I wrote this story to help someone help friends, colleagues and whoever could suffer from mental disease against your expectation as is often the case. This is the story about my colleague who I did not think suffered from mental disease, but who unfortunately did suffer for a few years. He is now recovering as much as he is able to start his new life with his new job.
He was one of my senior colleagues by 5 years older than me when I joined the company, and I started to work in a same development team. His way of talking was a little bit childish, and he graduated from a same university, and he is also a person who did not play the old soldier, so I did not feel that he was senior honestly and could get along with him. In addition to his personality, I respected his attitude and his seriousness toward his work. He seemed to be always right about what he did and what he said. He did not like ambiguity so he sometimes fought with someone over its ambiguity. I totally respected him regarding work.
Two years later, we worked together in one project whose schedule was very tight, and his role was to design circuits while discussing circuits' specification with a customer. As is always the case, but the customer frequently added, removed, and changed the specifications until the deadline. This happened for almost half a year, so he came early and left late after twelve. He was like walking dead, but he has a strong sense of responsibility so he finished his work finally. A few weeks later, we went for dinner and he told me that he was burned out due to the previous project and he could not sleep at night. However, I did not take it seriously because I felt that he did not seem to say so seriously. If I look back, he also did not take it seriously. A few months later, he told me that we saw a doctor because he could not sleep and took medication. Even he said so, I did not take it seriously because he talked about it openly to other peoples as well. This was a time when we should have taken an action to take care of him somehow by everybody who worked together with him, but we did not do that because there was nobody who had ever suffered from mental disease around us and we did not know how people suffer from it and did not know that anybody could be a victim depending on an environment these days.
A few months later, I was transferred to U.S office and we got separated, but sometimes exchanged emails to tell how we were doing. One year later, he came to the U.S office to attend a conference and we talked much and he confessed that we were still taking a few kinds of medicine for mental disease. However, he looked ok for me, although he was not actually. A few months later, I was told by a previous boss that he took a long sick leave and did not come to the office. I felt very sorry to hear that, but could not call him at that time because I was also suffering from mental disease a little bit. I did not have room to take care of others honestly.
When I came back to the Japan office one year later, he also recovered from the disease and was able to come to the office. He invited me for lunch and we talked about what was going on him so far. He said that he was almost like a wreck due to medicine when we was during sick leave. At first, he took one tablet of medicine per one time but there was a side effect of that, so he told his doctor it then his doctor increase one more different table to alleviate the side effect. And this repeated a few times and he took four kinds of tablet one time. It is obviously wrong to do this, but he did not doubt this because he suffered mentally. One day, he seemed to realize that something was wrong to increase medicine more, so he asked his doctor to reduce medicine. Since that time, he can gradually have reduced the number of tablets per one time. He is now taking only one table.
I got an email from him last month, and he was still in a long sick leave. He asked me to call him soon. I called him and asked him what was going on. He said that he got a new job and he was going to quit the current company and join a new company. That company is small, but he was appreciating that the company hired him even though he confessed that he still suffered from mental disease but gets better day by day. He seems to recover as much as he also be able to work again.
When I heard this, I was very happy as much as I could cry even over a phone. And I still feel responsible about his sick because I was not able to notice that. If I could had noticed that, there is a chance that he would not have had to suffer from it.
I wish the all the best for his new endeavor.
No comments:
Post a Comment