|
CEO battles depression, encourages parity in insurance coverage
Philip J. Burguieres began leading Cameron Iron Works when he was just 35, distinguishing himself as one of the nation’s youngest CEOs of a Fortune 500 company. Within 20 years, and by the age of 53, Burguieres had built his second Fortune 500 company, Weatherford International, into a major force in the oil services industry.
However, in 1996, at the height of his professional success, Burguieres confronted an obstacle much more daunting than any he had faced in the corporate world—a profound battle with depression. It was the second time he had faced depression, but this time he resigned as CEO and checked himself into a mental hospital for three months of treatment.
“My first major depressive episode lasted about six months. That was in 1991,” Burguieres recalls. “But the second and most profound episode lasted well over a year.”
Burguieres’ second battle came in the mid-1990s. It was the beginning of a shift that altered the trajectory of his personal life and professional life. “As therapy for myself, I started talking to other people,” he says. “I found others who’d gone through similar experiences.”
One friend suggested that Burguieres go public as part of his cure. “That was something I never in my wildest dreams thought I would do,” he admits. “But I gave a speech about my struggles with mental illness in a small church, and it gave me an incredible sense of freedom.”
Burguieres’ new direction gained momentum. “I then spoke to about 75 CEOs and their spouses at an event in Houston in 1997. I got enormously positive feedback, and knew I had to continue to speak out. Now I speak six or eight times a year.”
Burguieres’ talk, “The CEO and Depression—the Secret Killer,” has now been heard by receptive audiences throughout the United States and in Europe, including at a meeting in Prague of the World Presidents’ Organization, a group of more than 3,000 current and former CEOs.
Meanwhile, Burguieres also has become the personal confidant of CEOs who are part of what he has heard described as a secret network of CEOs with depression. “I can’t tell you the number of CEOs who open up to me with their own stories,” Burguieres says. “It would shock you to know how many individuals running major corporations are grappling with suicidal depression.”
Their stories have some common themes. “At some point, they get desperate enough to call a psychiatrist, beg for a 6:30 a.m. appointment, and pay in cash,” says Burguieres. “It’s sad. I’ve seen CEOs go out of the way to accommodate others in their organizations, but if they have a mental-health problem themselves, they’re convinced that people in their corporation will see them as weak.”
That is not a view shared by Burguieres. “I believe that being forthright is the way to normalize what is, after all, just another kind of medical problem,” he says.
Experts in mental health predict that about one in five Americans will experience clinical depression this year. Burguieres, however, believes that these statistics are “grossly understated.”
He notes that suicide is the 11th leading cause of death in the United States, claiming more than 30,000 lives each year. More than 400,000 people were admitted to U.S. emergency rooms or hospitals last year for attempted suicide. “Maybe a million more tried [to commit suicide] but weren’t admitted,” he says.
Burguieres now divides his time between running a family business, serving as vice chair of the Houston Texans football team, and working as an advocate for mental health. He believes that the stigma that causes organizations to treat mental illness differently from other illnesses is unwise and unscientific. “If your employee has leukemia, you’re not going to cut off his or her benefit,” he explains. Yet insurance coverage is often denied for the treatment of depression, a medical condition that costs billions of dollars in lost productivity.
“A huge amount of those losses would go away if businesses established parity in health benefits,” says Burguieres, who points out that companies get a gigantic return on investing in policies that include mental-health parity, which ensures that mental-health and substance-abuse disorders receive the same insurance coverage as physical illnesses. “It makes good business sense,” he says. “The cost for parity for the Houston Texans is less than one percent of our total costs for medical insurance.”
For Burguieres, the movement toward mental-health-friendly policies and practices is, like so many other things in business, a matter of talking to the right person. “Most of the business community is uneducated” about the issue of mental-health parity, he says. “Once you get to the right person—usually it’s the top guy—the logic of moving toward parity is clear.”
Burguieres is optimistic about overcoming the stigma of mental illness and has seen a tremendous change in attitude since he began speaking out nine years ago. “Then, I was out there almost by myself. Now, more and more business leaders and celebrities are beginning to speak out,” he says. “And more and more businesses are moving toward parity.”
Burguieres says that the process is just beginning. “In biblical times, people looked at lepers as people to be reviled. Fifty years ago, no one talked about cancer,” he says. “In 20 years, we’ll look back on our attitudes toward mental illness and see how much we’ve changed for the better.”
If his prediction is right, that change will be, in part, because of people with the courage of Philip Burguieres. |
