I’m not crazy, just traumatized

03.06.2025

I’m not crazy, just traumatized

by Patricia Brooks

My daughter drowned tragically as an 18-year-old girl with autism. They didn’t find her body in the local river until 12 days later and five miles downriver. I have no memory of those 12 days.

Two years later, her father died from a tragic motorcycle accident. I have little memory of my daughter’s accident, except for flashbacks, and the same for her father’s death, service and burial.

My profession was as a singer and performer and somehow, I kept singing for a year after my daughter’s drowning; I’m told I was in denial.

After that year, a darkness started to engulf me that I recognized as depression. This time was the worst I’d ever experienced, and I proceeded to find a psychiatrist. Their diagnosis was that I was bipolar (which later I discovered I wasn’t) and put me on antipsychotics, which after a bit landed me in seven ERs and five psych wards that next year. Each visit we tried a different medication for what they thought was my diagnosis. The last psych ward told me I had untreatable depression, and they recommended electroshock therapy which I agreed to.

Twelve shock therapies later, the miracle I had hoped for had not come. I was able to get out of bed, but the miraculous end of emotional torture did not happen. My anxieties and feeling scared constantly drove me to find out what else this panic, sweaty palms, and flashbacks of my daughter struggling in the water (something I did not witness but had become a real memory in my mind) really was.

Finally, a friend’s son who was a marine, said, “Trish, you’re traumatized; I bet you anything that you have PTSD.” I decided to do a three-week campus therapy course, and there were lots of soldiers and drug addicts attending. During those three weeks, I asked questions and received intense therapy and medication to address my symptoms. I came out hopeful and with a diagnosis that made sense: Complex PTSD. Not just complex from the two tragic deaths, but from a lifetime of pain starting back in my childhood.

My mother attempted suicide twice after my dad left us when I was 12, my alcoholic sister died in a tragic hotel fire and my still living daughter is a 26-year-old brain cancer survivor since the age of three. I have little memory of those days, but vivid ones of the traumas faced even back then.

I’m in trauma therapy twice a week now and I have also been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. This is when something so BIG and horrible happens that the mind can’t handle it, and you fragment it to be able to function. I’ve still got a long way to go, and I struggle daily, but at least I know my diagnosis is correct.

I chose to share my story with ADAA to be able to connect with those struggling and let them know they’re not alone and there is hope through the pain. Don’t give up fighting for your mental health when your gut knows something’s not right either with you, or with the diagnosis you’ve been given, fight to live.