. Since I was ten years old my mom decided to forgo prescription treatment as to not disrupt my growth as a child. Instead she chose to have me seen by a psychiatrist once a week for treatment.
The woman I saw when I was a child was kind and caring and I felt like she genuinely cared about me. I remember she used to take me and a small group of kids from school, who she also talked to, on little field trips on the weekend. These weekend trips would almost make up for the pain I felt from not having my father around. Things were going great for a while but about the time I was eleven I started having some trouble with kids in school. I wasn’t a very cute kid, I wore large glasses was oddly proportioned and had a haircut that was as short as some of the guys in my school. I dealt with it for a while, but when I was about thirteen he bullying took a darker turn.
I was in middle school and one of the girls that used to bully me asked if she could talk to me alone. She said she wanted to apologize for the way she had been treating me and wanted to clear the air. She asked if I could meet her in the choir room at lunch so we could talk. I agreed but when I got to the choir room she was in there with a few other girls, they cornered me and started saying how worthless and dorky I was, then she hit me. She punched me in the face a few times and got me on the ground. She continued to beat me up while all the other girls watched and laughed. After she was done the girl scratched her face and arms so it appeared that I attacked her and ran to the teacher with her friends. The teachers believed her but they also knew I wasn’t a bad kid so with no clue as to the truth we were both suspended for a few days. I returned to school hoping things would slowly get better but they only got worse.
By the time I was in my first year of high school I had almost no friends and spent most of my days alone or at the rec center practicing my figure skating. I was the quintessential loner. After a while I started seeking out people in school who were also outcasts and I eventually landed in a bad crowd of kids. I began cutting my arms and sneaking out at night to get high. Anything that would lessen the pain I had felt my whole life. One day my mom caught me cutting my wrists and took me back to a psychiatrist for counseling. I spent the next two years of high school being bullied by a large group of kids in my school. These attacks would range anywhere from verbal abuse to getting pushed into walls or lockers. By the time I was in my junior year of high school my mom decided to move us to Florida near my father and to a new school.
My new school was great. I had friends I felt like I belonged, my grades were improving and best of all my relationship with my father had been restored. We began hanging out every day and spending a large amount of time together. We would go to the beach every day, and every night I would go to the bar and hear him play music. Things in Florida were going great and with graduation right around the corner I decided to join the military. I graduated high school in the spring of 2012 and by the end of the summer I had enlisted. The first few months in the Navy were great. I graduated boot camp, got sent to VA beach for my technical training and made tons of friends along the way. Everything was going absolutely great until the Christmas of 2012.
I will never forget the day as long as I live. It was about one in the morning and I was lying in my barracks bed watching “Doctor Who.” I had a test the next day and was supposed to go to sleep early but I had a sinking feeling in my stomach and I couldn’t fall asleep. At about one thirty I got a call from an unknown number. When I picked up the phone there was a man on the other line who identified himself as a bay county officer. He asked if my name was Brianna and if I knew a man by the name of Jerry. I answered yes that he was my father. Then the man on the other end then said the words that I will never forget until the day I die. “I’m sorry but Jerry has passed away.” I was very calm about it on the phone. I asked what the cause of death was and he said it was still being determined. I thanked him for his call and hung up the phone. When I ended the call I broke down into a cry that was so crippling that I threw up. My roommate woke up and couldn’t get me up off of the ground, so she ended up carrying me downstairs to the sailor on duty. Within the hour I had discovered that my father had died by suicide.
I returned to Florida to bury my father and spent the next few days with my mother and sister. When I returned to my technical school I started getting harassed by a fellow sailor for how I dealt with my father’s death. She said I wasn’t emotional enough so I must not have cared about him. She said my visiting home was an excuse to get both the holiday leave periods, along with other statements as to how I conduced myself on my trip home. She harassed me for the next six months about being weak, saying death is part of the military and I need to get over it. These harassments went on outside of school too. I received harassing messages from her on Facebook and text messages on the weekends. It got so bad that eventually the instructors were called in to rectify the situation. After nine months of harassment I was finally graduating from the school and getting moved to my permanent duty station.
When I got the orders to Nevada I was excited, a new place new faces, and a fresh start. When I got to the command I realized it was an isolated station and it would be tough to find people to befriend out here. When I checked into my office I was introduced to a few coworkers and not five minutes into my first real day in the navy I got cornered by a group of girls I worked with about how I looked. They made fun of my hair and my makeup and said I was trying too hard, that I wouldn’t make any friends. Having dealt with bullying before I decided to just go to my chain of command and let them know what was going on. The laughed off my situation and put a target on my head. For the next year I dealt with constant harassment from not just coworkers but leadership as well.
There was one day in particular that was especially bad and I left work in tears. I got home went to my bed with a bottle of pills laid down in bed and pored all of the pills into my hand. I looked at them for about an hour before I decided to put them back. I woke up the next day tried to brush myself off and move on but I couldn’t. I was miserable. I wanted to leave one way or another, but I put on a happy face and went about my days as usual. A few months later I got sent to Hawaii for three months for the RIMPAC exercise. I enjoyed the experience and made a lot of new friends but the best part was when I came back to Nevada, we had gotten a new chain of command. I thought things would really get better finally and they did for a very long time, but one day a rumor got spread about me and I got confronted by my chain of command. I sat there stone faced while they yelled at me and when they were done asked me how I felt about what I did. I turned to them and said “I didn’t do what you are accusing me of, but if I did, it would be because I wake up every day and dread getting out of bed.”
That was a wake up call for both me and them. It showed them for the first time that I was unhappy and it showed me for the first time just how much my depression affected me. I was escorted to medical after the meeting where they asked if I could be seen by the psychologist at medical (or the “mental health doctor” as the referred to him). I sat down and waited to be seen and a few minutes later I was greeted by a smiling man in a while lab coat. I tried to find his rank so I could address him properly since he was an officer but I couldn’t. He noticed and said just to call him Jake. After I told him about what had been going on he said that it sounded like I had clinical depression and asked if I had known I had it, if so how long. I told him yes I was diagnosed when I was ten. When asked if I had ever received medical treatment for it in those eleven years I said no and became surprised. He asked why I hadn’t gotten treatment when I joined the military. To which I responded that we were told we couldn’t be treated for depression in my specific job field due to us being a “security risk.” He laughed and told me that was a lie. I was sitting there pissed, because for the first two years of my military career I could have been treated for my depression but everyone was so naive to the treatment options that they just assumed you couldn’t. I told him I was comfortable with being put on antidepressants for a while to test them out. He concurred and prescribed me Effexor.
If you have never been on antidepressants, the beginning stage is the worst. You get shaky, loose appetite and want to scream at everyone. It is a rough two weeks but once those symptoms stop it’s like a rainbow shooting over your head. I felt happy for the first time in almost ten years. I felt like I had killed a beast that the slowly killing me piece by piece and it was as easy as just asking for help. If I had known that I would have gotten treatment years ago. I didn’t have to feel depressed those last two years, I didn’t have to grab the pill bottle and think what if, I didn’t have to sit through every day thinking about how I could make it one more day. I could have just asked for help and my problems would have been solved.
Since then my depression has almost completely gone into remission and I have felt happy for the first time in almost eleven years. I no longer dread getting out of bed and I have the energy to do things I enjoy. In fact if was thanks to my seeking help that I joined this forum. I was told to find an online community of people with a common interest so I could have stuff to occupy my time when I wasn't working. All of these things have made a huge difference and being part of this community has helped a lot too! It's nice to be able to interact with people who share a common interest, in a way that is always positive!
So I say to you now if you or a loved one suffers for depression and is going untreated or if you see a decline in their behavior please talk to them. I wish every day that I could go back to Christmas of 2012 and tell my father how much I love him. Maybe then he could have gotten the treatment he needed his whole life.
If you have a similar story you are comfortable sharing, please feel free. If you aren't comfortable sharing that is completely okay too! Again I know this is a sensitive topic for this forum site but there's no better place to discus sensitive issues than with people who you are comfortable with.
When I was six years old my father walked out on my mother and me. I was little so I knew nothing of what was transpiring other than the fact that my father wasn’t around anymore. I remember my mom packing up our stuff and telling me we were going to move to Maryland to take care of my grandmother who had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. Once there we moved my grandmother in with us and my mom married her second husband Raul. After a few months of living in Maryland my father and I reestablished a relationship and he began to become part of my life again. Pretty soon I was flying out to Nashville to visit him and after a while he decided to move back to Maryland to be closer to me. We began seeing each other every week and pretty soon things felt like they were back to normal. Then something happened. After nearly ten years without a drink, my father, who was a prior alcoholic, relapsed. He began drinking every day.
I remember one day when I was a kid shortly after his relapse, I was visiting him and I had said something to him that upset him. He went into his room and didn’t come out. After about two hours I went in to check on him and saw him in bed with an empty twelve pack next to him. He was sobbing hysterically and started saying that I didn’t love him and there was no point in him even being around anymore. I kept trying to tell him I loved him but he just kept saying over and over that I would be better off if he wasn’t around. Pretty soon after that episode he decided he wanted to move back to Nashville to pursue his music career. I didn’t understand why he would just leave me again. I thought maybe I had done something wrong or disappointed him somehow. This really affected me and I started getting really sad.
When I was about ten years old my mom took me to a doctor. She complained that I was exhibiting “odd behavior” and was concerned for me. She said I wasn’t behaving like a typical ten year old and she didn’t know what was wrong. The doctor asked me a few questions and referred my mother to a counselor in town. After a few weeks of monitoring and counseling sessions I was diagnosed with clinical depression. As a ten year old I had no idea what that meant, all I knew was that my mom was visibly upset by whatever was going on with me. Since I was ten years old my mom decided to forgo prescription treatment as to not disrupt my growth as a child. Instead she chose to have me seen by a psychiatrist once a week for treatment.
The woman I saw when I was a child was kind and caring and I felt like she genuinely cared about me. I remember she used to take me and a small group of kids from school, who she also talked to, on little field trips on the weekend. These weekend trips would almost make up for the pain I felt from not having my father around. Things were going great for a while but about the time I was eleven I started having some trouble with kids in school. I wasn’t a very cute kid, I wore large glasses was oddly proportioned and had a haircut that was as short as some of the guys in my school. I dealt with it for a while, but when I was about thirteen he bullying took a darker turn.
I was in middle school and one of the girls that used to bully me asked if she could talk to me alone. She said she wanted to apologize for the way she had been treating me and wanted to clear the air. She asked if I could meet her in the choir room at lunch so we could talk. I agreed but when I got to the choir room she was in there with a few other girls, they cornered me and started saying how worthless and dorky I was, then she hit me. She punched me in the face a few times and got me on the ground. She continued to beat me up while all the other girls watched and laughed. After she was done the girl scratched her face and arms so it appeared that I attacked her and ran to the teacher with her friends. The teachers believed her but they also knew I wasn’t a bad kid so with no clue as to the truth we were both suspended for a few days. I returned to school hoping things would slowly get better but they only got worse.
By the time I was in my first year of high school I had almost no friends and spent most of my days alone or at the rec center practicing my figure skating. I was the quintessential loner. After a while I started seeking out people in school who were also outcasts and I eventually landed in a bad crowd of kids. I began cutting my arms and sneaking out at night to get high. Anything that would lessen the pain I had felt my whole life. One day my mom caught me cutting my wrists and took me back to a psychiatrist for counseling. I spent the next two years of high school being bullied by a large group of kids in my school. These attacks would range anywhere from verbal abuse to getting pushed into walls or lockers. By the time I was in my junior year of high school my mom decided to move us to Florida near my father and to a new school.
My new school was great. I had friends I felt like I belonged, my grades were improving and best of all my relationship with my father had been restored. We began hanging out every day and spending a large amount of time together. We would go to the beach every day, and every night I would go to the bar and hear him play music. Things in Florida were going great and with graduation right around the corner I decided to join the military. I graduated high school in the spring of 2012 and by the end of the summer I had enlisted. The first few months in the Navy were great. I graduated boot camp, got sent to VA beach for my technical training and made tons of friends along the way. Everything was going absolutely great until the Christmas of 2012.
I will never forget the day as long as I live. It was about one in the morning and I was lying in my barracks bed watching “Doctor Who.” I had a test the next day and was supposed to go to sleep early but I had a sinking feeling in my stomach and I couldn’t fall asleep. At about one thirty I got a call from an unknown number. When I picked up the phone there was a man on the other line who identified himself as a bay county officer. He asked if my name was Brianna and if I knew a man by the name of Jerry. I answered yes that he was my father. Then the man on the other end then said the words that I will never forget until the day I die. “I’m sorry but Jerry has passed away.” I was very calm about it on the phone. I asked what the cause of death was and he said it was still being determined. I thanked him for his call and hung up the phone. When I ended the call I broke down into a cry that was so crippling that I threw up. My roommate woke up and couldn’t get me up off of the ground, so she ended up carrying me downstairs to the sailor on duty. Within the hour I had discovered that my father had died by suicide.
I returned to Florida to bury my father and spent the next few days with my mother and sister. When I returned to my technical school I started getting harassed by a fellow sailor for how I dealt with my father’s death. She said I wasn’t emotional enough so I must not have cared about him. She said my visiting home was an excuse to get both the holiday leave periods, along with other statements as to how I conduced myself on my trip home. She harassed me for the next six months about being weak, saying death is part of the military and I need to get over it. These harassments went on outside of school too. I received harassing messages from her on Facebook and text messages on the weekends. It got so bad that eventually the instructors were called in to rectify the situation. After nine months of harassment I was finally graduating from the school and getting moved to my permanent duty station.
When I got the orders to Nevada I was excited, a new place new faces, and a fresh start. When I got to the command I realized it was an isolated station and it would be tough to find people to befriend out here. When I checked into my office I was introduced to a few coworkers and not five minutes into my first real day in the navy I got cornered by a group of girls I worked with about how I looked. They made fun of my hair and my makeup and said I was trying too hard, that I wouldn’t make any friends. Having dealt with bullying before I decided to just go to my chain of command and let them know what was going on. The laughed off my situation and put a target on my head. For the next year I dealt with constant harassment from not just coworkers but leadership as well.
There was one day in particular that was especially bad and I left work in tears. I got home went to my bed with a bottle of pills laid down in bed and pored all of the pills into my hand. I looked at them for about an hour before I decided to put them back. I woke up the next day tried to brush myself off and move on but I couldn’t. I was miserable. I wanted to leave one way or another, but I put on a happy face and went about my days as usual. A few months later I got sent to Hawaii for three months for the RIMPAC exercise. I enjoyed the experience and made a lot of new friends but the best part was when I came back to Nevada, we had gotten a new chain of command. I thought things would really get better finally and they did for a very long time, but one day a rumor got spread about me and I got confronted by my chain of command. I sat there stone faced while they yelled at me and when they were done asked me how I felt about what I did. I turned to them and said “I didn’t do what you are accusing me of, but if I did, it would be because I wake up every day and dread getting out of bed.”
That was a wake up call for both me and them. It showed them for the first time that I was unhappy and it showed me for the first time just how much my depression affected me. I was escorted to medical after the meeting where they asked if I could be seen by the psychologist at medical (or the “mental health doctor” as the referred to him). I sat down and waited to be seen and a few minutes later I was greeted by a smiling man in a while lab coat. I tried to find his rank so I could address him properly since he was an officer but I couldn’t. He noticed and said just to call him Jake. After I told him about what had been going on he said that it sounded like I had clinical depression and asked if I had known I had it, if so how long. I told him yes I was diagnosed when I was ten. When asked if I had ever received medical treatment for it in those eleven years I said no and became surprised. He asked why I hadn’t gotten treatment when I joined the military. To which I responded that we were told we couldn’t be treated for depression in my specific job field due to us being a “security risk.” He laughed and told me that was a lie. I was sitting there pissed, because for the first two years of my military career I could have been treated for my depression but everyone was so naive to the treatment options that they just assumed you couldn’t. I told him I was comfortable with being put on antidepressants for a while to test them out. He concurred and prescribed me Effexor.
If you have never been on antidepressants, the beginning stage is the worst. You get shaky, loose appetite and want to scream at everyone. It is a rough two weeks but once those symptoms stop it’s like a rainbow shooting over your head. I felt happy for the first time in almost ten years. I felt like I had killed a beast that the slowly killing me piece by piece and it was as easy as just asking for help. If I had known that I would have gotten treatment years ago. I didn’t have to feel depressed those last two years, I didn’t have to grab the pill bottle and think what if, I didn’t have to sit through every day thinking about how I could make it one more day. I could have just asked for help and my problems would have been solved.
Since then my depression has almost completely gone into remission and I have felt happy for the first time in almost eleven years. I no longer dread getting out of bed and I have the energy to do things I enjoy. In fact if was thanks to my seeking help that I joined this forum. I was told to find an online community of people with a common interest so I could have stuff to occupy my time when I wasn't working. All of these things have made a huge difference and being part of this community has helped a lot too! It's nice to be able to interact with people who share a common interest, in a way that is always positive!
So I say to you now if you or a loved one suffers for depression and is going untreated or if you see a decline in their behavior please talk to them. I wish every day that I could go back to Christmas of 2012 and tell my father how much I love him. Maybe then he could have gotten the treatment he needed his whole life.
If you have a similar story you are comfortable sharing, please feel free. If you aren't comfortable sharing that is completely okay too! Again I know this is a sensitive topic for this forum site but there's no better place to discus sensitive issues than with people who you are comfortable with.
