That summer, after two more hospitalizations, Jake’s desperate parents sent him to Mountain Valley in New Hampshire, a residential treatment facility and one of a growing number of programs for acutely anxious teenagers. “It was the depth of hell,” his mother told me. During spring break in 2016, Jake’s father wrote: “Jake was relaxed and his old sarcastic, personable, witty self.” A week later, though, Jake couldn’t get through a school day without texting his mother to pick him up or hiding out in the nurse’s office. He had long wanted to go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but now that felt like wishful thinking.
And the more anxious he felt, the more hopeless and depressed he became. The more school he missed, the more anxious he felt about missing school. He cried, slept, argued with his parents about going to school and mindlessly surfed the internet on his phone. He was hospitalized for four days, but soon after he returned home, he started hiding out in his room again. A few weeks later, Jake locked himself in a bathroom at home and tried to drown himself in the bathtub. An increase in dosage made Jake “much more excited, acting strangely and almost manic,” his father wrote in a journal in the fall of 2015. But none seemed to work - and some made a bad situation worse. It was the first of many medications that Jake, who asked that his last name not be used, would try over the next year. “Well, I basically started having that feeling all the time.”Īlarmed, Jake’s parents sent him to his primary-care physician, who prescribed Prozac, an antidepressant often given to anxious teenagers.
“You know how a normal person might have their stomach lurch if they walk into a classroom and there’s a pop quiz?” he told me. “I was so afraid.” His tall, lanky frame succumbed, too. “All of a sudden I couldn’t do anything,” he said. But he also wasn’t good at verbalizing what he thought he knew: that going to school suddenly felt impossible, that people were undoubtedly judging him, that nothing he did felt good enough. Jake was right - his parents didn’t understand. He refused to go to school and curled up in the fetal position on the floor. But nothing prepared them for the day two years ago when Jake, then 17, seemingly “ran 150 miles per hour into a brick wall,” his mother said. Jake’s parents knew he could be high-strung in middle school, they sent him to a therapist when he was too scared to sleep in his own room. The relentless drive to avoid such a fate seemed to come from deep inside him. He worried about it privately maybe he couldn’t keep up with his peers, maybe he wouldn’t succeed in life.
Not coincidentally, failure was one of Jake’s biggest fears. Though he was not prone to boastfulness, the fact was he had never really failed at anything. It was a lot to handle, but Jake - the likable, hard-working oldest sibling in a suburban North Carolina family - was the kind of teenager who handled things. It happened early in his junior year of high school, while he was taking three Advanced Placement classes, running on his school’s cross-country team and traveling to Model United Nations conferences. The disintegration of Jake’s life took him by surprise.
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