On the job at the CBC, producer John Scully recalls a supervisor once reprimanded him for doing a crossword puzzle on company time. Scully ducked out for lunch with his wife and began to sob: “Not just a few drops, but waterfalls of howling public pain,” he writes. “People looked away in embarrassment, but I didn’t care where I was. I was grieving, grieving so passionately for the loss of my skills and the lack of understanding from my bosses. The crying lasted half an hour.”
The product of Scully’s torment is Am I Sane Yet?
Clinically depressed for years – he has consulted forty doctors – Scully is also a skilled journalist with the concise eloquence you’d expect of someone who served fifty years in the newsroom. He is able to do what many other mentally ill Canadians cannot: document his own descent into self-agony.
