I am not okay. I may seem like it, projecting a public persona of someone who has their shit together and their emotions in check. During media interviews it may even come across as cold indifference. But it’s all an act, not for television audiences, not the general public, and not even for my friends. It’s for me.
It was Mental Illness Awareness Week, and I could think of no better place to be to tell my story and share the uncomfortable truths I uncovered over the past eighteen months, not only about my wife’s mental health condition, but my struggles to navigate my own grief and come to terms with my overwhelming feelings of guilt.
I just got off a call with someone who is perhaps the most uniquely qualified person in the world to understand what I have endured for nearly 18 months, a nightmare that he, himself has endured for almost two years.
Sometimes Looking Back is the Only Way Forward I didn’t know what to expect. While I had been to Cleveland…
It’s all your fault. You’re a narcissist. I hope you suffer. You deserve to die. These (and many more) are among the hundreds of comments I’ve received in the past few days after the interview I did with ABC 20/20.
It was all gone. Everything. Every piece of furniture. Every book. Every Pot. Pan. Fork. Kitchen knife. Sold or given away. I got into my car and pulled away. For the first time in my entire life I was homeless, but not without hope.
Closing a Door to the Past to Make a Future Possible As the one-year anniversary of the tragic killings that…
“He’s just doing this for fame and fortune,” someone recently said about me after learning I’d been writing a book for the past year. But that just isn’t true. I’m speaking and writing now because I have something important to share. The truth. And what I’ve come to learn about my late wife, about depression, PTSD and mental health — including my own.
Every generation, it seems, is impacted by the death of someone famous, a tragedy that makes a permanent imprint on your brain recording exactly where you were and what you were doing. And it’s even more tragic when they make the decision to end their own life.
My wife, Jennair, had been treated for depression for years. Yet I was surprised when her psychiatrist diagnosed her with PTSD.
