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From Luke’s Journal Sept 2025 | Vol. 30 No. 2 | Success-Failure

The word “breakdown” always frightened me for some unknown reason.

It must have been a premonition of things to come. For little did I know, one day I would experience one, “an award-winning one”.

A “nervous breakdown” they were once called.

Does this mean the nerves don’t function any longer?

Or does it mean something else has short-circuited within our complicated systems to bring a human being to a complete halt?

I’m not medically trained, so I wouldn’t know.

However, I do know there was nothing wrong with my thinking on the day I broke down twenty years ago, but there was chaos going on internally, which crept up quickly and unexpectedly.

I was the kind of person who had always just soldiered on. Nevertheless, the problem is that life catches up with us.

In the couple of years before that day at my school, the following things had happened. Both my father and mother had died in quick succession. I was the person responsible for medical, legal and financial decisions, which went on for a long time after their deaths. Between my parents dying, I was losing my position at a private school due to the unjust ways of the headmaster. I had a legal case against him, which I dropped, in light of everything else going on. As well as this, I was betrayed by the union that was meant to be supporting my case.

There were also real difficulties with a family member when I was trying to remove my mother from the family home, until the family GP came to the rescue. To cap it off, I became the ongoing and sole carer for an uncle who had an awful lot in common with Jack Nicholson.

The above explains the causes, but doesn’t explain what happened inside of me during my breakdown because of the misconceptions. I thought it would be a beneficial to explain this, at least my own experience of what happened.

The day before it happened, I was going home on the train,

It was the first week of a new term and I felt extremely tired, but I had no idea why. I did the very unusual thing of going to a pub when I alighted from the train and had a beer, which went down very quickly. At this, I thought that if I didn’t leave right that minute, I would drink all the beer in this pub, so I promptly departed and had no further drinks.

When I arrived home, I remember feeling that I didn’t want to go back to work the next day.

It was all very strange.

My wife encouraged me that things would be okay, and I just needed a good sleep. I was very worried things wouldn’t be okay.

The next day, I was on the train, which was making its way through the countryside. I looked out the window, thinking how the cows and the horses seemed very relaxed indeed. I was inside a very old train, the kind my mother would have caught on this same line many years ago. I had in my mind an old photo of her from back in the 1940s. I thought of her.

When I got off the train, I did something strange by approaching the station master’s office and asking him if he knew my father (my father had worked for the railways). He told me he had heard of my father. I walked down to the school. I was not at all feeling well but soldiered on in a stoic way.

The next thing I knew, it was all over.

I had managed to break down emotionally in front of someone, was put in a room for safekeeping, and my wife was contacted.

You might be asking by now, how I was feeling?

Well, I was actually feeling peaceful. It was like someone had come along and cut off a hundred-kilogram backpack I was wearing, which I didn’t know I was wearing. In my understanding, a breakdown happens to make our lives stop, because if we don’t stop, something terrible may happen, something worse than that which caused the breakdown.

My breakdown happened as a result of many griefs, which had not been attended to. This was because I didn’t think they needed attending to, as I had always soldiered on. As my future counsellor told me years later, I had “run out of petrol” and there was also a “hole in the tank”, which was a pretty accurate way of putting things. But before getting to him, I had knocked on the door of Psychiatry. This is where my problems really began. I ended up seeing two different psychiatrists and went on some different medications. That’s when I felt I was going to die, but not because I was suicidal.

“I ended up seeing two different psychiatrists and went on some different medications. That’s when I felt I was going to die, but not because I was suicidal.”

The first couple of drugs really did very little and I don’t remember their names. The second psychiatrist placed me on 300mg of Luvox (fluvoxamine, an antidepressant; standard dose is 100mg).¹ He never explained why. In his opinion, I was seriously depressed. He never mentioned the word grief. In all this medical intervention, I never had any counselling for the things I mentioned above. Grief was pathologised, and I was heavily medicated. The Luvox sent me into a terrible spiral of insomnia. I became a living wreck at home, and it was very difficult for my wife, who didn’t know how to “fix me”, although she was a registered nurse and midwife.

When the psychiatrist could see that the 300 mg Luvox wasn’t doing the job, he decided to add Zyprexa (olanzapine, an antipsychotic) into the mix.² I don’t know what the dosage was, but this was what almost ended me. I felt like I was going out of my mind, didn’t want to live anymore, but wasn’t suicidal. This went on for months. It did much damage to myself and my family, who saw that I was totally out of action. I felt helpless. I saw myself as a burden. To be blatantly honest, I felt like a total failure.

Upon seeing the psychiatrist with my wife, he was adamant that I needed to stick with the medication dosage regimen and that things would improve.

Well, they didn’t.

I was sinking both day and night.

I had no answers.

I didn’t trust the psychiatrist any longer, for he, too, had no answers.

Eventually, I managed to reduce the medications. Coming off Zyprexa slowly, I began to feel like a human being again. The medication was aimed at my head, but my heart was the problem.

My heart (or soul) was in enormous grief.

I didn’t have a mental health issue.

I had a grief issue.

My grief was the result of my many losses in quick succession, which compounded. The medication only complicated things and obfuscated them. It was like giving Panadol³ to someone with a broken heart, thinking that’s all they needed to recover from their broken engagement.

I did recover fully.

The further away I was from medication, the better I became. I never returned to taking more medications. As a part of my recovery, I wrote a book called After Darkness, Light, a coffee table book of black and white photography and poetry. I did a lot of walking, went to the beach, listened to wonderful music, read books, watched the movie, The West Wing twice. Most importantly, I came back to life for my family.

I felt God was always there throughout. I didn’t cast doubt over His presence in the story and didn’t blame Him. I felt for my wife, who found the whole thing very difficult because there was not much she could’ve done.

My life changed.

Teaching was over for me and that was a relief.

I did some courses and began working as a chaplain, which I very much enjoyed.

My breakdown wasn’t on account of any kind of mental disorder or psychosis. It was due to unattended grief and not realising how exhausted I had become. I had to have the breakdown to have a breakthrough in my life. The breakdown made time and space for dealing with the things that had happened – ending teaching and beginning life again.

All of which, I thank God for.

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