A Few Words About The Passing Of Grayson Murray

The shocking news of 30-year-old PGA Tour star Grayson Murray's suicide last week has the sports world abuzz with talk of mental health once again. If I may add a few words to the discussion.

I never met Grayson Murray, but I know him well. He suffered from alcoholism, anxiety, and depression, the soundtrack of my own troubled youth. Managing any one of these chronic afflictions can be life-altering. Having all 3 active concurrently in your life is being dealt one of life's cruelest and most insurmountable of hands.

The script goes something like this. A hypersensitivity to everyday-life stimuli, oft resulting in overreactions and questionable behavior. The pattern starts early in one's youth, with anxiety and mood swings swirling and percolating privately within until the great self-medicating discovery occurs. Alcohol!! The solution to all things life. Until the solution becomes the bigger problem itself, with displays of powerlessness and unmanageability soon impossible to ignore.

A brief stay in a substance abuse treatment facility takes the obsession to self-medicate away, but the protagonist re-enters the real world vulnerable, lacking the tools to manage their unleashed mental health afflictions and their lives enter a dangerous perilous phase. When re-engaging the world sober, the feelings of raw anxiety can be terrifying if not overwhelming, whipsawing the individual back to the perceived safety of a shutdown mode of withdrawal and isolation, oft resulting in bone-crushing depressions, creating a vicious cycle as predictable as the cosmos. Soon, we're visiting a psychiatrist where short-term chemical remedies are introduced, beginning a virtual game of brain chemistry Whac-A-Mole. Treat one condition, another flares out of control. until one day the individual, weighed down by the stigma of being mentally ill, tires of all the cycling, seeing no hope of ever being restored to sanity, fatefully deciding they can go on no longer.

If that sounds nightmarish, you're not wrong. There but for the grace of God go I.

Through my life's travails, I've concluded people experience three types of lives. We all have our Public lives, our professions and our pursuits, out there for all to see. We also have Private lives, with only our families, relationships and close friend circles allowed to see our more idiosyncratic sides. But it's the third type of life, our Secret life, that becomes most affecting, for in our secret lives lies the fertile soil for all types of neuroses to take hold.

Our quirky fetishes, our questionable ideations and obsessions and their persistence create guilt, shame, confusion, and self-loathing. In Recovery we used to joke as long as what's taking place in my head isn't taking place in my life, I'll be alright. But mental health is no longer a joke and too many among us are far from alright. Our emotional lives are akin to a nuclear reactor, an unstable volatile potentially eruptive core, kept cool by a myriad of social norms and conforming forces. And when those aren't enough, we employ further means. We seek spiritual connections, we lean on a divine life, we practice the soothsayers of meditation, mindfulness, 12-step programs, as well as a variety of therapies, ending with a visit to the Doctor and Big Pharma, all of psychology and psychiatry's innovations, our modern day cooling rods, all to keep our emotional cores intact. Which works well for some, not so well for others, just observe the homeless and imprisoned and institutionalized among us. Just imagine where society would be without these most modern of corrective methods. Now try to imagine where society could be with its focus on prevention, education, and treatment right from our earliest ages.

For some of our secret inner thoughts can be quite damaging, the anxieties, the fears, real and imagined, cascading conversations taking place with our innermost selves, our thoughts begin to warp, our sense of purpose in life becomes murky, tiring, burdensome, where actions once thought unimaginable soon begin to take form, grow in power, assume shape, soon over-riding all sense of reason and proportionality, resulting in irreversible fatal choices like the ones made by Grayson Murray

How a person's wiring can get so crossed is complex. Part heredity, part environment, human brain chemistry is complex, with even the acknowledgment of our having emotional lives a quite recent phenomenon in human history. Our emotional response system is antiquated, dated, designed for a world far different than the one we live in today. Evolution the tortoise, modern society the hare, the speed of social progress far outpacing our internal processing abilities. We're running Windows 3.0 in a Giga speed world.

The physical world of nature was not designed with human comfort in mind. Now we can add modern society to that list, our abilities to emotionally maintain challenged more and more with each innovation. And the shift in our modern ethos, once a life well lived was christened by a simple epitaph on a tombstone. He was a good man who provided for his family and was loved by all.

Today, our collective attention is placed on achievement, accumulating, and conquering of self and others. Everyday life has become a never-ending competition; education, career, relationships, and social status. Fall behind in one or more arenas, and you're reminded of it constantly by the ubiquitous messaging of social media and the like. And you feel it, for there's no place to hide in modern society, it simply won't let you be. We're engaged in a constant battle to not feel less than, out of place, or out of sorts. The emotional daggers of coming up short in comparison. It can make one feel like a failure, not worthy of love affection, and care, careening one ever closer to the perilous edge of hopelessness.

What we do know is depression and suicidal ideation do not discriminate. Financial or professional success is no safeguard. Which makes the actions of the Grayson Murrays of the world so shocking. For its the dream of so many of us to become famous in our fields of choice. How could money, property, and prestige not solve all of life's problems? But just look back recently... Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain, Chris Cornell, David Foster Wallace, and Stanford Soccer star Katie Meyer.

So many questions, not enough answers.

Mental Health Awareness is embroiled in a deep paradox. As a society, we've never known more, never been more aware, and never had more resources available to us, yet the data clearly shows we're falling further and further behind, with tragedies like Grayson Murray still far too common. Will we ever reach a tipping point, where as a society we will bond together to overcome this scourge? Or have we already passed it and are simply too numb to act?

I'd like to believe there is still time, time to declare war on mental illness, time for a mental health moonshot, a generational all-out assault on prevention, treatment, and awareness. But how? Our leaders, those in a position to affect real change seem incapable of action, more concerned with power and self-aggrandizement than a unified goal for the greater good. We've become a nation adrift, with no collective purpose, no vision of what a better healthier America looks like, no longer able to unite toward overcoming a common cause. How many more Grayson Murrays will it take?

But there is hope, for in tragedy we pause. An opening appears, a slight window in time to galvanize action and awareness, to make progress in some meaningful ways. But the window remains open only so long, its closing as I type. Once again, we've heard the bell toll. How can we convince each other once again that it tolls for thee? For it does. We've all been adversely affected by the mental health struggles of our sisters and brothers. Before we resume regularly scheduled programming, can we pause just a little longer?

There's a 3-digit Suicide Awareness number. Did you know it was 988? I didn't know either and I should. It turns out 82% of Americans are unaware of it also. To me, that is unacceptable. What is needed is a high-profile social media blitz to spread awareness of this life-saving service. I'm calling on my peers in the tennis and entertainment industries to leverage your high-impact contacts to see if we can create a campaign to help bring awareness to this simple yet life-saving service.

Every great journey begins with a first step. We can make this the beginning of something great. We are amid a National Crisis. National, that means all of us, you and me. Let's put our energies and talents together and see what we can do.