-by Bill Watkins
Formerly Suicidal
Los Angeles, CA

***

I was in a freefall. The order of events seemed to be: I had a spiritual awakening at the Betty Ford Center in February of 1995, dropped everything to become a dedicated member of the Al-Anon 12-step program for about four years, then… the roof caved in. I felt like I had entered a Black Hole. Not depressed at first, but more like empty, unsure, and listless. My joie de vivre was suddenly tres blasé, the spirit from my awakening at zero… I just thought I was dying.

Of what, though? The rounds with doctors began… Psychiatrists, psychologists, a neurologist and a cat scan. I had Clinical Depression, that’s it! Manic Depression even a better one because I would swing up emotionally with creative projects, then dip down at other parts of my day. With that handy diagnosis, prescribed medication became readily available to me, and doctors began to prescribe various drugs to me.

Their doses didn’t create the desired effect, so I conveniently took over their management, got high on Lithium hours before that experiment sent me to the hospital. I had overdosed for the first time, but was it? When I blacked out on alcohol as a kid, that was an overdose wasn’t it? We didn’t call it that, but it might have been. For a few years I wasn’t ready to link alcohol use with my depressive state.

How depressed was I? Suicidal eventually. For days, weeks, months on end – unsure if I wanted to live through days, unsure if I even could live through them. Sometimes I still thought I was just dying, moreso after the overdose on lithium, which left me gravely injured physically. Of all things, that psychotropic natural salt on the element chart, used by some as an industrial cleaner and certain physicians as a way to calm the mind of suicidal patients – it tweaked my brain enough to tweak my diaphragm.

I remained suicidal and now physically injured from an overdose for a period, then overdosed again, mostly on another psychotropic they gave me called Celexa. It was during that hospital stay when I looked up at my very tall psychiatrist doctor and noted, “Dr. W, there is no Pill for Will!” A true statement that jarred me back to my twelve steps. I started to slowly piece together my alcohol and substance use as a child, relate it to my current depression.

I started drinking alcohol on Dad’s lap at five years of age, his last sip of bourbon and water. He didn’t want to give me that “adult drink,” but I kept asking for a sip, knowing it was that liquid standing in the way of our intimacy. When I took that sip, I crossed several thresholds that would come back to haunt me. I had jumped into the alcohol drinker’s club young, kept that secret from Mom, so had learned how to lie – which for the religiously inclined like myself let in an evil force I call the devil, you can call it what you want.

That evil led me to a career of underage drinking, reconnecting with the substance with friends at twelve, blacking out on it for the first time at thirteen. I was a little thirteen year old, by the way, not a burly young man… still a squeaky-voiced boy, chugging flammable, toxic liquid around my sport playing, thinking that was normal. I didn’t know how to tell the girl I loved that I loved her, but I could play sports and drink alcohol.

A sad past, leading to a sadness doctors called a clinical depression, green lighting drug intake without checking my alcohol and substance abuse history. I suspect this happens when the doctors in question are out of touch with their own alcoholism. Lee Harris, the social worker who led me to my spiritual awakening at the Betty Ford Center on February 7th, 1995: was in a position to truly help me, coming from relevant training and… I suspect life experience.

Lee created a safe room of strangers at the facility’s “Family Program,” inspired us to tell our truths out loud to the group. Hence the awakening, as it will always be true that the Truth sets us free. I dream that this humble piece stirs the truth in readers, perhaps one veering toward depression and a merry-go-round of “know-it-all” doctors who don’t know it all.