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(bright music) (gentle music) - Men make up half of the population in the United States and nearly 80% of all suicides.

While women report to higher rates of mental health struggles, in Wisconsin, three out of four suicides are men, and more than 50% of them involve firearms.

Why is this happening?

The answer lies in the unique challenges men face, especially veterans and those living in rural or isolated areas.

In a country battling a loneliness epidemic, many men feel disconnected, weighed down by societal stigma and shame that prevents them from seeking help.

Tonight, we hear from three men who have defied these barriers and found a way to heal.

By sharing their stories, we hope to inspire other men to break through the silence, find the connection they need, and seek the support that can change their lives.

These are stories of resilience, stories of strength, and most importantly, stories of hope.

(somber guitar music) (birds chirping) - [David] You can be happy and sad at the same time and often are, and I think that's the fullest human experience really is if you can be in both of those places at once, you know?

- And it's okay.

Both can exist.

- Yeah.

If someone were to ask me right now, "Are you sad?"

if I said yes, that would be honest.

If they were to say, "Are you happy?"

I would say yes, and that would be honest.

My focus can shift back and forth as necessary.

I can just play one chord and it says all that for me.

(somber guitar music continues) Hi, my name is David Bear, and I'm here to talk about my experience losing someone I loved to suicide and about my own struggles with mental health.

- When you first got together and started dating, did you know that she struggled with mental health?

- I did, but not to the full extents of, not the full extent that she struggled.

We had very similar youth and teen experiences.

And a big part of that for both of us was struggles with suicidal ideation, with feelings of not fitting in.

We talked about those a lot, so I was aware of her history, but I wasn't immediately aware of how it was affecting her in the present tense.

Related to her mental health struggles, she struggled with addiction too.

I found out about her ongoing struggles with addiction first.

If she's struggling with using, to me that just meant she's struggling with mental health too.

So kind of at the same time, I would suppose.

She always made it seem like, if she would hurt someone (laughing) else before she'd hurt herself.

So at the time, no, I- - The anger was the forefront?

- Yeah, exactly.

It was rare, at least about her own inner workings, that she would express sadness.

She would express sadness for other people if they were struggling, but for herself, it would come out as she was pissed off at the world.

(somber music) - David and Alma met in New Orleans in 2008 and were married one year later.

After a series of crimes in their neighborhood, Alma became concerned about safety and self-defense.

- We lived in a pretty dangerous neighborhood.

She wanted to get a gun.

I was very much against it.

And what we essentially agreed upon was, I don't wanna see it, you know?

It should always be locked up, put away.

So she had a gun.

And that was that.

- [Elizabeth] One day in 2011, Alma didn't return home at the usual time, and David's phone calls went straight to her voicemail.

David was worried and walked to Alma's art studio to check on her.

- My first thought was she had relapsed and OD'ed, and that's when I put together, oh, well, there's a gun out, she's on the floor, she must've shot herself, and that's what happened.

She shot herself.

(no audio) (somber music) After she died, it reframed my idea of myself in a way too.

Because I've always thought of myself as a very perceptive person, very tuned in.

And you know, to find out you were missing something so major in the person you're closest to, that definitely messes with your identity.

And that is also something I think I probably still am coming to terms with.

What I absorbed myself in was either building my career or, when I wasn't doing that, drinking.

(somber music continues) I was terrified of becoming, of this becoming the defining event of my life.

Because at that time, and in many ways, it did become that.

But at the time, I couldn't see a way that could be the case and it be a positive thing, you know?

I don't wanna become a tragedy case.

And so I did everything I could to be defined by anything else, good or bad.

And that, on top of just also not having a plan and not really putting in any effort to make one, you know, I didn't, that first year, I didn't even see therapy.

I did nothing (laughing) that I was supposed to do, you know?

- [Elizabeth] What was healthy coping like?

- Talk therapy is a big one.

Having a relationship with her spirit, that was a big part of it.

And what I mean by that isn't that I'm, you know, talking to a ghost, per se.

But integrating who she was to me into myself, into my identity now, making her memory about our times together and the bond that we had and not as much about the way her life ended.

(objects whooshing) Meditation, that took a while.

That didn't come right away.

And that has become probably the dominant one that's still in my life.

It still is a major coping mechanism.

Also, creative expression, which is something that has always been a coping mechanism for me.

The memory I've had the hardest time alchemizing in any way has been the memory of calling her mom, having to tell her what happened.

- [Elizabeth] You told her parents?

- Yeah.

That's something that I've just, I don't know how to make that memory a positive one or at least one that has something I can take from it that's positive.

It's, yeah, yeah, that was very difficult.

- [Elizabeth] That sounds incredibly hard.

- Yeah.

- Especially on the cusp of you finding out yourself.

- Yeah, yeah, immediately.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's the hardest part.

(somber guitar music) - [Elizabeth] What would you have wanted her to know that you don't think she knew at that time?

- I'd want her to know that she was deserving of the love that she had and that, anyone who truly loved her, there was not enough relapses in the world to make anyone rather not have her around than have her around.

One thing I've noticed is it's not that people who take their lives think that they're not loved.

It's often that they think that in some way they don't deserve that love that they have, that they somehow have earned that love fraudulently, that if anyone knew the truth about them, they wouldn't love them anymore.

So it's not a matter of going back and telling her I love her, 'cause I know she knew that.

I would just want her to know that love was not, that love was not ignorant of who she really was.

It was because of who she really was.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (light music) (light music continues) - [Elizabeth] For many veterans, the battles don't end when they return home.

Invisible wounds like post-traumatic stress, depression, and traumatic brain injury can linger for years and often go untreated, even though their impact is profound.

Today I'm speaking with two veterans about the care and community that helped them heal.

- My name is Joe Harper.

I am a U.S. Army infantry veteran.

I also help with Veterans on the Fly and help with the Courage Foundation.

- You were in the Army?

- Yes.

I was a mortarman, and we had a, we fire, we had a four-deuce mortar, which is 4.2 in diameter.

For the four-deuce, it's a big explosion down there.

It's a, you know, a 34-pound round (mortar thundering) going down the tube and coming back out.

And when you drop the round like this, you're taught to follow the round down with your arms and your head, so you're clear from the where it goes off.

But the explosion happening right next to your head.

(mortar thunking) But you know, almost five years, it was time to get out.

You know, infantry is, it's a hard life.

(somber music) You know, I did my time.

I did what a lot of veterans do.

You know, they get out.

I met my lovely wife, got a good union job, had a family of three awesome boys.

Everything seemed to be going great for, you know, 20 years.

But then, start realizing things, you know, started having memory issues.

I would forget guys that I would been working with for 25 years.

I would forget their names.

And I would just talk to 'em an hour before, and I remembered their names, you know?

It was a lot of short-term memory issues I was having.

I had a friend one time, he was an Iraqi veteran, also a mortarman, so we sorta connected.

And one day he comes up to me, he goes, "Dude, you've got TBI."

I said, "What do I got traumatic brain injury from?

You know, I didn't go to war.

I didn't get blown up."

He goes, "Well, okay, but you got it."

You know, 'cause one thing I've, you know, you did a little research, and come to find out that those rounds that I was dropping in the Army actually were like concussions.

Every time your round go off, it was a concussion.

- Hold on.

(mortar thunking) - [Joe] And you know, when you're dropping 30, 40, 60, 80 rounds a day, you know, that's a lotta concussions in one day.

- Did you ever get checked for concussion protocol or anything like that when you were still in service?

- No, you know, that was the '90s.

Concussions were nothing, just work through it.

You know, people started to worry about 'em 'cause of the football players.

- Mm hmm.

- That really shed a light on what concussions are about.

And you know, with the football players, their concussions were collisions.

You know, you hit something, your brain hits inside of your skull, and you know, that causes damage.

Where blast injuries is the blast wave goes through and rattles the brain.

So that's a different type of damage.

- Mm hmm.

- But still damage.

- In those 20 years, looking back on it now, were there symptoms that you now realize you had?

- Oh yeah, brain fog was definitely one of 'em.

Balance, I really noticed my balance, especially, you know, I liked being outdoors.

I struggled in a canoe because of balance.

I thought I was just getting old, but it wasn't.

It was the TBI.

So then I read one time where, you know, fly fishing can help veterans and stuff like that.

So I went and bought a cheap outfit and went and tried it.

I found an organization in Madison, Wisconsin called Veterans on the Fly.

You know, I don't know these guys, but I'm gonna go try it.

I'm still struggling this whole time, and then they were patient with me, which was, I'm thankful, you know?

- Struggling with the anxiety?

- The anxiety, the depression.

You know, I was the grumpy old vet that nobody wanted to talk to 'cause he's just grumpy.

Everything you just, you know, you just bottle up and push it down and work through it, but it still makes you grumpy.

- [Elizabeth] Joe eventually went through a TBI assessment and was recommended for intensive outpatient treatment.

Every day for three weeks, he worked with psychiatrists, therapists, and doctors to confront the symptoms of his traumatic brain injuries that had been affecting him for the last 20 years.

- And that was hard.

It was good.

As I say, it was the second best thing I ever did in my life.

First one was finding a woman that would put up with me.

(Elizabeth laughing) - And you had never had any mental health treatment before?

- No.

- Okay.

So this was really the first time you were acknowledging that, A, you really were struggling with depression.

- Yeah.

- It's diagnosed.

And you're getting help.

- Yes.

- [Elizabeth] After completing the three weeks of intensive treatment, Joe connected with a fellow veteran through the Courage Foundation to continue working on his symptoms.

- My name is Dave Weber.

I'm a Navy veteran and I currently work for a nonprofit called the Courage Foundation.

And we help veterans with one-on-one peer coaching, peer support, and we help veterans that are struggling with post-traumatic stress and some TBIs and mental health stuff like depression.

- When you were working with the veterans, what do you see as far as their symptoms of PTSD?

- They'll struggle being isolating, isolating themselves.

Another thing is being hypervigilant.

So in the military, depending on their job, a lotta times their survival's dependent on being hypervigilant, noticing subtleties in a situation, where something just moved or somebody's coming up behind me.

And then that same hypervigilance that saved them in the military, now you're in the grocery store and you're still hypervigilant.

You notice something move fast behind you, or something's happening ahead of you, and all of a sudden, the mind just starts racing.

And so this avalanche of emotion, they can't handle it and they have to leave their groceries in the store and just leave or do or say something they regret.

And so focusing on that is something that I really like to zero in is helping them recognize what calm feels like before, so that when they notice the tension coming on, when they notice they're becoming hypervigilant, having skills to be able to get themselves calm before it becomes an avalanche of emotion.

So I would say isolation, hypervigilance is one.

Another one is just adjusting to this new body, you know, an injured body, what can they do now?

Another one is regret.

It's like, there's a lotta people that wish they had done something else or tried a program and didn't get into it, or had so much identity wrapped up in that particular, you know, position and rank and everything else, and now they don't have that.

And what do you do?

- How much of that did you have to overcome personally to be able to do this work?

- I, yeah, everything.

I had to overcome all of it.

And I think that's why, for me, I'm so passionate about it, because it literally saved my life.

And so now I can, when I share that, like I can hear somebody talking through it, and I understand what it feels like to really feel like the lowest person on earth, and like how to be, you know, go from feeling completely worthless to taking that first step.

(light music) - Dave includes many different aspects of peer support to tackle the complex struggles of veterans.

He gave me a glimpse into some of the calming techniques and breath work that he teaches in his workshops.

- All right, so your eyes closed, seated comfortably.

(light music continues) Exhaling out of my mouth just to help myself relax.

Slowly inhaling through my nose, just taking a moment to notice the sound and feeling of that breath.

So allowing myself to settle down and noticing a little tension, wiggling my fingers, wiggling my toes, have my feet nice and flat.

So this is just practicing getting settled.

Slowly opening my hands, kind of like letting a butterfly go.

So we'll be cycling back and forth between tension and relaxation to feel that difference.

So let's begin by exhaling in three, two, one.

And exhale out of your nose or mouth all the way out.

(light music fades out) (somber music) - [Elizabeth] What message would you have to any vets that are early in their journey of healing?

- [Joe] I know a lot of vets, a lot of men think, you know, going for treatment shows weakness.

It don't.

It actually shows strength.

You know, it just, you're recognizing that, hey, I got something wrong with me.

Let's go get it fixed.

(somber music continues) (gentle music) (dog barking) (door clicking) (gentle music) (feet thumping) - I think that there's a major fallacy when we say that men don't like to talk about mental health or that nobody wants to talk about men's mental health.

There's some barriers there.

There's the stigma aspect.

There is the deeply, the deep-seated feelings of, to be vulnerable is to be weak.

But I think we're talking about it now more than ever.

And I just think that we're kind of up against it sometimes with the world in which we're living.

I'm eager to talk about mental health.

For me, not talking about it is more exhausting, trying to disguise it and hide it and pull myself up by my bootstraps, so to speak.

To me that's more exhausting than if I actually do open up and I'm honest about it.

(gentle music fades out) - [Elizabeth] Chris Heimerman has been a friend for years, as well as a mental health advocate in the community.

He's always been open about his own mental health journey and joined us to share his story.

- The first time I went and I saw a counselor, I was the guy walking through the parking lot.

I was working as a hockey broadcaster at the time.

Talk about a sport rife with masculinity.

- Yeah.

- Perhaps a fair amount of toxic masculinity.

But I remember walking through the parking lot with a hoodie, and like the hoodie drawn up and like down because I didn't want anybody to see that the voice of the Lumberjacks (Chris and Elizabeth laughing) was going to see a therapist.

- [Elizabeth] Yeah.

- I felt like I would've been outed at the time.

- When do you feel like you first knew that you were struggling with mental health?

- I have these blurry memories of being a child, like an elementary-aged school child, and just wondering why I felt so sad about either nothing or something incredibly trivial in the grand scheme of things.

So I mean, when I look back, I can see that I've been dealing with it pretty much for as long as I can remember.

And I think my response was to be the class clown.

I think my response was to do my best to always be upbeat, to always keep people laughing.

In terms of when I, I mean, 'cause really, what we're gonna start talking about now is like how I dealt with it, which was in a very unhealthy way with substances, and my drug of choice was alcohol.

And I've been thinking about this, despite all of the times that I've shared my story and stuff, I can identify when it became a problem, and it was when I began hiding it.

(somber music) - [Elizabeth] You were working, you were married, you had your girls, twin girls that you were raising, training for Ironman.

I mean, that just sounds like, (laughing) it sounds like you would almost be too busy to drink, you know what I mean?

- Yeah.

- But really, you were drinking to stay that busy, I guess.

- And in a way, I was getting myself up at 5:00 in the morning the next day to get in my run to sweat it out.

- Oh.

- Or dare I go one step further and say that I was doing it to punish myself.

Like my relationship with running was not healthy at that time.

- [Elizabeth] Okay.

- So yeah, but it really was, like you look at this guy's life, editor of a newspaper, a beautiful family, doing marathons, it's like, yeah, put him on the cover of "Men's Health," right?

(Elizabeth laughing) And in reality, I was suffering in silence.

- [Elizabeth] That suffering in silence, you know, we say that term, that phrase a lot, but what does that feel like when you're in it?

- Being trapped.

That this is it for me.

That I'm always going to be hiding this thing, and I'm just never gonna be free of it.

And I'm just grateful that, on one fateful Friday afternoon, I decided that enough was enough.

And it's kind of in a twisted way.

I decided enough was enough and I tried to drink myself to death.

And I don't know what it was about sort of standing at the brink and realizing that and messaging my wife, and telling her, "I need help.

I'm drunk.

I'm need help."

And that was when we got me into rehab.

- [Elizabeth] Chris spent two weeks in rehab in the spring of 2019.

For the next few years, he continued to struggle with emotional highs and lows, as well as getting divorced in 2023.

- When I found out just how hard it was gonna be to love myself and how hard it was gonna be to actively, actually grieve my divorce and grieve my marriage, I kinda hit rock bottom a little bit.

And I ended up in the hospital and in an intensive outpatient therapy program.

And during which, I got a new diagnosis of bipolar, which, when it was pointed out to me and explained to me what it is, it was like, "Wow, yes, that makes perfect sense."

Like it's a diagnosis that fits like a glove.

That excitement was very quickly replaced by the fact that I got put on a new medication.

We took another medication out of there, and I'm just leveled.

You know, I'm tired.

And I miss my energy.

I miss my zest for life.

And I simply have to stay the course on what we're doing, because I know that I will turn the corner.

By the grace of God, I have parents who know about my stuff, and I was able to call them and share what was going on.

And my dad came down and hung out for a few days to keep an eye on me.

And we started the recovery process.

(somber music) Come on, come here, baby girl.

- [Bruce] I'm Bruce Heimerman, his dad.

(person laughing) - She's so good.

- [Elizabeth] What was it like even just now hearing us in the other room talking about Chris' story?

- Memories.

I remember a lot of what happened, but some of it I didn't know about.

You know, so, yeah, it kinda touched a nerve a little bit and just, it hurts.

- Sure.

- Knowing that he suffered.

(somber music continues) Sorry.

- [Elizabeth] It's okay.

- No, I don't know if I was enough.

- [Elizabeth] If you were enough of what?

- I was around enough, if I was there for him enough.

- You were always there.

You were always there for me.

I never felt a lack of having a dad.

I just learned really early on how to like hide how I was feeling.

And that's a regret that I have of my own too- - Yeah.

- Is that I didn't speak up and advocate for myself- - Yeah.

- When I was younger.

- I found him one, when I came down just when he said, in June, I walked in the house, and he was sitting on the couch, I think, if I remember right, and we talked a little bit.

And just looking at him and hearing him, he was lost.

And when I looked at him, I thought, "My son is broken."

And I didn't know how to help him.

- You just being here was huge, though.

Having you here to keep an eye on me was absolutely tremendous, Dad.

- I wake up in the morning and I thank God for giving me another day.

So that's what kinda makes it so hard is because I don't understand.

I didn't understand.

I'm starting to.

I'm learning.

And I'll continue helping him.

- Mm hmm.

- That statement, that commitment to learning, when I hear that, it warms my heart.

- Yeah.

- 'Cause then I know that, you know, you're doing the work (laughing) as well.

(Bruce laughing) Then I know I'm not in this bunker alone.

- No, you're not.

It's not about being weak.

It's about helping.

It's about saving somebody.

- Thanks Dad.

- Yep.

(arms thumping) - Love you.

- I love you too.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - Remember that you don't have to fight this battle alone.

Find more resources at milwaukeepbs.org.

To reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, dial 988 or text HOME to 741-741.

(gentle music) Thank you for joining us.

(bright music) (light music) - [Narrator] Funding provided in part by The Charles E. Kubly Foundation, committed to improving the lives of those impacted by depression since 2003.

(light music fades out)