By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer
He may not have a degree in psychiatry, but Damien Harris’ lived experiences have made him an expert on mental illness.
Harris has been diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder. He knows what the inside of a padded room looks and feels like. He has attempted suicide more than once.
“I’ve always had issues with depression since I was a young child,” says the Inland Empire native, who has lived in Sacramento since the late 1990s.
“In the 40 years I’ve been on this planet, I’ve dealt with a lot more things than most people have,” Harris adds.
He almost died at birth. His brother passed away one Christmas and his parents’ marriage unraveled soon thereafter. Harris says he had an abusive stepfather who tried to force himself on him. Moves to vastly different environments were also traumatic. He was exposed to gangs and gunshots in East Oakland.
“I’ve always lived ‘’hood adjacent,’” Harris says. “Not to mention I was always the ‘weird kid.’ I was always a target for people, whether it be ridicule or just touching themselves or whatnot. Not to mention I had a speech impediment. I had a lisp and self-confidence issues. “I wanted to be a very bubbly, upbeat person, but life was like, ‘Nah, we’re going to whup your ass and educate you about reality real quick.’”
Harris would learn about the barriers and boundaries that can come with one’s skin color, living in Canyon Lake, an affluent, predominantly white, gated community in Riverside County.
“I knew about racism by the age of 10,” Harris says. “I was one of three Black people … one was my mother.”
Blacks who moved to Canyon Lake, he says, typically left expeditiously. His own time there was “hellaciously painful.”
“It wasn’t safe for me,” he says.
Harris recalls being escorted to school due to harassment at the bus stop. He had a gun pulled on him by a girlfriend’s uncle. It was around this time that he began to suspect he may be bipolar.
“Nobody knew how to diagnose me,” he says. “I knew I had anger problems and I had a lot of emotional issues. I’d be upset. I’d be sad, but I also attributed that to the fact that my brother passed away and my family was broken up and then my family was gone. The things I knew and grew up having were ripped away from me quite quickly.”
Harris’ “first real outburst” happened at age 11 after his girlfriend broke up with him on Valentine’s Day. He remembers two neighborhood boys teasing him about it and calling him the n-word.
“Something in me snapped that day. I went to my kitchen, grabbed a butcher knife and chased the boys down the hill,” Harris says.
He pursued them despite warnings to never run with sharp objects and the fact that the hill was quite steep.
“I didn’t care,” Harris says.
One of the boys’ dad greeted him with a shotgun, he says, ordering him to leave. Harris returned home and locked himself in his room. Officers came knocking at the door. Fortunately for him, the situation didn’t turn tragic as many others involving Black and brown youth in the midst of mental health crises have. Harris wasn’t arrested, but the police seriously suggested that his parents seek help for him.
“They put me in therapy,” he says. “But it didn’t work.”
Minor Adjustments
Harris says he was the product of “two very intelligent” but “non-social” parents. Their tendency to stay to themselves was transferred over to him as a young person.
“I had to teach myself, number one, how to be social; and, two, I had to work on not taking everything personal because when you’re bipolar, things hit you differently. Things hit you a little harder than normal. A bad day for you can be earth-shattering for me.”
Harris says he spent 10-15 years not fully understanding what he was feeling or why. As a young Black boy, he felt that doctors were just throwing out diagnoses, and medication, to keep him out of their faces. He was put on ritalin, a central nervous system stimulant often used to treat attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
“It was basically crack,” Harris says. “I was already a crazy, wired, wild child, so that didn’t really help too much.”
Alternatively, what worked was caffeine from coffee given to him by his stepmother and peppermint and ginger tea from an aunt who was a naturalist.
“It helped a lot,” Harris says.
The depression diagnosis came when Harris was in middle school.
“Bipolar proper came when I was 25-26, when I got involuntarily committed to a mental institution.”
California law allows a person to be temporarily committed if they are perceived to be a threat to themselves or others. The term “5150” is also used in urban slang to describe a “crazy” person. Harris spent weeks in a local facility after an escalated episode.
“I was coming out of a really toxic relationship with a young lady,” Harris says. “[We] had been off and on again, a really unhealthy situation. One night I just kind of gave up and gave her the apartment. She had a daughter so I didn’t want to put her out like that.”
He went to stay with his mom.
“I was just really down and something told me to give up on it,” Harris says.
This would be his third attempt at taking his own life.
“The first time, I’m literally in the bathtub and just slit my wrist. I did it the wrong way and ended up surviving. But this time, I was kind of over it. I was tired of feeling like this. I was tired of feeling unwanted, unappreciated, like I was a burden on everybody. I was like, f*ck it, whatever.”
Harris grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two bottles of painkillers and downed all three. He sat around the house, watching wrestling on TV and listening to blues music until he blacked out.
“I woke up mad that it didn’t work,” Harris says.
He called his then-girlfriend, wanting to “figure things out.” The couple were sitting in his car talking, Harris recalls, when things started to feel as if they were moving in slow motion.
“My eyes started getting really heavy,” he says. “Out of nowhere, the lights just were off.”
When they came back on, Harris was in the ER at Kaiser Morse.
“They had an IV in me and they’re feeding me chalk and the doctor is asking me 8 million questions.”
Harris was cognizant to some degree and remembers his girlfriend leaving and taking his car, a Subaru Impreza Blackstar. Enraged, he ripped the IV out of his arm, intending to go after her. He cursed and threatened to kill anyone who stood in his way.
“They tried to stop me and failed miserably,” Harris says. “I should have been brought up on assault charges. Luckily I was not.”
Harris says he was so hyped up with adrenaline that neither the stun gun nor the dart the officers used phased him. He was taken down eventually and woke up strapped to a gurney.
“I forgot what they said, the actual medical name for Tylenol and aspirin, but they found a sh*t ton of that in my body and a large amount of alcohol. After that, they officially diagnosed me with bipolar disorder. I believe it’s type 2.”
Bipolar disorder, formerly called manic depression, is a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings that include emotional highs, known as mania or hypomania, and lows, known as depression. With bipolar 2 disorder, or bipolar 2, a person has had at least one major depressive episode and at least one hypomanic episode.
“I knew something was wrong with me,” Harris says. “I just didn’t know what it was. I just thought I was a really overly emotional person.”
What Brings You Here
Harris has been to therapy off and on for most of his life. Some mental health providers, he felt, simply went through the motions with him. He admits to trying to turn the tables on counselors in the past. Some of Harris’ relatives have described the local gamer as being “too smart for his own good.”
“If I feel that I’m smarter than you or I feel like I can play a game of mental chess and beat you, I’m going to test that water and whether I’m going to be a habitual line stepper,” Harris says.
For him, sidestepping has been a matter of survival.
“The best way to avoid something is by completely deflecting it. I’m a black belt at that; I’m a master at that. Here’s the irony: I got that from my mom. Most mothers are very nurturing and hugging and they’re like, ‘Hey, you need to let your feelings out.’ My mom would always deflect and go, ‘Oh, you think your life is bad? You think what you’re going through is bad? Here’s what I’m dealing with.’ It became a metaphorical pissing contest.”
His father, on the other hand, pretty much ignored things, he says. Until watching a YouTube video about former Canadian wrestler and mixed martial arts fighter-turned sportscaster Mauro Ranallo’s battle with bipolar disorder.
“That movie was so damn good that my father called me and apologized. He was like, ‘I get it now. I understand.’ We literally talked for two hours about it.”
His father asked him what medicine he was taking, what happens when he has manic episodes and if he knew what triggered them.
“That kind of helped our relationship grow a lot better,” Harris says.
The two share a love of cooking and perusing cookbooks for new dishes to try.
“I have a first edition of Julia Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ in my damn kitchen,” Harris says. “Not a lot of brothas can say that.”
Adding meditation and music to the mix also helps Harris keep dark thoughts at bay. He enjoys playing video games with friends across the country. He also has tried his hand at wrestling and stand-up comedy. Harris is starting to share his personal mental health journey out loud, at the urging of those closest to him.
“Check on your people,” he says. “People fake being OK … I wake up every day fighting. ‘Do I want to wake up or do I just want to go to sleep forever?’ It doesn’t matter how many pills I take. It doesn’t matter how many therapists I go to. Every day I wake up and go, ‘Let me get my gloves on, it’s time to go in the ring,’ because you’re fighting with yourself.
“If you know someone that has bipolar, talk to them, try to coax them to open up a little bit. Try to help them tear that wall down a little bit. I promise you the biggest fight is not with you. It’s with the person in the mirror.”
Harris has four friends who do that for him. They’re more like brothers. They worry because he’s going through a divorce. They told him it was OK to grieve the loss of his uncle and a beloved pet. They not only encourage him to seek help, they offer to go with him. He gives them advice about their issues too.
“Part of it is if I can help them with their problems, I don’t have to think about mine,” he says.
His brothers don’t let him slide either. They not only check in, but check him when they feel he needs it.
“Deep down inside, I’m very appreciative of it, that someone cares,” he says. “There are a couple of times where they’ve talked me off the cliff.”
“Head Space: Exploring Black Men’s Mental Health” is an OBSERVER’s special series.This project is being reported with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2024 Ethnic Media Collaborative, Healing California. Senior Staff Writer Genoa Barrow and The OBSERVER are among the collaborative’s inaugural participants.