The following article was originally posted by The Huffington Post on 1-2-17:
PTSD (Prison Traumatic Stress Disorder): When Suicide is Suited in "Success"
By Louis L. Reed, CADC, CAC
Have you ever been so weighted with the grief of a lost relationship, job, freedom, or even a life that your entire world felt like Hurricane Katrina had slammed into your emotional levees and violently drowned you in melancholy? I mean, we are talking when the riptides of pain pins you in a Full Nelson and even refuses to let go on a tap-out or 3-count! As recent as a few hours ago, I was driving on a winding, dark, lonely highway in the Valley area of Connecticut. I had left a day filled with grant prospects and meetings behind me at the office. My best friend and I had dinner at a restaurant the evening before, after a Spirit-filled church service. We both had burgers. She ate hers with coleslaw and drank a seltzer water with lemon. As I cruise-controlled in total silence, my thoughts drifted off to my 40th birthday I’d be ‘celebrating’ on February 7th.
I began to think about aaaaallllll of the trauma I had experienced in life.
I suddenly remembered how, at the approximate age of 6 or so, my 16-year-old baby sitter made me play ‘house’ with and touch her breasts. Before I could muster a defense to shake away that thought, I was assaulted with the embarrassment I had of both of my parents being in federal prison around the same time. As I was staggering against the ropes, I got a left hook from another event that occurred about a year later of my older cousin having me incest her. While I was falling to the canvas, a montage of other terrifying memories seemed to cinematically flash across my mind as wide as the windshield my eyes were misty trying to see out of: The 1990 incident when my sister was shot in the face by her then-boyfriend; the verbal altercation I had on August 17, 1991, over a drug deal that left me shot in the chest at the age of 14 and having to relearn how to walk; the 1992 tragedy where my cousin was murdered at the age of 16 in front of his mother — shot 32 times!; the 1999 situation when my brother survived a gunshot wound to the head, and the plurality of unnamed encounters I experienced during the interim with having shot, kidnapped, and/or robbed people. Then...the culmination of the aforementioned landed my thoughts in the 2000 federal indictment that sentenced me to nearly 16 years at the age of 23. I remember how formidable the notion was for me completing that sentence to term. I just knew at the time I would stock-pile the Benadryl I’d been prescribed and have a fatal overdose the moment I had completely got sick and tired of being sick and tired. Continue reading >>>
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