Form and Function: Professional Success During Mental Collapse

Note: This piece was written as an explanatory prequel to the popular two-person post “The Third Wheel”.

As my report was being briefed at the the White House, I was committing myself to the psyche ward at Walter Reed. In that moment, I was both impressively powerful and terrifyingly powerless. It was the ultimate characterization of the polarity of my mental illness.

Five years earlier, at 20 years old and without a traditional college degree, I churned out more than one hundred national intelligence reports used in determining U.S. economic, political, diplomatic, and military policy and strategy. My reports were briefed almost daily at the State Department, the White House, the CIA, and at least a dozen other national and international intelligence organizations.

It wasn’t a total surprise, though, when, a handful of years later, I was given the option of either voluntarily or involuntarily being committed to in-patient psychiatric care at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. My problems with mental instability didn’t start at the National Security Agency (NSA), I knew, but they did come to a head while I was there.