RESILIENT NH
profiles
Speaking Openly and Listening to Others By sharing his own experience with mental illness, John Broderick shows others the way BY L I I SA R AJ A L A
JOHN BRODERICK once served as chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, yet it is his work with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health – spreading awareness of the signs of mental illness and encouraging community and systematic support for mental health – that he considers “the most important work I have done in my entire professional life.” Prior to the pandemic, over the course of a few years, Broderick traveled around New Hampshire and Vermont, speaking to more than 100,000 high school and college students, business leaders and employees, senior citizens and veterans, to share his family’s experience with the devastating impacts of mental illness not properly addressed. Since the pandemic, Broderick and Dartmouth-Hitchcock moved the conversation online. “The purpose of my work is not to tell my family’s story,” clarified Broderick. “That’s just a way to open the door a crack so people will speak back to me.” CHANGED PERSPECTIVE Broderick serves to initiate community conversations about mental health, but he admits it took him a long time to understand it and speak openly about it himself. His family has a very personal story, though it is one that was broadcast publicly – news reports in 2002 of Broderick’s adult son, under the influence of alcohol, severely assaulted his father one night after stewing over an argument regarding his son’s alcoholism and its impact on their lives. Broderick underwent six hours of facial surgery and was lucky to be alive. His son, Christian, was originally sentenced to seven to 15 years in state prison. He served three years, granted 38 RESILIENT NH 2021
parole in 2005, a sign of his recovery. While the Brodericks for years had tried to address their son’s social disengagement, drinking and sudden lack of motivation, it wasn’t until his evaluation, diagnosis and treatment in state prison for depression, anxiety and panic attacks that they realized the expert advice they had received earlier, and social norms of those times, had been ill-equipped to address the real issues at hand. In hindsight, Broderick remembers a series of missteps during a time when there was no acknowledgement nor understanding of mental health issues. The first mistake, he says, had been downplaying Christian’s withdrawal as a teenager. He and his wife would say Christian was creative, an artist who marched to the beat of a different drummer. “That may be true, but it doesn’t mean he can’t have mental health problems,” says Broderick. “It was explained away by some commonsense explanation.” When Christian developed a hard-core drinking habit that worsened by graduate school, Broderick and his wife admitted him to facilities in Keene, NH, Connecticut and Florida. But that only developed resentment rather than addressing the underlying issues causing his self-medication. Experts then advised that Christian needed to hit “rock bottom” to force himself to stop drinking and that the Brodericks had to take a hardline approach – kicking Christian out of the house – to make him come to grips with his situation, or else he’d drink himself to death in their home. “The advice was well intended, our actions were well-intended, but they were in fact inflammatory,” Broderick says, in hindsight.
