When Kody first opened up to me about what was really going on, I worked to help find him the right treatments to help him feel better. Getting him to get help was incredibly challenging. He had been told by many people in his life that depression and anxiety was just weakness and he should just get over it and feel better.

I knew he needed actual medical treatment for a real medical condition, so I pushed for him to do something. I was sure that if I just got him to commit to getting treatment, everything would be okay. I was lucky enough to not have any experience with people with mental health problems prior to this, so I really thought it would be like going to a doctor for anything else; go in, get meds, recover.

It turns out that going and getting treatment for depression and anxiety is not that simple. Even when I finally got him to call and get help, he first had to get an appointment with a primary doctor. Appointments were months out, and even once he’d seen one, they just referred him to a physiatrist who didn’t have appointments for three more months. It clearly wasn’t particularly urgent to them to get things started.

I still find it concerning that when he told someone he was having intense suicidal thoughts, their reaction was to set him up with an appointment months from that moment. I remember thinking that it felt like they were taking a huge risk on someone who’d barely been talked into going to get help. By that time he might decide not to go, or he might be dead.

Once he’d seen the psychiatrist and been given a prescription, I thought that’d be it. The first pill he tried gave him really bad side effects and didn’t help with his mood. The second one he tried deepened his depression. They then prescribed lithium and continued to increase the dose even though he told them it gave him headaches, apathy, and even more suicidal thoughts. They thought he’d do better at a higher dose. None of these proved to be beneficial treatments for depression.

After a few different combinations of medicines, he dropped his psychiatrist. We tried another direction. He’d heard about genetic testing that was available to find the efficacy of certain medications based on genetics. We found a doctor who would do this. This was also the first doctor that was willing to talk to me.

I remember she pulled me aside and said she was worried about him. All of her usual arguments for why a person should choose something other than suicide didn’t work on Kody. I wasn’t surprised by this, but the words amped up my concern. I’d already tried reasoned argument, he had answers for everything.

The genetic test found some specific meds that should work better. Kody tried them and combined them with a range of supplements she recommended. For a while everything felt better, he told me this was working.

Later, he gave me the truth. He’d wanted it to work, had pretended that it did, but the whole time he continued to feel he’d be better off dead.

It was only after his first suicide attempt (at least the first one he told me about) that he told me that this treatment wasn’t working. He’d read information online on how to use your car to pump carbon monoxide inside and die fairly painlessly. Apparently he’d tried this for a few hours and only gotten a headache. We joked often that his car was too efficient to kill him. Joking was all we could do to deal with the fact he’d actually tried to die.

At this point, I really started to loose track of appointments he had and treatments he tried. He went to work less and less frequently, eventually quitting so he didn’t get fired. He tried acupuncture, lots of alternative meds, more pills, and even marijuana to get a handle on it. He had a series of different jobs for a few weeks or days at a time. He had no insurance coverage and refused to get on mine.

Somewhere in here, he started to blame me for his depression. He claimed he’d been fine before he married me, which wasn’t true, but at the time felt real. We argued constantly, since he couldn’t hold a job and I was only able to make house payments due to the savings I had been putting aside. Meanwhile he spent hours trying to kill himself in our garage, disabling the garage door after I left for work and trying a variety of ways to kill himself. He bought a shotgun and would sit all day in his car with it pressed to his head.

Everytime I came home, I was terrified of what I might find. But I had to go to work to keep a roof over our heads. If he wasn’t home when I got there, I worried about where he was. Sometimes I drove around, checking his work parking lot, and then about everywhere else I could, all the while scared that I’d find a body. He’d come back saying he’d been at work, when I knew it wasn’t true.

After he moved out, I completely lost track of what he was doing and how he was seeking treatment for depression. We were still friends, but he locked me out of that part of his life. He seemed to really improve. I thought his idea that I had caused his depression was true, because he was doing so much better without me.

It wasn’t until the middle of 2020 that I got any information on what he was doing in terms of treating depression. Between the time we divorced and then, he’d lived with his sister, but he’d been kicked out, he said because of political differences, but I knew that was a lie. He struggled with homelessness and lived in his car.

At the begining of 2021, he told me his New Year resolution was to actually do something about getting better and to make his life worth living. He went to the VA and it seemed like things might be getting on a better track. For once, he really appeared to try. There were new meds, regular therapy appointments, and an apartment that they paid for so he wasn’t homeless anymore.

There were still times where depression showed through and in the end nothing they tried worked still. He was even hospitalized after trying to use pills to kill himself only a few weeks before his final attempt. I know now that this was the turning point where he gave up hope.

Kody’s Story has no happy ending, unless you consider there is some happiness in the end to the pain. No one will ever know what Kody might have done with his life or who he may have become. He never found the right treatment.

I wonder often if they just misdiagnosed him from the onset. I always believed that Kody was bipolar. I asked many of his doctors about this as a possibility. Most agreed it was possible, but wanted to try other things first. No one took me seriously.

I’ve heard since, that this is a common misdiagnosis. If so, no matter how many anxiety and depression meds were tried, they couldn’t have cured him. I think about moments of mania alongside the depression that I witnessed over the years and wish that someone would have listened to me. It isn’t worth worrying about now as I’ll never know the truth.

If anything can be learned from this story, it’s that we have to do something about the way mental health is approached in the United States. Long waiting periods, trial and error with prescriptions, and the trouble with depression diagnosis itself means people fall through the cracks. Kody isn’t the only one to slip through and deep into the darkness of depression.