Speaking Openly and Listening to Others

By sharing his own experience with mental illness, John Broderick shows others the way

BY LIISA RAJALA

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 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.

After Christian’s forced sobriety in state prison and professional evaluation revealed he had mental illness, Broderick was dismayed.

“I was still in the mindset that mental illness was hopeless. I thought being an alcoholic was hopeless,” he says.

‘CRUELEST THING IN THE WORLD’

Similar to how cancer or AIDS was spoken about in hushed tones, mental illness had been stigmatized by society.

Broderick personally remembers being a child when his mother spoke in hushed tones about the “c-word,” even whispering when having private conversations in their kitchen.

“People did not say the word ‘breast.’ Look at the change in our society—now people say the words ‘breast cancer,’ and now women with breast cancer, most of them are living full lives,” thanks to open communication encouraging regular checkups and intervention, says Broderick.

Similarly, he recalls how Magic Johnson changed the conversation about AIDS, letting the world know it could happen to anyone.

And, over time, as Broderick’s family healed – through the initiative of his wife and son – and Christian benefited from appropriate treatment, Broderick’s perspective changed.

Broderick says he learned from his own experience and from what Christian taught him.

“My son says, anybody at any age who has a mental health problem, they have two things in common: They didn’t ask for it and they don’t deserve it. That’s true. What do the rest of us do? We make sure they feel bad about it. That’s the cruelest thing in the world.”

“I waited a long time (to talk about mental illness). I was probably as ashamed as anyone.”

Gordon MacDonald, former state attorney general and newly named New Hampshire Supreme Court chief justice, once told Broderick that many men at the Concord state prison have diagnosable health problems.

“Sometimes we call it drug overdose, sometimes we call it abuse and neglect, sometimes we call it crime, generally, but often there’s a mental health component,” Broderick says MacDonald told him.

Broderick knew the statistics. According to a 2017 report on mental health from NAMI NH, the New Hampshire Department of Corrections estimates approximately 40% of the state’s incarnated population is living with a mental illness, that jumps to 71% of female inmates. Seventy-five percent of inmates have a history of substance abuse.

“I waited a long time (to talk about mental illness). I was probably as ashamed as anyone, and then over time, I realized the mistakes I made that unwittingly harmed my own son – my own ignorance,” he says.

Former Chief Justice John Broderick, senior director of external affairs at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, shares his story with students at Lebanon High School. Since the pandemic, to accommodate virtual learning formats, D-HH has played a 28-minute video of Broderick’s talk and Broderick participates in a live Q&A. (Photo courtesy of D-HH)

By sharing his story, Broderick reasons, a student, teacher, counselor or parent might respond differently.

COMMUNITY OUTREACH

It was not Broderick who came up with the idea to publicly speak about his family’s experience with mental illness, instead a psychologist friend asked him to be involved in spreading a national mental health campaign, called The Campaign to Change Direction.

After receiving the blessing of his son and wife, Broderick agreed to start publicly speaking. That work later developed into Broderick’s partnership with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health to promote the supplemental R.E.A.C.T. Mental Health Awareness Campaign.

One in five students ages 13 to 18 in the U.S. have or will have a serious mental illness, according to the R.E.A.C.T. webpage. And there isn’t a “type” of student who may experience such a health crisis, as Broderick has found from the variety of students who approached him after his school presentations.

Once he was approached by a varsity football player who was firm with Broderick that he couldn’t talk to his parents about his suicidal thoughts. Broderick persuaded him to make an appointment with a counselor that day, and he did.

Another girl in 6th grade thanked Broderick for coming in to speak, then opened up after he asked her the simple question of how she was doing.

“‘I’m not doing well, I’m thinking of killing myself,’” she told him. “I just hugged her, and then asked her, ‘Do you know what a pinky promise is?’ She knew what it was, so we locked little fingers and I said, ‘I want you to promise to see a teacher or counselor.’ She was having real problems at home and school.”

Broderick stayed through lunch and saw the same girl walking toward him with a woman counselor to show she had kept her promise to ask for help.

“The counselor says, ‘We know about most of the kids who are having problems, but we didn’t know about her,’” recalls Broderick.

Spurred by Broderick’s conversations, Dartmouth-Hitchcock hosted a Youth Summit in 2019, giving teenagers a platform to speak to adults, teachers and government officials. Students asked for more trained counselors and teachers who could connect with them on a personal level and be sensitive to their needs.

“I’m a good person to start the discussion, but if others weren’t interested, there wouldn’t be a discussion,” says Broderick. “The culture is changing, I have no doubt about that. These young people will change it.”