North Bay police constable Steve Taylor’s life sits in ruins, a result of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcoholism.
Taylor has been caught three separate times and charged with impaired related offences. He’s tried suicide, not once but twice, seen his family life destroyed and is presently serving 45 days in jail.
He spoke exclusively to BayToday to tell his story, not because he is looking for sympathy, but to raise awareness of PTSD and alcoholism. This is part one of a two-part story. The second will run tomorrow.
“Most of the people I have met who have PTSD do have legal consequences. We aren't well adjusted happy people,” Taylor admitted while sipping a coffee at a downtown shop.
He believes his state of mind has everything to do with his job…a front line first responder…a North Bay police officer, and he sees fellow officers suffering just like him, but hiding, afraid to admit it.
“We see all kinds of things. A lot of things we see don’t get reported to the media so the public don’t know what we’re dealing with.
“I’ve struggled with being around dead children. Suicides, sudden death investigations, sexual assaults. There are so many things. Every day is different. You never know what you are going to see. One minute you’re having coffee, and the next you’re covered in blood helping paramedics load somebody into an ambulance.
Taylor, now 40 and suspended without pay, says he was diagnosed with PTSD long before he was charged, and in fact he first complained about symptoms back in 2005. Two psychiatrists told him his symptoms were on the high side.
The 15-year veteran was diagnosed with “complex” PTSD which is trauma, after trauma, after trauma, layering itself and never being dealt with. It’s not just a single incident like being assaulted or robbed.
“It’s like putting a whole bunch of weight on your back, then finally you just can’t deal with it anymore. It becomes too much.”
The trouble with complex PTSD is that there are so many traumas, that you don’t know what will trigger an episode, so it’s hard to avoid them.
“I could be sitting there with my daughter at night reading her a story and all of a sudden something brings me back to a situation from work where I was in the fight or flight mode, on high alert. My body is protecting me, telling me to be on guard...that there is danger, and I go from being completely calm in what should be a tender moment with my daughter, to big eyes, pounding heart, and the hair on the back of my neck standing up, and I just want to fight. It’s a totally inappropriate response to what is actually happening.”
Not that many years ago, officers that were involved in horrific incidents would go for beers after work to try and forget what had just happened. Then it was back on duty the next morning, business as usual.
“I’ve been on 15 years and when I came on that was still the mentality. Whether it was a good or bad day at the office, you’d go for drinks. That’s how you dealt with stuff. Now anyone who has come in the last five years seems to be different. They’re not drinking, or if they are, it’s not like we did 12 years ago.”
It was trying to cope that way that led Taylor down the slippery path to alcoholism.
“I was always a social drinker growing up, but never was in trouble because of drinking. Just drinks on the weekend or on a special occasion. But what happens is you use the alcohol as a medicine. The alcohol will help to a degree in the beginning.
“If I’m having a hard day and a lot of anxiety, worry and hypervigilance, I know if I have a couple of drinks that it goes away…right away. The switch gets flipped off and so that’s how it started. I started drinking innocently with one or two drinks after a shift just to help me sleep and calm down, but it just progressively got worse.
“I went from self medication to dependence to full blown alcoholism. It became my only go-to coping skill to deal with the PTSD.
“It (PTSD) started to get worse. It gets stuck in your head and the addiction kicks in. You think its going to help me again, but it only makes things worse. At the end it was chaos, insanity.”
In Taylor’s case, the alcohol came into play because of the PTSD.
But even when he was charged the first time he didn’t see it as rock bottom.
“That’s the crazy thing about it. That’s what I should of thought. But I think part of the problem is being a male, being a police officer, accepting the fact that you’re sick, that you’re an alcoholic, that’s the hardest part. Getting to that point where you accept it. People could be telling me, showing me all this evidence, ‘Steve that’s another impaired, Steve you’re getting a divorce’, all these things, and I’d be thinking ‘It’s not because of me, it’s not because of my mental health’. I’d say they’re crazy. It’s insane, the evidence is there and I chose to deny the symptoms of both the PTSD and the alcoholism.
“The second time it happened you’d think that would have been enough. People said ‘Steve get help’ but I don’t want to have to admit that I have these problems and I feel it affects my ego, my reputation at work and at home. That was the problem, getting to the point of accepting this because I’m in charge and if I don’t get help I’m not going to be around.”
Thoughts of suicide crept into his mind.
“Absolutely. The night before I was arrested last time in July I was going to kill myself. I couldn’t do it anymore. It’s not because I want to die, I don’t. I have kids. I have great reasons to be alive…I have a great partner, great family, great friends, but it’s so exhausting being in a vicious cycle of the addiction and PTSD. At my very worst, which was six months leading up to my last arrest, I was drinking up to 60 ounces of vodka a day. Not sleeping, not eating, I would hallucinate, I would lose track of time. I’d have to go through my phone and check text messages to find out what the hell I’d been doing. It was a general feeling of defeat and hopelessness.
“Even going back to before I got arrested the first time I can remember all my friends from work at my house on the lake. They all brought their families and we had a big barbecue and were playing in the lake. I remember standing there looking at everybody, looking at my house and thinking, I should be happy but I’m not. I hate my life; I hate my job.
Part of the pressure Taylor felt was to not let his fellow officers down.
“I don’t want people that I work with to trust me with their life. It puts that seed of doubt in their head, ‘I don’t want him coming to back me up on my call. He’s crazy. What if he has a breakdown? What am I going to do with him?
“I wouldn’t blame them for thinking that because I’d be thinking the same thing too."
And the fear of being labelled weighed heavily on Taylor as he struggled to go to work every day.
“One thing I learned very quickly and I heard it a lot my first year, whatever you get labelled you will stay with that label. If you are labelled a coward, you’ll be a coward your whole career.
“My career was taking off. I was doing really well. From the outside it looked like I seemingly had everything. I was living the perfect life…but I wasn’t.
Taylor willingly admits that his alcoholism and PTSD had a huge affect on his family life. He’s now separated, something he doesn’t attribute solely to alcohol or PSTD.
His eyes start to water when he speaks about his family.
“My family is torn apart. I didn’t have a relationship with my kids for a while. They’re 10 and seven and they didn’t trust me. They didn’t want to be around me. I think they were afraid of me. I was a mess and that should have been enough.
“My kids aren’t talking to me and they mean everything to me. I love them more than I love myself and here I am doing these things and at any time these things could end my life.
“I’ve been told more than once that I shouldn’t even be alive, that the alcohol consumption was off the charts. That should have killed me. How I’m still here today I don’t really know.
“There’s been two suicide attempts. Suicide ideation (suicidal thoughts) have definitely affected my family. At least now I have a relationship with my kids again. I’m in recovery. It’s slow but there’s 10 years of damage there.
“But right now I’m sober, I’m abstinent…I’m not drinking.
“After the third one I hit rock bottom. It’s crazy. The first one should have been rock bottom. The second one absolutely should have been rock bottom but it wasn’t. The third one was.
“I remember I was laying on my couch that morning and I was done. I don’t know who I was talking to but I yelled the word ‘help’ out loud...and this is God’s honest truth, within 30 minutes my (AA) sponsor was at the door, he said ‘Let’s go to a meeting’. Since July 15th I’ve been in recovery. That was definitely a turning point.
So for the past year Taylor spent 21 weeks as an inpatient at Homewood Health Centre in Guelph, one of the largest mental health and addiction facilities in Canada.
The first five weeks he attended strictly for addiction and learned that PTSD and addiction live in the same part of the brain, you can’t treat one without the other. He got sober.
“Then all of a sudden the PTSD symptoms went through the roof and they were worse than ever because I wasn’t drinking.”
He didn’t know what was wrong, he didn’t know at that point he had PTSD.
“Nothing seemed to fix it. I took medication but nothing seemed to help, so I went back to alcohol because I know it will stop those feelings. The wheels came off the bus.”
So he went back to Homewood and did another eight weeks that combined his addiction and PTSD.
Taylor thought he had been helped by talking about the trauma and incidents he had seen as an officer that had put him in the mental state he was then.
“I left there after telling them all these things and left there thinking I was going to get better, but it seems I walked out of there after ripping open a big scab. It was all fresh again and I was worse than before I went.”
In the month leading up to his third and last admission there were struggles.
“I was not doing well,” he admits.
So in January it was back to Homewood, this time into the Post Traumatic Stress Recovery Program for eight weeks.
“I was under the direct supervision of a psychiatrist and she tweaked my meds which changed everything for me.
“That’s what so frustrating about all this. I’ve finally acknowledged that I’m sick, that I need help, but the meds they give you don’t start working for six weeks, so you’re still suffering. If the meds don’t work, they have to try another combination and another six weeks of suffering.
“Admitting you need the help is one thing, but getting through the diagnosis, to the meds to where I am today, was hell…truly, it was hell."
