In the fall of 1998, I had a very mild heart attack—so mild, in fact, that I didn't know I'd had one. I had experienced no chest pains and I wasn't aware of any other symptoms. The Emergency Room staff at Baylor Hospital in Dallas took blood, and a few minutes later, the doctor came to me and asked, "Has anyone ever told you that you've had a heart attack?" That was the first I knew about my heart attack.
I wound up having triple bypass surgery, spent four days in cardiac ICU, and was then moved to my own room. Before I felt ready to go home, a nurse came in and announced that I was going home later that day. Apparently my insurance company had a policy that, no matter what kind of surgery a person had undergone, they had to be released once they were 48 hours on oral medications or pay the rest of the hospital bill themselves.
Before leaving the hospital, one week after my bypass surgery, I was given a three-page questionnaire about depression. At the time, I wondered why they would be asking me about depression. As far as I was concerned, I wasn't depressed. I felt much better than I had before the surgery. I was happy that my blockage had been caught and remedied BEFORE I suffered a major heart attack. I was looking forward to going back to work and, most important (to me, anyway), I WASN'T SAD.
I completed the survey, confident that many of the questions really didn't apply to me.
Shortly thereafter, my cardiologist prescribed an 18-session course of cardio-rehab, designed to get me back to the best health I could now achieve. The first thing the Landry Center rehab staff did was ask me to fill out a different three-page questionnaire on depression.
I went through the same explanation with them, but to no avail. So I filled out the questionnaire and began working.
At the end of the last session, they asked me to fill out yet another three-page questionnaire on depression. This time, I didn't waste my breath on explanations. I filled out the questionnaire, went home, and prepared to go back to work half-time, 20 hours a week. I was also planning to finally finish my B.A. degree during the rest of my convalescence.
One year later, I still hadn't done anything about finishing my B.A. But I had a discussion with a good friend who was a psychologist. She told me for the first time that being depressed didn't necessarily have anything to do with being sad. That was a revelation. She gave me an article to read which helped me realize that I WAS depressed, and it was manifesting as an inability to overcome inertia and get to work—even on things I believed I really wanted to do.
Once I realized the true nature of my problem, the fix was pretty easy, requiring only a re-commitment to finishing my degree before my 50th birthday, creation of a list of required activities and a calendar for their completion, and a daily reminder of what had I had to do that day and what activities were not allowed to get in the way.
I then finished the last 36 or 37 hours for my degree in about two months!
The lesson here is that marketing managers, marketing directors, and Chief Marketing Officers must watch their staff for behavioral changes. Sometimes those changes can reflect burn-out. But other times, those changes may be an indicator of depression, and that is often an easily-fixable condition.