A happy ending
Chris Nihmey, a teacher and author, knows firsthand what it’s like to live with mental illness. He’ll tell his story to Ottawa area schoolchildren this fall, JULIE BEUN writes.
Something wasn’t right. It should have been, but deep down, it wasn’t. All around him at Holy Family School, Chris Nihmey’s family and friends sipped champagne, chatted and celebrated the launch of the first book in his co-authored children’s series, A Quarter Past Three.
He should have been happy that late June day in 2001, happier than he’d ever been.
But then again, he also knew something that few others did. He was hiding three serious mental illnesses in plain sight.
Although not yet diagnosed — that would come soon enough when his world collapsed around him — Nihmey, then 26, was living with a debilitating trifecta of serious mental health issues: bipolar disorder, which affects four per cent of the population, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) — the world’s fourth most common mental illness — and generalized anxiety disorder (GED), suffered by five per cent of people over a lifetime.
‘I want to inspire people to change their attitudes and give hope to people who are suffering. In high school especially, a lot of mental health issues start to come up. The more we talk about it, the better kids feel about bringing it up.’ CHRIS NIHMEY Author of Two Sides to the Story: Living a Lie
Until then, Nihmey had managed to cope — barely. But this time, within weeks of his greatest success, the handsome, jovial teacher who had visited 35 schools in less than three weeks to tout his book would become so withdrawn and depressed, he’d spend the next two months refusing to emerge from his parents’ basement.
Fast forward 12 years and while the 39-year-old has had further manic up periods and horrific downs, there’s also a happy ending.
He has survived, indeed, even thrived enough to pen Two Sides to the Story: Living a Lie, a sort of memoir/educational book aimed at cutting away the stigma of mental illness.
What’s more, this year he’ll be doing a book tour and multimedia mental health awareness presentations throughout Ottawa’s elementary and high schools. His book, published by Chipmunkapublishing.com, will be available at Coles and Chapters bookstores by Sept. 1.
“I want to inspire people to change their attitudes and give hope to people who are suffering,” says Nihmey, who still works as a substitute teacher. “In high school especially, a lot of mental health issues start to come up. The more we talk about it, the better kids feel about bringing it up.”
It’s a pivotal message for a man who spent most of his life hiding behind a mask of normalcy. An eager baseball and football player as a child, he was an engineering student and later studied human kinetics and psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Although he graduated at the top of his class, he had developed obsessions and anxieties, constantly asking questions and talking very quickly to mask his fears.
“I was obsessive about notes,” he recalls. “I had them all over my room in residence. … I literally had to climb over them to get to my bed.”
But it wasn’t until he landed his first full-time teaching gig in 1998 at Saint Thomas More Elementary School that the true depth of his problems surfaced.
“I felt so terrible at times that every lunch hour, I’d lock myself in the staff washroom, lie on the floor and stay there for 45 minutes until the bell.”
By 2000, his mental health was so affected, he had to give up full-time teaching. Even so, few people outside of his immediate family knew of his battles. True, he wrote his book and worked as a substitute teacher, but as he slipped into bipolar disorder’s frenzied, manic state — characterized by erratic behaviour, lavish spending, a messiah complex, hyper creativity and ecstatic spirituality — his mind kept him busier still.
“A lot of things happened in those months,” he recalls. “I never slept. I’d go to Toronto for a week because I thought people were chasing me. I walked the streets and met homeless people. I was spending so much money, when I was done my high, my credit cards were maxed.
“I’d spend $18 on a Lone Star dinner and throw down a $100 tip. I was buying people things all the time, often strangers, so I’d avoid my family because they’d try to stop me. …
“My mind was open and clear and I felt great. I was doing inventions, joined two pyramid companies, started my own ministry to help others with their faith,” he says, laughing. “If you can imagine that. In April of that year, I hit my peak and thought I was the second coming of Jesus Christ.”
Within two months, however, his first real low hit and with it, suicidal thoughts. A diagnosis of bipolar disorder by his doctor was later confirmed by Ottawa Hospital Civic campus psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Boyles, who started him on lithium to treat the illness.
The day of the diagnosis, Nihmey says he returned to his parents’ house, “darted into the basement and stayed there for two months. It was immobilizing to see my friends moving on with life, getting married, buying houses, having kids.”
Yet even as the depression lifted with the support of his parents and his deep faith in God, Nihmey was overwhelmed by anxiety and obsessions, notably with hell and hitchhikers who he would constantly stop to pick up, regardless of how inconvenient it was to him.
Once, on driving home from Toronto, he became obsessed with helping two young women whose wiper blades had broken in a storm. After offering to help, then driving off, he became so convinced they’d be stranded, he got on and off the highway four times searching for them. In the end, the four-and-a-half-hour trip home took nine hours.
Between 2005 and 2009, he struggled with hypomania, an extremely active and volatile state of mind that would hit every few days. During those periods, he lived in fast-forward, speeding everywhere, talking constantly and quickly, being argumentative and rarely sleeping.
Over time, however, life and his mental state stabilized enough for him to write his latest book, which was published last February.
“It took me five years to write, which is a bit longer than normal, but I was doing it during a tough period.
“But I’ve never felt healthier than I do now. Health can happen, but it takes faith, hope, never giving up and perseverance, love and strong support, courage, discipline, responsibility and, of course, a lot of hard work,” he observes. “There’s only one other thing that will take you to the next level … and that’s you.”