CHANGING the Game Plan
By Jean West Rudnicki
“It’s almost life,” jokes Philip Burguieres, Vice Chairman of the
Houston Texans recounting the young franchise’s meteoric rise
followed by a spiraling crash and burn during its first few seasons of
play. “We started off with a bang as everyone in Houston knows. We
got better the second year. And much better the third year. The fourth
year was a disaster. We only won two games. We went way up, and way
down. So we changed everything, and things are getting a lot better.”
His optimism shows.
Burguieres might have been referring to his own life in many ways.
He is intimately familiar with its ups and downs, and understands the
critical importance of making changes. His personal
battle with depression has been chronicled in
Psychology Today and Newsweek, as well as a host of
other venues, and will be among the stories featured
in a series of PBS specials slated for production in
August.
Burguieres rocketed to success early, earning the
title of youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company at
age 35, and he transformed Cameron Iron Works, a
$100 million company, into a $2 billion enterprise
during his twenty-year reign. He had embarked on
an equally successful venture with a second company
in his fifties, when he suddenly plunged into a deep,
debilitating depression that drove him to the brink of
suicide. For nearly two years this talented and gifted man who had led
a company of more than 7,000 employees worldwide, struggled to live
a marginally functional life, considering it a good day if he got out of
bed and made it down the stairs, and not knowing at the time if his life
would ever be any different, or if he would even have a life.
His passion, and part cure, became a campaign to help de-stigmatize
mental illness; delivering the message that mental illness is an illness,
not a character flaw; that individuals who suffer from its widely
divergent forms, ranging from depression to schizophrenia to paranoia,
are born with a genetic predisposition to the condition, much as others
might be born with a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.
Burguieres first encounter with depression occurred in 1990 while
CEO at Panhandle Eastern, a natural gas pipeline company rife with
problems when he assumed leadership. About a year into it, mounting
job pressures began to affect him, causing the initial onset of clinical
depression. One day, with little warning, he passed out in the office.
A well-qualified and prestigious psychiatrist later diagnosed him with
“situational” depression, and told him to recover he needed to change
jobs. That seemed an easy enough fix. Burguieres quickly arranged
for a successor and left the company in good stead,
taking several months off before signing on as CEO
at Weatherford International, an oilfield services
company.
“I believed him,” he says of the doctor and the
prognosis. “It’s what I wanted to hear.” In truth, just
like a newly diagnosed diabetic, what Burguieres
actually needed was a massive lifestyle change, but
it would be several years and a near fatal encounter
with suicidal depression before he would come to
that understanding.
As in the first instance, the depression’s onset at
Weatherford occurred quickly over about a threeweek
period, except this time it was severe – so
severe that Burguieres contemplated suicide as a way out.
“I understand perfectly why people commit suicide,” he says. “When
you’re going through depression, you’re in such a hole – you can’t see
any way out. You’re not thinking rationally…your brain has to be
thinking totally irrationally, and crazy…you’re ill…you’re sick.”
