Traumatic situations open door to depression
While working as an operator at Covestro, Kenneth Clark also serves on the emergency response team as a firefighter and hazmat technician.
“I went through a period where I was dealing with depression. I had a lot of bad feelings about myself. At the time, I didn’t really know why. But I came to understand that it was due to traumatic situations.
“I used to be a volunteer firefighter for the City of Mont Belvieu. I love firefighting. I like helping people. But I think I saw too much, too fast. I did it for about 10 years. The fires, they didn’t bother me at all. It was the car wrecks. It was the death that I saw.
“The incident that pretty much put me over the edge happened one Friday evening. I was sitting at home when my pager went off at about 10 o’clock. There was an accident involving a motorcycle. So I started heading to the fire station. About halfway there I could hear the radio chatter. It said there was a confirmed DOA. Something inside of me said, ‘Ken, turn around.’ But then something also told me to keep going.
Kenneth Clark used to be a volunteer firefighter for the City of Mont Belvieu.
“When I reached the scene, I ran into a fellow firefighter. He said, ‘Man, there’s nothing you can do.’ I thought about turning around again, but I just had to go up there to the scene. And it was devastating. It was two people on a motorcycle, and they both were gone. It bothered me so much that after I got home, I couldn’t sleep that whole weekend.”
When his department met the following Monday evening, a chaplain was on hand to visit with the firefighters and EMS personnel.
“He was trying to get a sense of everybody’s feelings and emotions. After he went around the room once, he came back to me and said, ‘I think I know what it is.’ He said, ‘What is your purpose? What is your role with the department?’ I said, ‘To serve and protect. To help people.’ He said, ‘Exactly. And when you went to that scene and realized there was nothing that you could do to help those people, you basically felt useless.’
“When I thought about it, he was right. If I had gotten there and been able to get those people packaged up, on a helicopter and off to a hospital, that could have helped. I would have felt a little more release that I tried my best. But the fact that those people didn’t move when I got there, it just stuck with me. So a lot of my depression came from doing that kind of work and seeing the heartache that I saw. It just took a while to catch up with me.
“I always told people that you think you want to do that job, but sometimes you really don’t. Late at night when everybody else is asleep and you can’t sleep, that’s when those old demons come back to haunt you.”
— Kenneth Clark
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