Ivan: A story of friendship and mental illness

When I heard about Virginia Tech . . . and Aurora . . . and Sandy Hook Elementary . . . and the Navy Yard, my heart broke for all of the victims who died so senselessly. And I thought about Ivan. My childhood friend, my role model, and protector. A popular, gifted student and the best athlete I’ve ever known. A magnetic personality with an infectious smile and laugh.

It’s been ten years since he killed himself.
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In my first memory of Ivan, I’m looking through the fence of what would become my childhood home. I’m six years old and small for my age. I’m wearing a helmet because of birth defects that had yet to be corrected and Coke bottle-thick glasses for a lazy eye. I’m shy.

My family had just moved to a new house which backed out on to a large green space, where on that day two boys my age were playing soccer. After awhile they noticed me silently watching and one of them came over to talk to me.

I won’t pretend to remember what exactly we said to each other. But I know that was when I made my first friend in my new neighborhood, and kicked off what would be countless hours of sports, video games, bike races, swimming pool trips, firecracker experimentation, and stupid daredevil stunts. In a word : fun.

It was only the next fall, when I started at the local elementary school, that I realized I had truly hit the jackpot when Ivan befriended me. From the beginning, it was clear that he was the most popular kid in the school. He was fun, smart, funny, and the dominant force in any recess game.

When I look back on those years, I have to resist the temptation to turn Ivan into a mythical figure, but it’s hard.

I remember the day he won four straight dodge ball games . . . the whole time hopping on one foot while holding a bandaged and badly sprained ankle off the ground.

I remember the youth soccer game when he scored from half field. Twice.

I remember when we were playing football behind our houses and some older kids wanted to take our ball. Ivan said they could have it if they could get it from him. After repeatedly running into fences trying to catch him, they gave up and left us alone.

I remember the time I was foolishly serving as his goalie while he practiced penalty kicks. The first shot came so fast that I couldn’t even get my hands up before it whizzed past me. When I tried to save face by complaining that the sun was in my eyes, Ivan helpfully ran into his house to get me some sunglasses so we could keep playing. He broke those glasses with his next kick.

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When middle school came around, we didn’t hang out as much. He had started playing for competitive soccer teams and spent most of his weekends and after-school time at practice or playing in tournaments. We still frequently walked to and from school together, but gradually fell into different peer groups.

Unfortunately for me, middle school’s more rigid social hierarchy wasn’t kind. While I didn’t have the helmet anymore, I hadn’t grown much or become more outgoing. I was sickly and I was still wearing the thick glasses that made me an appealing target for hormonally-charged bullies.

It wasn’t an everyday thing, but I got more than my fair share of unprovoked cruelty. For a long time, I just took it. It was usually just verbal taunts—sticks and stones, and all that. If I didn’t react, I figured the bully du jour would get bored and move on to someone else. It almost always worked, but not with one. We’ll call him Eddie. He was persistent, and for most of a school year he taunted me any chance he got.

Finally, one day in gym class I’d had enough. During a basketball game he leveled one insult too many and I shoved him as hard as I could. I must have surprised him because I managed to knock him down. Then he got up.

I was going to get my ass kicked.

As he came charging at me I braced myself for impact. Then, from over my shoulder, I heard a firm,steady voice say: “Is there a problem Eddie?” Eddie stopped. “No. It’s cool, Ivan.” Ivan patted me on the back and we went back to our game.

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By high school, Ivan and I would see each other around school and the neighborhood. We’d chat every now and then, but we were definitely running in different circles now. He was an All-State player on our school’s state champion soccer team. I was an editor on the school newspaper. We had mostly different friends and took different classes.

But during our senior year we ended up both taking Advanced Placement U.S. History. It was like nothing had changed since we first met. We sat next to each other in class, joked around, even got in trouble as co-organizers of a “strike” to demand that class be moved outside on a particularly nice day. Our classmates didn’t have the same commitment to the cause that we did, and our teacher was not amused. But we were. Together. That meant a lot to me at the time. It means more now.

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After high school, we went to different colleges, but over the holidays we’d get together for a movie, a cup of coffee, or some beers. Catch up, have a few laughs.

In the end, we both decided we were interested in pursuing careers in public policy and got in to graduate programs on different coasts.

In the summer after my first year, I came back home to do an internship and was staying with my parents. One June day my mom told me that she’d seen Ivan out walking with his mom in the neighborhood. I hadn’t realized he was home, figuring he was doing his internship somewhere near his school.

A few days later we were at a neighborhood bar, and had fallen into our usual easy conversation. We hit on politics, mutual friends, music, sports. The big news from that night was that he had decided to drop out of school and do some writing. Even after he explained what he planned to write about, I didn’t really get it. Still, I thought, hey, gutsy move. Go for it, man.

Eventually it got late and we got the check. We only had twenties and so put them on the table and waited for the waitress to come make change. Ivan tried to get her attention, but she didn’t see him and went to the back of the restaurant.

“Did you see that?” he asked, annoyed and a little angry. “She blew me off.”

“Nah,” I said. “I don’t think she saw you.”

“No. She definitely blew me off.”

“We’ll catch her next time around,” I said.

“I’m going to leave her a note so she knows why she’s getting a shitty tip.”

“C’mon man. Don’t do that. I’m sure she didn’t see you.”

“Yeah. I guess. You’re probably right,” he said, calmer now, smiling.

After we paid up, he gave me a ride back to my house. He was going back to California the next day. So, we shook hands and said our goodbyes.

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In August, I headed back to school. My life was as good as it had ever been. I had made a lot of close friends in my program and had just started a relationship with an amazing woman who I would marry a few years later.

On August 19th, I got an email from Ivan. He was responding to one I’d sent a month earlier asking how his writing was going. He apologized for not getting back to me sooner. Things had been hectic. He’d moved back close to home to live with his brother. It was taking awhile to get organized, and he was “trudging through some old family issues that had never really been dealt with.”

He asked how things were at school and closed by saying he hoped all was well. I don’t remember if I responded to him.

On September 13th, I got another email from him. It was a mass email—he was changing his email address. He was upbeat. He joked that he didn’t need to apologize for the mass e-mail since technology made it possible to send a message to a lot of people without having to “lick as many stamps as people,” and anyway, he “hated the taste of stamps.”

In a sort of non sequitur, he closed his email: “As Dave Anderson (one of the folks getting this email) said: i’m dragging myself, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. have a good one everybody—ivan.”

Even as an adult—almost twenty years removed from the shy, sickly kid I was when we first met—I felt proud that the guy I’d always looked up to had quoted me in an email to all of his friends.

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Five days later, my dad called. Ivan was gone. He’d committed suicide. My parents, in shock themselves, had found out the day before from Ivan’s mom, but needed time to pull themselves together before calling me.

All I remember saying—screaming, probably—was, “NO!” There was no possible way that HE did THAT. He was Strong. He was Happy. He had tons of friends, a loving family. No Way. NO FUCKING WAY!!

But he did do that.

Over the next few weeks, I learned how hard things had gotten for my friend. “Family issues” turned out to be his code for mental illness. In the days before he ended his life he was briefly hospitalized and diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. In the preceding months, his actions had become increasingly erratic. He gave his car away to a stranger. A noise at a mall food court startled him; he threw a chair. The police had been involved.

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When I hear about tragedies like those at Virginia Tech, the Aurora theater, Sandyhook, and the Naval Yard, the killers’ actions sicken me. The needless loss of life is horrifying. The suffering of the victims’ families is devastating. At those times, we can’t imagine how such things can happen.

That’s when I think about Ivan. Not because he did anything that even remotely approached those horrors. He didn’t. Not because his suicide, as fundamentally life-changing as it was for me, could match the scope of the tragedies dealt those communities. It couldn’t.

But I think about the signals I missed, the signs I didn’t even know to look for. I think about a mental health system that, in the end, was unable to help my friend cope with his illness even with his family actively pushing to get him help.

This is where I’d put my proposal for foolproof mental health reform, but I don’t pretend to have one. I just know that we as a society can and must do better.

Since graduate school, my work has focused on advancing the use of rigorous research to improve policy decision-making in other fields, and the main lesson I’ve drawn from it is that we know far less than we think about what works to address our society’s problems. As is true in many other areas, our mental health system likely underperforms because many of its services and policies have never been rigorously evaluated, leaving us in the dark as to which of them are effective, ineffective, or even harmful. If that is to change, we must recognize the limits of our knowledge, and commit to a systematic, scientifically rigorous effort to identify those strategies that most effectively serve the mentally ill.

While such an effort should include figuring out how to spot and treat people like James Holmes and Adam Lanza before they lash out, these young men shouldn’t be the face of mental illness in this country. We need to remember that they are far outnumbered by the Ivans who need help finding solace, whose worlds have become endlessly confusing, frightening, and chaotic.

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I’ll never know exactly why Ivan took his life. Were his thoughts too terrible to face anymore? Did he do it in a moment of clarity, distraught that he could no longer control his actions?

What I do know is that he was a chance victim of faulty brain chemistry, a wonderful, gifted friend who tragically suffered from a terrible illness and died far too young.

When my son gets older, that is what I will tell him when he asks about his name: Lucas Ivan Anderson.

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The author is the Vice President of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, though the views expressed here are his own. This essay was posted with the blessing of Ivan’s mother and brother.