Life and depression

After 60 years I can look back and be thankful for the good moments. Do I have any regrets? Sure I do, but who doesn’t? Have I experienced any negative moments? Yes, I have.

The other day I was reading another story on Medium and someone was talking about depression and how hard it is to live with it. I am thankful that I have not been burdened with constant clinical depression. I know of several people who have been diagnosed with it and it is no picnic. In my first job as an adult, I guess I was either 18 or 19 and I worked on a psychiatric lock-up ward in Terrel Texas. My parents worked at Terrell State Hospital and because of their connections, I was able to land a job as a psyche tech.

This psyche ward was the lock-up ward for Dallas County Texas. Once committed to this ward there was no getting out during the day or night. You were literally locked up with a bunch of other people who had varying degrees of mental issues. Amongst them were paranoid schizophrenics, catatonics, psychopaths, and sociopaths. The worse of the worst. It was a lock-up unit because most of the patients were prone to violence and could not be around other patients. There were several staff members present 24x7 365 days per year.

I was employed there in the early 1980s. I want to say it was in 1981. I was very young and naive to say the least. I worked with 2 other psyche techs on the unit. There was a psychologist, LVN and RN on duty. On many occasions, we had to grab a patient that was acting out and drag them kicking and screaming to an…