Depression led local runner to get help

By Bryan McKenzie

Published: June 22, 2008

A hundred years ago, when human relationships were free of carefully crafted propaganda and peer pressure to purchase proper designer duds, emotions were easier to moderate.

Unfortunately, the agrarian-based methods of dealing with life’s vagaries and vicissitudes fall flat in the face of the psychological impacts of a high-tech, high-stress and over-dramatic modern society.

In short, “suck it up, tough it out, be a man” doesn’t make it anymore.

Dan Bayliss knows that. He’s known it all of his life, and that fact was brought home hard four years ago when a good buddy died in Iraq.

“It really affected me. I tried to talk with my dad about it and he said, ‘That’s life. You have to deal with it’ and I couldn’t,” Mr. Bayliss recalled recently. “At one point I was walking down a hallway and it seemed like everything was bending around me and I couldn’t hear people. I didn’t go to work for about five days and I wasn’t eating much even though I was running a lot. I thought I was crazy for a while.”

Not crazy at all

The graduate student and marathon runner wasn’t crazy. He was depressed. He had been for some time, maybe since he was 9 when his grandfather, with whom he was close, died.

“I remembered in high school having this inferiority thing going. I had no direction. I’d always felt like an imposter. In college I felt good about graduating and getting good grades for all of about one day and then that feeling of accomplishment was gone and filled by self-doubt,” he recalled.

Running marathons made him feel great and successful. The next day, however, he was back down with doubt and sadness. Then his friend died.

“I’d look at the things that were bothering me. There was a constant anxiety and depression and I tried to ‘get over it.’ I was thinking that I’ve got problems with financial aid and my friend lost his life. That made me feel worse,” he said. “When this hit so hard, I thought ‘I’m an educated guy. I gotta find the answer here.’”

Finding balance

Because he couldn’t ‘just get over it,’ he found a good counselor and an appropriate medication to balance a lifetime of highs and lows.

“It was work. We’d talk a lot of things out and I finally felt like I had my head above water. I’d felt like I was at the bottom in the deep end, before,” he recalled. “I finally got to feeling good enough long enough that I could see where I was, whereas before, I was just in a cloud all the time.”

Mr. Bayliss understands that he’s been depressed most of his life and that it’s hard work to maintain equilibrium. Hard work, as the agrarian saying goes, never hurt anyone.

“It doesn’t just go away, it takes effort,” he said. “There’s no one type of person who gets depressed. It happens to everyone and it’s good for people to understand that. It’s not good to feel [depressed] all of the time.”