Thoughts of suicide hounded me even though I was preaching every Sunday about abundant life. I had suffered from depression and anxiety long before the stress of Ph.D. work. Now the pain was compounded by taking a double full-time course load while working a 20-hour per week graduate assistantship, preaching on Sundays and raising two young children.
In college, I had made it as far as raising my dorm window and staring at the concrete three stories below. No one would have guessed my level of pain. Eventually I would be elected student government president, win a state speaking championship and be awarded my college’s highest award for social action. I kept trying to prove my worth and covering my blinding insecurities.
Brad Bull
My new doctor’s intake form asked if I ever thought of suicide; I checked “no.”
There was no way I was telling the son of the pastor who baptized me that I was thinking about suicide multiple times per week. (As a therapist, no matter the wording on the intake form I’m assigned to use, I never ask yes/no questions about suicide; they make it too easy to lie. I recommend something like this: “It’s common for folks to have thoughts of suicide. I have. How often do you think about it?” The person either immediately says “never” or looks to the side and says, “Ummm.” That opens the conversation.)
In seminary, I went to a counselor for the first time. I don’t remember ever feeling overtly suicidal in those years, but my depression was compounded by an allergy medication that eventually was taken off the market when found to contribute to depression. Counseling helped me deal with being away from home for the first time.
Family secrets
But then, during my post-graduate one-year internship as a hospital chaplain, it happened. One of my maternal grandparents died. This triggered a chain of events that led to me discovering a series of deep multi-generational family secrets. To say I fell into an identity crisis would be like saying Daniel was thrown into a den of cats — technically true but lacking any sense of life-threatening severity.
“This triggered a chain of events that led to me discovering a series of deep multi-generational family secrets.”
Someone I aspired to be like — a profoundly respected member of the community — had turned out to have a very dark history. I found myself torn between the reality that the person should have been in jail — for a very long time — but, if the person had been in jail, I wouldn’t have had this-or-that wonderful memories; nor would I have learned this-and-that important life lessons. I felt like Luke Skywalker screaming “Noooooooooo” to finding out he was related to Darth Vader, but, all the while, I was longing for redemption for someone who had done unthinkable things. The tension ravaged my soul, and I sought a Yoda to console me.
Let me quickly say that after subsequent years of studying family secrets, it wasn’t the discovery of the family secret that nearly killed me. It was the accumulation of the impacts of the secrets with which I was dealing without direct help. I was fortunate for a significant network of inspirational and caring people who helped informally until I got direct professional help.
Scholar Evan Imber-Black has distinguished positive secrets from toxic secrets. Positive secrets are legitimately private matters, such as what a mom and dad do in the bedroom. This is necessary and healthy. Toxic secrets are withheld information that perpetuates harm to those who would benefit by knowing. Toxic secrets need to be revealed.
However, this must be done very carefully. Like walking from a dark room into the light is painful and requires adjustment, so must the discovery of secrets be managed. Even after majoring in pastoral counseling in a rigorous seminary program, I was nearly clueless how to manage the toxic secret I discovered. To be sure, though, being clueless about how to handle the secret was better than being eaten alive by the secret because having discovered the secret, I now had something clear to address. (In addition to Imber-Black’s book The Secret Life of Families, an excellent resources for learning about secrets and their management is Dani Shapiro’s podcast “Family Secrets.”)
Hitting rock bottom
Fortunately, I hit the necessary-for-change rock bottom when two things happened.
First, personal accomplishments failed to help me feel better for more than a few hours.
Second, accumulated stress of parenting and a Ph.D. program — capped off by an abusive boss — took me to a physical-health breaking point. I’m very fortunate to have steered clear of alcohol and drugs — especially during the opioid epidemic. But years before, I had run headlong into the shiny lights of the internet. I knew I had a problem when, at 4:30 in the morning, I awakened myself when I smashed my face into a computer monitor, hurting both my forehead and nose. I looked at my watch, shocked to see the time. At 9 a.m., I called and made an appointment to see a counselor. This became a cycle of rinse and repeat until the bottom fell out during my Ph.D. program and frequent suicidal ideation returned.
I wound up at the student counseling center, humiliated initially by being paired with a fellow-Ph.D. student nine years my junior. I already was a licensed therapist being treated by an intern.
“Part of my problem was the pride that kept me from admitting just how deep my problems were.”
It was perfect. Part of my problem was the pride that kept me from admitting just how deep my problems were. At our first session, I told Chrissy I’d never been fully honest in therapy. She asked, “What are we going to do about that?” I pledged to be honest.
Eventually I followed my counselor’s advice to see the campus psychiatrist about getting a prescription for an antidepressant. In the waiting room, I ended up sitting next to someone I knew — a person with profound mental health issues and who would subsequently make national news for criminal behavior. I felt myself boiling in shame that we were seeing the same doctor. I had not yet read Brennan Manning’s Ragamuffin Gospel to discover the healing properties of converting personal shame into the humility of mutual brokenness.
An unfilled prescription
The prescription for an antidepressant sat unfilled in my wallet for months. I knew the research of the time said that the quickest path to recovery from cognitively driven depression was using medication to break the cycle of energy-draining depression and pairing this with cognitive behavioral therapy to discover and debunk unconscious and/or habitual thoughts that feed depression. I went to the pharmacy drive-through at one point to fill my prescription. But when I was told the out-of-pocked price, I said, “I’d rather be depressed.”
I carried oppressive shame about feeling depressed and about getting it treated. I’d once heard that the herb St. John’s wart helped with depression. I tried to buy some but circled the inside of the pharmacy like a teenage boy trying to muster the nerve to buy sanitary napkins on his mother’s shopping list (which I once had to do and am now so glad to see a generation where that’s not the problem it was in the 1980s). I left without buying the herb, overcome with the fear of the clerk looking at me with eyes that would say, “You must be depressed.” (That’s the cognitive distortion of mind reading.) I even felt guilty about reading A Soul Under Siege, Welton Gaddy’s book about clergy depression.
“I carried oppressive shame about feeling depressed and about getting it treated.”
Then, one day I was mingling in the sanctuary after church, where I had preached. The crowd was thinning, and I found myself having a private conversation with a college-aged female. Almost out of nowhere, this bubbly, wickedly smart young woman became serious and incisively asked, “Brad, are you OK?” Her tone wasn’t “are you OK” in the sense of “You seem drunk or too angry.” It was “are you OK” in the sense of “How is your overarching sense of well-being?”
I stared at her. Her eyes were sincere, safe and requesting the honesty befitting everyone at any place but especially from her minister standing in a sanctuary.
I drew a breath. Then it happened. I said it.
“No.”
In no more time than a perfect heartbeat, she matter-of-factly asked, “Are you depressed?”
I somberly nodded.
Again, in no more time than a perfect heartbeat, she matter-of-factly asked, “Are you taking something?”
Derisively, I wrinkled my forehead and right cheek as I shook my head no.
Her compassionate face evaporated into firm resentment and confrontation.
“Her compassionate face evaporated into firm resentment and confrontation.”
I immediately saw her eyes seethe, “How dare you look down your nose at me who is taking medication for depression.”
Her gaze became even more intensely fiery as she averred with nearly unrestrained disgust: “Let me guess. You think if you were more spiritual you wouldn’t need medication for your depression.”
I feebly nodded.
She hammered, “Let me get this straight, though. You have severe allergies, don’t you?”
I nodded, already seeing the conclusion, but I resolved to accept this well-deserved tongue lashing. She continued: “But you don’t take anything for your allergies do you? You don’t take a pill once per day or take a shot once per week, do you? Because you’re so spiritual it keeps your allergies in control.”
Her eyes bore into me for three perfect heartbeats. I nodded my consent of message received.
She turned and walked away.
After lunch with my family, I drove to the pharmacy and filled the prescription for a medication to treat my depression by first treating my pride.
Brad Bull enjoys paying forward the help that moved him from suicidal college student to joyfully dealing with “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes” — including his own shortcomings. He finds great satisfaction in receiving messages like a military veteran saying, “A few months ago I couldn’t stop thinking of killing myself. Now I can’t stop smiling. Thank you.” He is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Tennessee and Virginia. His counseling and retreat services operate from DrBradBull.com.
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