How Do You Mend a Broken Brain?
In the spring of 1970, I was seventeen years old and a senior in high school. The Bee Gees released a new song titled “How Do You Mend a Broken Heart?” That song resonated deeply with me, and I still love the song fifty-six years later.
At age seventeen, I didn’t realize I had been suffering from PTSD for eight years. I did know that my emotions were extremely fragile. I thought I had a broken heart, but what I really had was a broken brain.
On the baseball diamond, I had a coach who spoke to me abusively. He humiliated me by putting me alone on the diamond before a game and hitting grounders to me at third base so hard that I would inevitably miss one. When I did, he screamed at me as the opposing team and spectators looked on. It angered me so much that after he would hit me a ball, instead of throwing it back to home plate to our catcher who was standing next to him, I threw the ball at the coach as hard as I could, forcing him to jump out of the way. I completely lost control of myself. In anger, I quit the team.
When the fall of 1970 came around, I found myself at one of the most prestigious and challenging engineering schools in the nation, Rose Polytechnic Institute (now named Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology). Rose had the smartest engineering students from around the globe. I went from being a student near the top of my class in high school to a college student near the bottom of my class. I was quickly overwhelmed. When I couldn’t solve a calculus or physics problem, I flew into a rage and pounded my desk with my hand – so hard that the entire bottom of my hand would turn purple with bruising. I completely lost control of my emotions.
This behavior chased me into my marriage and even with the birth of two beautiful daughters, I was unable to manage my emotions appropriately. After twenty-eight years of marriage, I went through a divorce and my life, as well as my family’s lives, were in shambles. A mental health counselor suggested that I might try picking up a camera again. I hadn’t seriously used a camera for forty years, because a camera reminded me of my mother, who was shot to death when I was nine years old – she had taught me how to make photographs as a child.
So, how do you mend a broken brain? Maybe by picking up a camera? It sounds like such a ridiculous idea, doesn’t it? I decided to give it a try, and over the course of the next twenty years, amazing things happened to me. I began to recover memories of my mother that had been erased since the time of the murder. My entire being was slowly transformed. I was able to control my emotions. I became steady, predictable, and it would be safe to say, normal. It dawned on me that making photographs had a direct connection to how I felt, behaved, and to what I remembered.
– James Rice, Co-Founder, Fotophase
