Page 41 - ACTL_Sum23

I was so ignorant about mental illness and mental health problems, I didn’t see them when they came into my own house, with my thirteen-year-old son. My wife and I didn’t see it for what it was and he didn’t know what it was. He thought it was just him. We saw signs, looking back, when he was in high school and mid- dle school that we should have known were mental health related, but we didn’t. When my son went away to college and then to get his master’s degree, he started drink- ing, and drinking pretty heavily. And so we reached out to the alcohol experts. They said, Judge, your son is an alcoholic. And you and your wife, they said, at some point are going to have a decision to make and here it is: You can put your son out, literally out of your house, or you can let him stay in your house. He’s going to die drinking in your house – not tomorrow or next month or even next year, but you can’t drink like he’s drinking and have a long life. My son went to alcohol rehab. Nothing took. And finally, we had to make that de- cision they told us about. We loved our son, and we didn’t want to lose him, and so we made the hardest decision we ever made in our life, and we put him out. It was the wrong decision, but we didn’t know that then. After three weeks of that agony, when he was living in his car, sleep- ing at the shelter, we brought him home. We dreaded that phone call that no parent ever wants to receive, and we knew at that point that we had failed him somehow. He was good and smart and decent. One of the brightest people I’ve ever known. But his life was going backwards at a hundred miles an hour and he couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t even see it. And when he came home, he was drinking as much as he had before we put him out and looking back, I think he thought, they’re going to put me out again and I can’t go out again. So, one night he’d been drinking and he as- saulted me. I went to the ICU of a local hos- pital. I was in the ICU for six or eight days. I have no memory of that, but my wife does. I don’t know how she survived that. I was on the Supreme Court at the time. It was all over the news in New Hampshire and in Boston and all over the country. My doctors went on the Today Show. I remember the day that my son was sent to the state prison. I hope you don’t have that day in your life. My son hugged me that day and said, Dad, I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I did that. Just tell me you’re going to be okay. I said I’m going to be fine. I said if you don’t quit, your mother and I won’t quit. He said I won’t quit. He spent three years in the state prison and when he got there, my wife and I went to a meeting with the head psychiatrist. He said let me tell you what’s going on with your son. He has really serious anxiety and depres- sion and panic attacks, that feeling you’re about to die, that are virtually off the charts. He was self-medicating, Judge. That’s what the alcohol is. And I knew that day in that conference room that we had failed him. I should have known something about mental illness. I know a lot more now. My son spent three years in the prison. After four months, he was like a differ- ent person. He said, Dad, I’m sleeping through the night. My mind’s not racing all day long. I can focus, Dad. I’m teaching at the prison. He was seeing a counselor pretty regularly, and he was paroled after three years. Seven years ago I got involved in a campaign. Over those years I’ve been traveling throughout New England in my black Jeep. Actually two. One of them died. I’ve driven a hundred thousand miles on back roads and highways. I’ve been to more middle schools and high schools in New En- gland than I knew existed. It’s been the most important work of my whole life. When I started it I thought, well, I’ll educate kids about the five basic signs of mental illness, but as you might expect, I learned a whole lot more than I left behind. I’ve spoken to tens of thousands of kids from the 6th grade to the 12th grade. I’ve had confidential conversations with more kids, age six through twelve, with wet eyes and cracking voices, than anyone alive, not because I’m special, but because this topic resonates. The very first time I spoke at a high school, it was in Concord, New Hampshire. It was 9:00 a.m. The kids were in those uncomfortable wood- en bleachers we all remember. Nobody on the floor. I was on a six-inch riser behind a fixed podium with a gooseneck microphone under the bas- ketball net, and I looked out at them and I thought, they’ll probably say, “whose grandfather is this guy and why is he bothering us at 9:00 o’clock.” We had launched a campaign a few weeks earlier in front of 425 people who showed up in an empty house chamber in Concord, New Hampshire. 425. Our entire congressional delegation, our governor, three members of our Supreme Court, the attorney general, law enforcement, educators, families, the Catholic Bishop, the Episcopal Church, the Jewish commu- nity. It was stunning. SUMMER 2023 JOURNAL 40 My son, who was drinking pretty much every day for years, has not had a drop of alcohol in fififteen years. He said, Dad, I’m not that guy anymore.