Army General With Bipolar Disorder Shares: “I am not ashamed.”
I was born unknowingly with what they call a bipolar brain, completely unknown to me or to the army or to anybody, which gave me tremendous energy, drive, enthusiasm. If people had known what they were seeing, they would've said, "There may be something going on with this guy."
Hello, I'm Gregg. I served in the US Army from 1975 to 2015, and my branch was Engineers. Once I graduated from West Point in '79, I went to Army Ranger School, and then I did all the jobs that you do as an army officer, and then I ended up making one-star and two-star general.
In 2003, I had a triggering event, the Iraq War, and it sent me into mania, but it was a high performing mania, in which I performed better than I ever had in my life. I felt like Superman, bulletproof, didn't need sleep. After being manic for almost a year, I fell into terrible depression. I went to the doctor during the mental health screening and said, "Hey, there's something wrong with me." And the doctors evaluated me and they said, "You're fine. "There's nothing wrong with you." And they couldn't see past my success. High ranking officer.
11 years after the Iraq War, I went into full blown mania. I had paranoid delusions that people were out to get me. They were spying on me. They wanted to see me arrested, put in jail, tortured, murdered, in prison. But when I would dip into depression, it would be the opposite and all I wanted to do was to die. I ended up getting removed from command, which is a nice way to say I was fired, forced to retire, and then later hospitalized. And I on my own went back to the same doctors and said, "Hey doctor, there's something "really, really wrong with me." And this time my wife came and she said, "You know, he was manic before and now he's depressed." They connected the dots and they said, "Oh, mania, depression, bipolar disorder." I am not gonna be stigmatized, embarrassed, ashamed.
A battle buddy from the army and my wife got me into a very good VA hospital in White River Junction, Vermont, and it was tremendous treatment, medication, therapy, electroconvulsive therapy. So I actually spent six weeks living in the VA hospital. It stabilized me. It kept me from getting worse, but it didn't make me better. I didn't get better until a few months later when they prescribed lithium. Once I started taking lithium, within about three or four days, my symptoms vanished. They went away and I came back to life with energy, enthusiasm, interest.
So, what my therapist, I think the most valuable thing she has done for me is to help me figure out what are the triggers. And think in a military setting, you have minefields, and what the military does is it tries to figure out, where are the mine fields? And you put like a fence around them. So what I figured out how to do was to say, "This is a trigger, this subject, this event, this location, "and I don't go there."
I'm good about getting exercise and working out, going to the gym, going out for walks, things like that. I've got friends who are terrific. I've told all of them that I have bipolar disorder, and here's the symptoms of mania and depression. And I said, "Hey, when you see me going "into either the mania or the depression, "please come talk to me. "Tell me that you're seeing these symptoms."
If you have a mental health issue and you don't get help, you're looking at a path of destruction. Anything I can do to take my near death experience, where I wanted to die every day for two years, and transform it into a plus, an inspiration for others, then that's what I do.
