Even CEOs Get the Blues

It is a measure of the esteem in which Burguieres is held that when the fog completely lifted more than two years after his Midwest sojourn, he was still an A-list force on the Houston business and social scene. He was on numerous boards. He was advising on mergers and acquisitions. He was instrumental in helping secure the National Football League's newest franchise, the Houston Texans, a $200 million business of which he is now vice chairman.

And he found himself richer than ever. For the first time he owned his full humanity.

He could recognize beauty around him, as in, say, a sunset. He could enjoy an afternoon of golf. "If I took an afternoon off 10 years ago to play golf, I didn't feel good. I really wanted to be at the office," he recalls.

Most of all, he took an interest in other people as people, and it started with John Sage. Day after day in the depression suite, they forged a bond of empathy out of shared psychic pain. They discovered what men who are bred for competition shun from an early age—that people connect not by parading their strengths but by confiding their fears, their disappointments, their hurts, as well as their hopes and dreams. Only afterwards did they realize it became the instrument that changed their lives. It both restored the capacity for intimacy and expanded their identity as human beings who have value beyond an earnings report.

Burguieres reconnected with his family—and he got love back. In this he was most unusual; much credit goes to his wife, who endured decades of loneliness without becoming terminally bitter. "I made the effort to change," says Burguieres. "I started paying attention to my two kids. The good news is they embraced it."

More typically, observes Frank S. Pittman III, M.D., psychiatrist to Atlanta's elite, the wife and children become alienated through inattention. The men "substitute giving their family money for their presence. And when they begin to catch on that their family would just as soon not be bothered with them, they resent giving the money and try to control things. She gets madder and madder as he gets richer and richer."

Then, when he needs a human connection, she isn't there. "If he doesn't have his marriage to go back to—not the trophy wife but someone who knows him as just a human being—he's alone in the universe. More than anything else," stresses Pittman, "what pulls someone out of depression is the sense of not being alone." The evidence from the lab is clear: intimate bonds constitute our natural state; in their absence neither brain nor body functions normally. In all mammals, isolation begets depression.

With the help of a top Houston psychiatrist ("CEOs know all the tricks," says Burguieres; "they go at 6:30 in the morning and they pay in cash") Burguieres became aware he had feelings, not all of them wonderful, and was able to identify and address them instead of burying them with work. "There are two kinds of managers," he says, "those who are successful because they're aggressive and goal-oriented, and those who are successful because they fear being unsuccessful. I was successful through fear of being unsuccessful. I never took a vacation. There was guilt associated with pleasure. I didn't want to be like my father, who had lost his job when I was a child, stayed home and struggled to fill his days."

But motivation coming from a negative source also relentlessly generates anxiety and stress. and turns people into compulsive perfectionists. They often feel drained, rarely get a sense of satisfaction from doing well. And in the long run they are at risk of burning out, as Burguieres did that morning in 1991 when he collapsed in his office.

"I was a classic workaholic," he says. "I had a mistress. I'd lie to my wife. I'd sneak off on Sunday afternoon and tell her I was going to run errands, and I'd go to the office for two hours. I'd come back, and she'd ask where I'd been, and I'd say, 'Well, I stopped by the grocery store and I had a bite to eat.' But the mistress I was running to was my job."

It is a common belief that the upper, and still highly masculine, echelons of corporations constitute an emotionally arid moonscape. "The CEO's position is very isolating, very focused on performance, and it's a very tough, aggressive world," says Real. "That supposedly makes it a very unemotional world. But in fact there are tons of emotions running around. They just don't get dealt with." Instead they go unrecognized, and belittled, as if our entire thought apparatus weren't embedded in and contingent upon emotional states.

Eventually, the anxiety and the guilt Burguieres so strenuously concealed with work exploded in depression. Unaddressed feelings will do that. "I suffered from guilt about everything," he recalls. And the anxiety began declaring itself in a way that couldn't be missed—in panic attacks.