Suicide Survivor Learns To Manage, Instead Of Cure, His Mental Illness

You can learn more about Jeff Morris and his book “Just Live: Simply Take The Next Breath” here.

TRANSCRIPT

TRIGGER WARNING: A head’s up we discuss suicide in this episode.

From a young age Jeff Morris knew he was special.

I think most parents think their kids are special, but I think I knew I was kind of really special to my parents because I wouldn't have, I don't think I would have been born if my brother hadn't been killed in the car wreck because the timing of it was Stevie was born in July of 1966.

He was just two months old when he died. Jeff’s parents were only 15 and 17 at the time. They had Jeff just one year later.

…I mean, they were in high school. I can't imagine that happening as an adult, but to be a kid and have that happen would just be, I think it has to, I think my parents have both struggled with their own mental health issues because of that. You don't ever get over something like that. You just learn to live with it. I want to preface this by saying my mom and my dad are the greatest parents ever…I have a wonderful support system and family. But my parents struggled with some alcoholism. And so, you know, one of the things that happens that I've read about is kids who grew up around alcoholism tend to do one of two things. They either struggle with addiction themselves or they try to be perfect. And I think one of the issues for me was I tried to be perfect. 

Being born from a tragedy gave his life extra weight. This is a story about Jeff’s battle with perfectionism and mental illness and how he’s learned to manage instead of cure it. This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Moody 

Jeff grew up in the blue collar town of McLeansboro (mc-LANES-burro), Illinois. He came from a family of teachers. During the school year he loved to watch and play football and basketball. He spent his summers at the city pool.

From the time I was probably seven or eight years old until I was in my early teens, every day that I was in McLeansboro, I was at the swimming pool in the afternoons. And then at night I was playing baseball. And so I had lots of friends.

He strived to be the best at everything he did.

I tried to be the best athlete and I was a really good student.

When Jeff was in the first grade, his parents divorced. The following year his mom remarried and Jeff was primarily raised by her and his step dad. 

I missed my dad a lot. I only got to see him every other weekend and a month during the summer and holidays. 

His dad would remarry five times. In 1978 he married Jeff’s health teacher Ann and she and Jeff became quite close. They had Jeff’s younger brother Matt in 1980.

Around that time Jeff started noticing his mood changing.

I mean I just remember feeling very alone and being down a lot, looking back. I mean I think I was depressed. And … because it was the late 70s, early 80s, you know, I really didn't put a name to it. I didn't know really anything about mental illness or depression. It wasn't really something that we talked about. I remember not feeling good about myself. 

To cope Jeff threw himself into school and sports. In high school he decided he wanted to be a teacher and basketball coach.

Growing up in a family where we struggle to make ends meet sometimes, even at that age, I knew I didn't want to go through that as an adult, so it was important to me to be financially stable. 

Becoming A Man

After high school he wound up playing basketball at a community college, not far from home. In the fall of his sophomore year, he got a call from his dad, who asked Jeff to come home.

I was thinking maybe he was going to tell me he had cancer or something. And so I was concerned because my dad had never done that. So I drove to my dad's and he sat me down and told me that he and Anne were getting divorced. And I was just devastated. I was just crushed. And my sophomore year college was probably about as bad a year as I've experienced in my life because of that. I was just sick and I was sick for myself and I was also sick because my younger brother Matt was the exact same age that I was when my mom and dad divorced and I thought now my brother is gonna have to go through exactly what I did and I just I you know, I hated the thought of that.

The following year he got the chance to play basketball for a Wisconsin school.

And that was probably one of the best things that happened to me. It was kind of scary because I went 700 plus miles away. I was like an hour from the Canadian border. So I only got to come home for a few days over Christmas and then during the summer, those two years, and I grew up a lot and it was good for me even though it was hard at times. 

By the time he returned home he felt like a new person – confident and happy. And he knew he wanted to settle down with his girlfriend Kerri. 

From Teacher To Administrator

They married in May of 1991 and both got jobs as teachers in a small town in Illinois. 

But Jeff was still depressed at times.

It was difficult. It was really difficult. What I've learned is that as you get older, it's very common for people with a mental illness, unless you're getting treatment …It just gets progressively worse.

Thinking a promotion would help, Jeff went back to school to get his master’s in Educational Administration, and went from being a teacher to a high school administrator in just a few years.

I really loved being an assistant principal because I was actually, I think, pretty good at it. was good at dealing with with I'm not good at being a boss. I'm good at being kind of the boss, you know, not the little hammer, not the big hammer, because I'm not confrontational. And I found myself that I was really good dealing with kids who came to my office in trouble, kind of the challenging kids, because I dealt with the discipline issues. And I was also good at dealing with the teachers. But my mental health was still getting progressively worse. And part of the issue for me was I thought that getting a different or better job, making more money would help me feel better and that you know that just isn't the case… mental illness. That would be like somebody with cancer saying well if I get a better job my cancer is going to be better. That's just really unrealistic. 

Tried And Failed

But Jeff stayed on the school administrator trajectory. In 1996 he applied on a whim for a job as an assistant superintendent and got it. On the outside everything appeared great.

JEFF: I was 30 years old. In a year I got a job as assistant superintendent, had a new baby daughter who was the best baby ever. Her mom and I bought a new house, a house bigger than I'd ever expected to live in on a golf course…Even positive changes in your life can be stressful. And so I had three big changes in my life, new baby, new job, and new house. And so we did all of that in a very short period of time, like within a four or five month period of time, all that happened. And so even though they were all positive changes, it really, really stressed me out. And I was very good at or bad, whichever way you want to look at it, I was able to hide that. You know, it was like Jeff never has any problems and and he's so calm and he's so, you know, got it together. But inside I was just dying. 

LAUREL: So there was the stress of you didn't like your job. You had, I'm guessing, this mortgage on the new house that was probably more than you'd ever paid. And a new baby, which like all three of those things, on their own are hard to deal with. And you had them within a four month period. yeah, that's a lot.

JEFF: Yeah, it was a lot on my plate and very challenging to deal with. Again, even though they were all good things, I had just reached a point where I just couldn't take it anymore. And I was so depressed that I just didn't know what else to do. 

So on October 7, 1997, Jeff left his job at the school district in the middle of the day and drove home.

JEFF: I always felt like I was a burden on people and that people would be better off if I wasn't around anymore. I didn't feel like I was very good and I think that goes back to being a perfectionist…I could have nine people tell me I was doing a great job and one person say something just teeny tiny thing negative and I would fixate on that one thing…I was just miserable in my job and I just, I wasn't sleeping, I wasn't eating and I thought of myself as being depressed. I don't remember the word depression popping in my head. I just knew that I was suffering and I just wanted the pain to stop and that's the reason that I attempted. What it really boils down to is that people who want to die…they want the pain to stop and they don't know what else to do and that's in short that's what I was feeling. 

LAUREL: And you stopped yourself. What stopped you?

JEFF: I just thought about, at that point, the thoughts of people being better off without me kind of dissipated and I started thinking about how...I think the big thing I thought of was my parents losing another son. My mom and dad had already lost my older brother Stevie and… Kerri her having to raise my daughter and my daughter, you know wouldn't have never really known me … And I think all those thoughts just kind of came to my head… Kind of got myself together and just, I actually went back to work and never told anybody about it. 

That was the first of six suicide attempts. 

Jeff knew he needed to be around kids and teachers, that he thrived in the energy of a school. So he left his job at the district and in 2000 went back to being an assistant principal in Saint Louis. 

But in November of that year, the day after the election, the depression came back.

Diagnosis

I remember this vividly because we had a proposition that was being voted on as well. And we had worked like crazy as an administrative staff in the district because we were going to do a bunch of work on buildings in the district and we had worked really hard to get this proposition passed. And so that night after school was out we had this big rally. There were all of these parents and teachers and administrators, were hundreds of us watching the poll results. And it should have been a, we were really optimistic and it ended up passing and I was really excited about the, we were gonna get air conditioning in the building I worked in and do some other stuff that really needed to be done. And I just remember being really depressed. And the next morning I went to work and I was still really depressed and I for some reason I took out my insurance card because in the back of my insurance card it had an employee assistance number and it also I believe had something about behavioral health like if you ever needed to call for help and I ended up calling the number and they helped me find a counselor.

He started seeing her once a week and she ended up diagnosing Jeff with Bipolar II, a mood disorder with a pattern of chronic intense depressive episodes and mild manic episodes. 

JEFF: I get, I have gotten severely depressed. I still get depressed, but I don't get the real high manic episodes. My mania is very subtle.

LAUREL: And what was it like to get some answers, to look back at moments in your life and finally understand what was going on?

JEFF: I mean, I think it was helpful. I think it's generally helpful to know what you're dealing with. And so when you have a problem, but you can't identify it, that's frustrating. The frustrating part for me was then after a while, it was like, now I know what I have, but I'm not getting better. And that was the frustrating part for me because even though I got diagnosed and I was even you know taking medication the only person I think that knew my diagnosis besides my my doctor my counselor was my my wife and she knew I was taking medication and I think even at that point you know 25 years ago there was still…somewhat of a stigma attached to mental illness and I felt like I'm a really important administrator in school. can't let anybody know that I'm struggling with depression. So I kept it to myself. And I was still having struggles and they were probably still getting worse.

By 2002 Jeff had lost a lot of weight and had stopped sleeping. He’d been hired as a high school principal and he was terrified. He attempted suicide again. This time Kerri found him and took him to the hospital. Now she knew something was wrong.

She stood by me, it was supportive of me. The first time I was hospitalized was the fall of 2002. And that's the first time that she and any of my family knew what I was going through and then I had attempted previously. And from 2002 to 2009 I attempted, you know, subsequent times. And I think that she did everything she could to help me. But in the end, think she just, it was just too much for her and I get that. I mean, it's too much for me sometimes, but I don't have a choice. She did and she made a choice to end our marriage and although it was hard for me and probably, I don't know if devastating is too strong a word, but after the divorce and after some time, I figured out that it was probably for the best because I found that relationships are hard for me because when I'm feeling bad, I don't want those feelings to get transferred to somebody else. 

Preventing Suicide Is Like CPR

After Kerri and Jeff divorced in 2010, he took an early retirement through disability because of his diagnosis.

I was really, really, really down about that because I was leaving a career that overall I loved and I was proud of what I did and I loved working with being in education and I wanted to find a way to take, I wanted to still teach and help people.

He came across a non profit suicide prevention hotline called Kids Under 21. Its organizers train adults and high school students to answer phones and help people through a crisis.

I really wanted to help get into rural schools because that's where I'm from. Because rural areas typically don't have a lot of resources. They don't have access to mental health care and organizations like Kids Under 21.

For 12 years Jeff traveled around the midwest visiting schools, sharing his story, and helping teens understand and prevent suicide. He’d tell people that he survived multiple attempts on his own life.

I can talk about my story. And, you know, it kind of helps reduce whatever stigma someone thinks is attached to having a mental illness. But I don't want to tell my story to have people feel bad for me. That's not helpful. It doesn't help me. But I think it gave me some credibility to go into a school and talk to kids about suicide prevention and say, you know, the reason I'm doing this is because I want to help you all not have to go through what I went through. I wish I would have had somebody come and talk about this when I was that age because I might have been like, man, that's me that they're talking about. The thing that did help me was I felt like I was helping people and that it made what I've been through mean something. 

LAUREL: I'm guessing some of this work of doing the suicide prevention training was powerful and meaningful for you.

JEFF: I had a student, a former student of mine, his name was Marty, and he reached out to me. He was a student of mine at the last high school I was a principal at in St. Louis in Afton, Missouri. And Marty was a wonderful kid. I remembered him. He was kind of a kid that every school has. wasn't great at anything, but he was really good. He was a good student was an athlete. He was just everybody loved him. I mean he was a kid that everybody loved. If there was a sports event Marty would be right in the middle of the student section you know cheering people on. If we had an event at school, if we had homecoming and dress-up days Marty dressed up every day. He reached out to me and after a little conversation, he asked me if I had dealt with depression. I said, yeah. And I immediately knew that either he was struggling or somebody he was close to was struggling. So my training in suicide prevention kicked in. long story short, Marty told me that he had thought about suicide. I don't remember if he told me he had attempted or not, but I knew he was serious. And I was living in Iowa. He was in Springfield, Missouri…  I asked him if his parents knew. He said no. I said, well, I know your parents. We need to get them involved. I said, you need to get help. And so I said, tomorrow I want you, I said, I'm going to message you again tomorrow. I said, I want you to give me time to give you help, to get help for you. And he promised me he would do that. And I even contacted, was able to contact his friend that he was staying with at the time and told him, do not leave Marty alone tonight. And he said he wouldn't. And we got Marty help and his parents were wonderful. did. They got him into a facility and he was getting, he was on medication. He was seeing a counselor…  I might have checked on him a couple of times and he was doing okay but in December of that year a couple months later Marty I got a message that Marty had killed himself and I know that sounds like a morbid story to tell when we're talking about suicide prevention but the reason I tell that story is because you know I it's it's a lot like CPR.  I am so sad that Marty died, but I don't feel guilt. And the reason I don't feel guilt is because we did everything we could to help him. his parents did everything. And it would be like somebody having a heart attack and perform CPR and they just don't make it. There was no reason for us to feel bad.

Many students have come up to Jeff after a talk and shared their stories.

The reason that I do the work I do is because I want to help people at least give to know what to do to help them and give the person they care about a chance. And that's what we did with Marty. One of the difficulties with suicide prevention is I have really no idea how many, if I've helped a lot of people, I think I have, but a lot of times people who are struggling, you know, you don't know that you've helped them because they don't reach out after getting through an episode or being helped by somebody. So I really don't know how many people I've helped. 

LAUREL: What does it feel like to know that you've helped people?

JEFF: That's the greatest feeling in the world. I think as I said earlier, I've never been motivated by money or any type of accolades, anything other than just like helping people in any way I can. You almost feel a high from it.

Bartender

In 2012 Kerri and the kids moved to Iowa and Jeff soon followed even though he knew no one else there. At first he was counting the days til his son graduated from high school so he could move back to St. Louis. But then he realized he was missing out. 

I need to stop thinking about moving back to St. Louis and just enjoy living in Iowa, make the best of it. And that's when I decided I was going to start bartending because I would get to know people. And that was a lifesaver for me because I started bartending at a little country bar in a neighboring town in Iowa and then eventually moved to a different bar in the town I lived in. 

Iowa marked a new beginning for Jeff.

 I think we all have lots of multiple turning points in our life but I think that was a big turning point for me … that's when I started to change the way that I look at my mental health because one of the things that I used to do that was kind of destructive was when I would get depressed I would as I would start to feel better, would tell myself, Jeff, never let yourself get depressed again. And so as I would feel better, I'd like, ‘I'm never letting myself get depressed again.’ And I can't do that. I don't have that power. And so I changed the way I thought about it.

He says he learned how to manage his illness instead of cure it.

Let it happen. You've been through it hundreds of times before, thousands of times. You're going to make it through every episode. Let it work its way through and don't make a big deal out of it. Because sometimes I would get depressed and I would feel bad and so I would get worse. Well now when I get depressed, I joke that it's kind of like my own menstrual cycle because it happens about once every month to two months. Generally when I feel bad, it's not that big a deal anymore. 

He also has a dog who forces him to get outside for walks. When he’s out in the community, it’s hard to miss Jeff’s arms covered in tattoos.

And one of the big ones I have is a semicolon. And that's a pretty common thing, pretty common knowledge that people know that the semicolon is a symbol of suicide prevention… the semicolon is used when an author could end a sentence, but they choose not to. And so the semicolon became a symbol of choosing not to end your life when you you know, you were thinking about it…I have the suicide prevention hotline number on my arm and they ask me about what the number is and I tell them and I find there are two kinds of people. People who have either been depressed or thought about suicide or people who know somebody close to them who have.

LAUREL: What would you like people to know about suicide that you haven't already mentioned?

JEFF: Two things: is suicide is preventable. Even if somebody has made up their mind that's what they're going to do, it can be stopped. And it's not very complicated how you do it. I think the phrase that I use a lot even in the book is it's simple but it's not easy.

The second thing … be a good listener. Let them talk…A very consequential thing that happened to me was about 10, 12 years ago, I was at my mom's and I was really struggling with all this and we were standing in the kitchen and she looked at me and she said, Jeff, I have no idea what you go through. I've never dealt with mental illness and depression like you have, but I can listen. And that was just, that was such a powerful moment for me and my mom and for me, because it kind of struck me that like that's what I need is when I'm feeling bad and I get to a point where I just need to talk to somebody, just letting it out is very powerful. And so I tell people, you know, just be a good listener. Tell them I have no idea what to do, but I'm going to be here for you and you talk, I'll listen and I'm gonna help you through this and I'm not gonna abandon you and we're gonna work through this together and I'm gonna be with you the whole time and I think that's the most important thing people can do.

Today Jeff bartends three or four shifts a week and he’s just published a book called “Just Live: Simply Take the Next Breath” and with his book he’s made it his mission to help other people like himself. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.