Mental Health: The Taboo Concept for Marines

The Personal Story of an Infantry Marine, Father, and Brother

by Stephen Corson

How do you start to write about something that requires so much delicacy? When something is so hard to talk about, how much easier is it to write about? I’ve struggled with these questions for four years now. I’ve decided to write about my struggles in the hope that it helps at least one more individual other than myself. Mental health, especially among men in the Marine Corps, is a hard topic to talk about. It wasn’t until this year that I had leaders above me share their mental health experiences with large groups of Marines with the hope of spreading awareness. That’s almost 12 years of service without ever hearing my leaders come out and discuss mental health in an open format. Mental health has been an issue for decades, with a myriad of groups trying to bring awareness to it, yet it’s still such a sensitive issue that we have brothers and sisters taking their lives every day due to them deeming that [that] decision equates to an easier life.

To help spread awareness, I have decided to briefly write about my experiences in the last four years where I have struggled, with a little back brief on the years before that to add context. I would need to write an entire book to encompass everything I believe led to my experiences, but I will try to make this awareness post more digestible. My experience does not occur in a vacuum, as I know my feelings are felt throughout the total force in one way or another, in addition to very close friends of mine.

I enlisted into the Marine Corps on May 11, 2011. Like most Marines, I come from a broken family with my mother raising me and my two siblings, which aids the development of mental health issues according to the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) concept.

To me, my heroes were those who had fought for our great country in the tremendous number of battles throughout OIF/OEF. I had decided at the age of 8 years old that I would enlist in the military and held to that my entire life. I wanted to join the Army until my sophomore year of high school before I ultimately decided to enlist in the Marine Corps due to the specific culture they fostered. The purpose of talking about who my “heroes” are is to highlight the type of mindset I’ve had since I was a child. These guys didn’t talk about mental health, they didn’t care about their injuries. What mattered to them was patriotism and fighting for America, and more specifically, the guy to their left and right (the brotherhood), and I wanted to be one of them more than anything. People feel different ways about the wars and their purpose, but all I’ve ever focused on was the Americans who have given their lives in pursuit of what our government deemed necessary for liberty and freedom to continue.

Fast forward to the beginning of COVID and I had gathered a tremendous amount of experience and adversity throughout my Marine Corps service. Train hard, deal with injuries enough to proceed with training but not enough to take me out of the “fight” and away from my unit, and more specifically, never was my operational tempo slow enough for me to fight my mind, so mental health was never an issue. To me, I took after my leaders when I was junior; be disciplined, be hard, make decisions without emotions, be tactically minded as that is what would save lives when needed, etc. Discipline, respect, and mission accomplishment were what mattered. I killed it at these facets of what I, and those before me, deemed important. Always at the top of my courses, I grasped knowledge quickly, and always put mission accomplishment at the top. I had friends who lost their lives, but in an operational unit, you don’t have time for grieving as there is always another training mission, etc. to focus on. Unbeknownst to me, this would take its toll on me.

COVID hit and as we all know, the world came to a standstill. No longer was my brain occupied with the 1000 tasks I needed to complete on a day-to-day basis. No, it was that time when I started to dwell in my mind far too often, which ultimately turned into a slippery slope. I was going to college full time, 16 credit hours a semester at the time, in addition to being an instructor for an entry-level schoolhouse for Marines. When COVID happened, I soon started to find myself overwhelmed by things that hadn’t overwhelmed me before (school). I started battling myself and questioning all kinds of decisions I had made, in addition to experiences that I had had. It started small to begin with, but by 2021, I was in a very dark place mentally, but no one seemed to realize. I found myself struggling, questioning why I was alive, and deciding that if I were to leave this earth, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Very few things in life brought me joy, none at the time to be exact, and I developed a knack for drinking bourbon to try to numb how I was feeling. And I draaaaaaank, I would go through one or two bottles a week, and this went on for about a month until I decided that it only made me feel worse and I stopped (thank goodness I don’t have an addictive nature). 

In the summer of 2021, I went through Infantry Unit Leaders Course, a rite of passage for infantry Marines, and the course that says, “You made it” in the infantry community. I struggled with mental health this entire course and it showed, but because the Marines I was there with, and the leaders of the course, didn’t know how I was, they just thought I liked to keep to myself, and this was noted on performance exams. Nevertheless, even after dealing with a brother passing away after a fall during the middle of the course, I graduated second in my class but felt no excitement about that at all, or real accomplishment, although it should have been an extreme sense of accomplishment. Instead, I had a “celebration party” with my sister, wife, and two friends where I drank a bottle of Avion Reserve I had gotten for my birthday, before losing my bearing and crying for the first time since my dear friend Faith passed away. Still then, I don’t think my sister, wife, or friends understood why I was so emotional, but the alcohol forced me to have my emotional guard down and let those emotions flow.

I played with the idea of getting help for a while but was always so afraid that it would upend my career, take me away from being able to shoot guns or limit my future opportunities because of some diagnosis. I ultimately started to get help at the end of 2021, but to no avail since I was to PCS soon to the Marine Corps Shooting Team. The shooting team helped save me in a way. The practice of competing with a weapon brought me joy for the first time in a long time and it gave me an “out.” A way to not focus on all the noise in my head and instead focus on a way to be in the medal bracket every time.

I got to the team in February 2022 and still had issues, but again, none that the Marines below, adjacent, and above me could notice. I went through a season of competing which gave me an “out” for the noises. At the end of 2022, I could no longer go any longer and decided to seek medical help for my mental health. I was ultimately diagnosed with anxiety and depression and was given an SSRI to regulate myself.

A setback to the 2022 season of shooting was me destroying my left ankle ligaments on the range. I went all year competing because I refused to give up my chance to prove I belonged on the team and that they had made the right decision bringing me on. In December, right before Christmas I saw a surgeon and had surgery scheduled for February 2023 to fix my ankle. Surgery was successful but that confined me to my couch for a literal 30 days with next to no movement. For 90% of 2023, I struggled to get back to my previous performance levels after not being after to do anything for 5 months. This caused me to suffer mentally and forced me to seek mental help again. The doctor upped my medication dose to what it currently is, in addition to prescribing a fast-acting anxiety med to help regulate anxiety attacks which would happen on a more than not consistent basis. That brings us to today, where I still struggle with mental health but on a level that’s able to be managed. I acknowledge that I need to get into therapy which is on my soon-to-do list but one that hasn’t happened yet. 

Mental health is a nasty beast. Mental health, in addition to my beliefs, has cost me a lot recently in life. I’ve struggled with the fact that I have had friends take their own lives over mental health struggles, friends who I had recently talked to, and I never spotted the signs. I’ve struggled with the fact that I never got to say goodbye to a best friend of mine before she lost her fight to cancer, I’ve struggled with the fact of why I can’t be better than what I am. Most important of them all I guess, is I lost my relationship due to many reasons, one of them being my issues with mental health and the decisions I made because of it.

With all of that being said, I implore people, especially men, to talk to one another about mental health. So often it is seen as a weakness, although more people than we realize are dealing with the same issues. It takes 1 person to open up to make other people feel more at ease to open up about themselves. Mental health shouldn’t be taboo, it should be a concept brought up in weekly conversations so there is more awareness and acceptance of it. For anyone who knows me personally, I make jokes about mental health, in addition to a myriad of other things, daily. It’s a way for me to cope, but I will never be one to not help someone in need when they are having a rough go at it. I’ve been told multiple times that I am intimidating, or hard to talk to, but in my head that isn’t, or shouldn’t, be the case. I have values and a specific nature I believe in the Marine Corps which makes me act a certain way, but I am always willing to talk. I would plead with any of my friends or those who see this to seek me out and talk, about anything, as I truly have a love for helping others out when they need help most.

To conclude this, it’s not enough to say, “It’s okay to seek help.” We, as human beings, have to become comfortable talking about our own experiences so those who aren’t comfortable about their circumstances, become comfortable about it and talk to someone. Again, it took me 3 1/2 years before I sought help. Mental health issues do not go away on their own, as much as we want them to. That 3 1/2 years ultimately cost me a marriage and hundreds of hours of happiness. That shouldn’t be something anyone goes through alone. Let’s do more as leaders and share our own experiences.

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Stephen is a current active-duty infantry Marine attached to the Marine Corps Shooting Team, Weapons Training Battalion Quantico where he is the operations chief for the team.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.