10 years since the accident
By: Charlie Derr
Tags: Social Change, Future Of Society, Nature, Grief And Loss, 9 11 Attacks

Especially in these last 10 years, my own journey has brought me to new places and (by necessity!) a fairly intense level of self-awareness. In the immediate aftermath of mom’s death in the spring of 2009, i was completely adrift mentally. Unsure about how i would even be able to function without her listening and active support, despite the fact that i’d already made it well into middle age myself, my sense of coherence gradually unwound completely, and 7 months later, just before Thanksgiving of that year, i experienced a complete and utter psychotic break.

There were a large number of delusions that i experienced as rock-solid reality as i literally lost my mind. Time had become non-linear and i lost the sensation of the present being separate from the past being separate from the future. One of the most haunting images that levered its way into my consciousness was that i was flying one of the planes and that mom was flying the other as we both headed for the two tallest buildings on the island of Manhattan. It was like an out of body experience. Being horrified at what we were about to do, but also having no ability to change course and not complete the terrible task.

In the end, my lovely wife Michelle called 911 and i was transported to the local hospital bleeding from a deep gash on my left elbow that i’d given myself by climbing in and out of the bedroom window i’d smashed out (another of my delusions had to do with feeling that i was no longer permitted to use doors). The ambulance personnel and state police officers who’d responded to Michelle’s call for help had handcuffed me to the gurney. My memories from that point are choppy, but i won’t dwell on what i do remember (which was quite intense and worthy of a whole other story just by itself).

Dr. Schweitzer, the psychiatrist who was on-call at the hospital that morning, and i ended up developing a very good relationship over the course of the subsequent months and years as we worked together to try to find a way for me to regain some mental stability. It was not an easy road for me. I found that there was an awful lot about myself that i didn’t understand or even like. For years i fought against the medication (haloperidol or haldol for short) that evened out my moods. Initially i was very reluctant to take it, for fear that i would end up losing my “edge”. In the spring of 2011 i very nearly had another break on this same anniversary as dad was diagnosed with cancer, necessitating the removal of one of his kidneys. Additionally, on April 15th of that year, we got word that my cousin Joe Kennedy had been killed in action in Afghanistan. Drastically increasing my haldol dosage kept me out of the hospital, but only by the skin of my teeth. That summer, even with the extra haldol, i needed additional strong medications to just be able to get consistent and regular sleep.

Dr. Schweitzer continued to work with me. There were still so many questions looming in my head about mom’s death, my relationship with her and above all just an immense amount of incredibly powerful grief. Dr. Schweitzer urged me over and over to just drop it and just to find a way to be at peace with some of my questions being forever unanswered. I tried to take his advice. By the end of 2013 i had tapered down my haldol dose to a minimal level and was doing better. After i had initially explained various facts and impressions from my past to Dr. Schweitzer, he came to a point where he no longer wanted me to talk about this stuff with him any more. The “old-school” education he’d received many decades prior taught him that some things are best just left undealt with. I found this strategy to ultimately be problematic. There was a lot i’d suppressed for many years even prior to mom’s death. But i tried to follow Dr. Schweitzer’s advice. It turned out to be practically impossible. Thinking that i had “gotten better”, in the spring of 2014 i decided (on my own — with no more medication to prescribe, i was no longer seeing Dr. Schweitzer at that time as he’d advised me to just stop taking the minimal dose of haldol i was on in December of 2013) that i was well enough to “properly memorialize” my mother. And so i came up with a plan to build a tiny free library deep in Sage’s Ravine along the Appalachian Trail that would allow her love of books and wilderness to live on. There were a number of complicating factors, but in the end, nothing got built and in early June of 2014 i had a 2nd psychotic break. I ended up spending three days at the Four Winds facility in Katonah, NY, where i was labeled a substance abuser for my regular marijuana use. By that time, i’d been wanting to taper off my pot smoking for a number of years. I did get high once or twice after coming home, the last time (to this date) being on the summer solstice of that year.

My haldol dose was extremely high during my 3 days as an inpatient and for the months following (given intravenously because i “couldn’t be trusted” to take the pills voluntarily (which grates on me to this day — there was never a time following that 2nd psychotic break when i would have refused to take the haldol that Dr. Schweitzer told me i needed orally, but such are the vagaries of the mental health care system…)). That summer i lived in a sedated fog. As my haldol dose was permitted to gradually come down i sunk into a fairly deep depression. Three decades of daily marijuana use had taken their toll. Without the “easy answer” of getting high, i found i was unable to enjoy life. For several years i did very little other than go to work and come home to read in bed in the evenings and all weekend.

Dad died of lung cancer in the winter of 2016. It was not an easy time, but i’m blessed with a very close extended family and we all supported each other. Later that year, when i tried to refill my haldol prescription i was told that Dr. Schweitzer had also died. He’d previously urged me to find a new “chemist” (sticking to his guns that talking was not something that would be productive for me to do, even in a relationship with a doctor and/or therapist) but i’d not taken any action.

Early in 2017, my hand was forced, as i was running out of haldol. I found a young resident psychiatrist who would see me. Dr. Dahal explained to me that modern psychiatry no longer believed that suppression/avoidance of difficult topics was the best course of “treatment”. And gradually i again began to open up about some of the issues which Dr. Schweitzer had insisted that i leave alone. As i got regular exercise (mainly swimming, though i resumed hiking and paddling as well) and a new medication was added (lamictal/lamotrigine) the depression finally began to clear. Dr. Dahal rotated out of his 1 year appt. and i had to begin anew to establish a trust relationship with his replacement, Dr. Mathias.

In the spring of 2017, my mother-in-law Gillian was a pedestrian in a crosswalk nearby in her home town when a pickup truck struck her and killed her. My own reaction was to compartmentalize my intense grief for her in the immediate aftermath of that horrible event, and i was able to provide support to other family members throughout that summer. In the fall of that year, my intense emotion finally burst. It felt like more than i could take, but on the bright side, i didn’t lose my mind this time around. I’d tried to “safely” bleed off some of my mental pressure by diverting my anger to a person (who is now an ex-friend) on the internet that i had substantial disagreements with, over important issues like gender and racial equality. That didn’t end well, as i found myself just so worked up over what i perceived as his racist and misogynist views (and for the record, i still maintain my evaluation is correct, though he would not concur i’m sure) that it interrupted my sleep.

Luckily, i was able to see the woman who oversaw both of my young resident psychiatrists, and she helped me understand that the “real” issue was my grief over Gillian which had suddenly come to the surface. She also told me that intolerance is never a reasonable option, even in the face of someone else’s intolerance. We don’t want to bring ourselves down to their level. I found that advice impossible to immediately integrate, but after thinking long and hard about it, i do mostly think she’s correct even if her (and now my) position stands in direct contradiction to that of Karl Popper.

I eventually requested to come under the care of this very wise woman, who is both a reverend and a psychiatrist and she treats me to this day (i’m deliberately omitting her name for the sake of her privacy).

Over the course of the past few months i’ve also been seeing a therapist much more frequently. She and i have brought up many of the issues from my past into the light of day. My relationship with mom was and remains quite complicated. She undoubtedly loved me very much. But she wasn’t perfect, and i’m now coming to understand that some of what i experienced as a young child really had profound and lasting effects on me. On mom’s side of my family, there are a number of folks who’ve had severe problems with alcohol and other substances. Dr. Schweitzer was adamant that i’d inherited a “missing filter” (that he felt that the haldol helps repair) from mom.

Mom herself did drink when she was younger. At some point (probably around the time i was between 8 and 12 years old) she did stop completely. Later, after she and dad divorced (when i was in college), she became very active in AA, and continued to be involved deeply in that organization for the rest of her life. To my knowledge, mom never did have a complete mental breakdown, but she certainly struggled with depression for a number of years. A few years before her death, she did go on medication, which seemed to really help her an awful lot.