Even CEOs Get the Blues

Burguieres' experience as a top executive who not only battled depression but is comfortable talking about it is especially unusual because he is called on to help many other CEOs. As a result, it opens a window into a rarefied but closely guarded world—perhaps the last bastion of denial of human vulnerability—where any perceived weakness can carry a high price tag. Indeed, the day Burguieres embarked on recovery Weatherford's stock plummeted, losing more than 10% of its value.

Three months of hospitalization and a slew of antidepressants didn't help much. But a chance encounter did. A month after his return, out to dinner with his wife, Burguieres was spotted by an acquaintance. "I saw the story in the paper," John Sage opened. "What happened? Did you have a heart attack?"

"I'm suffering from something you're not familiar with, John. I'm suffering from clinical depression," he replied, and he still isn't sure why. He didn't know Sage all that well, and he hadn't told anyone else. But he is sure that "John Sage saved my life." A stunned Sage suggested they talk privately. The two men settled into a corner of the restaurant while their wives went home.

A star linebacker from Louisiana State turned Houston real estate entrepreneur, Sage confided he was indeed familiar with clinical depression—he was fighting his way out of one. "But John," Burguieres stammered, "you can't be depressed. You were an All-American football player. You're tough." Sage, whose severe depression followed the double whammy of business reversals and the brutal murder of his closest sibling, was equally confounded. "But Philip," he countered, "you've got all that money and that gorgeous house!"

The cultural mythology surrounding success challenges even those who seem to have it all to understand how they can find life so empty they dream only of ending it all. But corporate executives, and especially entrepreneurs, may in fact be even more vulnerable to depression than others. It's not that times are suddenly tough for CEOs, who at this cultural moment enjoy as much trust as used car salesmen.

More likely, a special combination of forces impinges on them, from within and without. The forces are particularly durable, deeply embedded in the men—and it's mostly men—and world they operate in.

The very qualities that propel them to success can arise from an extremely dark place in the psyche. The tendency to build their identity on achievement makes a downturn unbearable. The modern American corporation is structured to give CEOs wealth and power but also crushing isolation. What's more, there's something in the nature of success that makes being at the top dramatically different psychological terrain from getting there. And the American dream that wealth transmutes success into happiness always ends in bitter disappointment. "You're the same you, just in posher surroundings," says psychotherapist Terence Real, head of the Real Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and author of I Don't Want To Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression.

Make no mistake; modern CEOs are generally an outstanding breed. They're smart. They're charming. They have extraordinary coping skills. That's how they got where they are. But the orientation to action that so distinguishes them can work spectacularly against them when problems arise, preventing them from getting help or even recognizing they need it, ultimately pulling them into a depression so subterranean it resists treatment. "They're human doings, not human beings," says M. Gene Ondrusek, Ph.D., senior psychologist at the Scripps Center for Executive Health in La Jolla, CA.

The morning after their restaurant encounter, Sage called Burguieres. He was a little further ahead on the timeline of recovery and felt that might give Burguieres something to grab onto. Burguieres found him to be "the first person who knew what I was talking about." For the next year and a half, the two battled cultural myths and personal demons shoulder to shoulder; they were true blues brothers. They spoke every day by phone and met several days a week in the office Weatherford provided Burguieres, who was still board chairman. They dubbed it "the depression suite."

"We didn't think we'd ever do anything significant in our work lives again," recalls Sage. "We felt that even if we had something important to do we wouldn't be up to it. We feared we'd be sidelined all our lives. We were living our worst nightmare. At the time we didn't realize the good coming out of it; we were getting better but we didn't know it."