Eric Hipple fought his way to the top as a quarterback in the National Football League.
But mental illness in his family was an even tougher struggle.
Hipple, a 10-year player with the Detroit Lions, was a keynote speaker Thursday at the 2015 Indiana Suicide Conference at Grace College, Winona Lake. He is now an outreach specialist for the University of Michigan Comprehensive Depression Center.
It started out when he played football in Southern California. His high school senior year, Hipple was seen by a scout from Utah State University and was recruited to play for its football team. He was a four-year starter and sixth in the NCAA for passing.
There was talk of Hipple being drafted into the NFL. In a Bowl Game, however, Hipple’s knee was injured. The first three rounds went by and Hipple didn’t get a call. Then the Detroit Lions made him the first pick in the fourth round.
He went to the Lions’ camp and made the group of 45 out of 146 that made the team. He was the third-team quarterback and the holder for the kicker.
He wanted more than that, so he worked hard. The following year came around, and Hipple again made the squad of 45. He was still the third-string quarterback, but after the starting quarterback was injured in the sixth game of the season and the backup quarterback was “terrible,” Hipple was called to play. He started against the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football.
In his debut game, he threw for four touchdown passes and ran for two more touchdowns. One of the touchdown passes was a 94-yard pass, which was a record until Brett Favre broke it. The NFL deemed it as the best NFL debut by a quarterback in history and his jersey was put up in the Football Hall of Fame.
Hipple started the next five years, but then he started getting hurt, and it took its toll on him physically and mentally. In his 10th year, he was a different person and had gone through a divorce. His ex-wife had moved back to Utah with their two kids.
At 32 years old, Hipple was cut from the team.
He took some time off and traveled a bit. He ended up getting remarried and started a business called Hipple & Associates. He didn’t know anything about the insurance business, but poured himself into it and in six years his business was successful.
“But that’s when it hit me. I didn’t know who I was anymore,” he said. “I didn’t feel good. I got to the top and said, ‘Is this all there is? Where’s the excitement? Where’s life at?’ And I started falling into a slump.”
At the time, he said, he didn’t think much about it because his mom had “spells.”
Hipple kept going downhill. He didn’t want to leave the house anymore, he had no motivation and life “wasn’t fun anymore.” The business started falling apart because he stopped paying attention to it. He gave his accounts to a competitor.
His wife drove him to the airport one day so he could fly to Arizona on a business trip. During the drive, Hipple had an overwhelming sense of thoughts he had in the past, reached over for a napkin, wrote “I’m sorry, I love you” on it, handed it to his wife, and then jumped out of the car. His body hit the pavement at about 75 mph.
The ambulance and police came, and Hipple was a “bloody mess” on the highway, but he didn’t remember most of it. In the hospital, he overheard a conversation between a psychologist and his parents but he told them he didn’t have a mental illness and didn’t want to be put in the psych ward.
Hipple got out after the bandages were taken off. He never learned anything about what happened or got treatment for it. Since he didn’t learn anything from his own experience, it left him ill-prepared for what happened next.
His son, Jeff, was living with his Hipple’s ex-wife, but traveling back and forth between them. Jeff was trying to figure out where he wanted to live, and his mom was having issues with him.
Jeff started ninth grade and it started great including being captain of his basketball team, Hipple said. When the holidays came around, Jeff started becoming symptomatic. Hipple told his son he’d be OK, but Jeff started getting worse. He didn’t want to go to school. His grades dropped to the point where he wasn’t eligible to play sports anymore, so Jeff was benched. Jeff gave his lucky shoes away to the player who took his place.
On a Saturday morning, Hipple had to leave on a business trip. He told Jeff goodbye at about 6 a.m. The next day, Hipple’s wife called and told him Jeff was dead.
“He had gotten underneath my bed and got my shotgun out of its case,” Hipple said.
He blamed himself, flew home from Vancouver and went to the morgue to see Jeff. Seeing his son’s body, Hipple said he just wanted to die right then and there. The guilt was “unbelieveable.”
“The thing is, when I jumped out of the car, I felt like I was doing people a favor because that’s the mindset – doing everyone a favor if you’re not here. But right then in that moment, I knew exactly what it felt like to be a survivor and I can’t do that to somebody,” Hipple said.
He started drinking a lot more and taking prescription medication to feel numb. He wasn’t paying attention to his wife and other children, and got arrested for a DUI. The judge told him there were programs to help him, but Hipple didn’t do one so the judge threw him in jail.
Halfway through his sentence, Hipple vowed to make changes when he got out. He was invited to a lunch at the UMCDC about depression. He wanted to learn more and kept learning about mental illness.
He started a school program, which his daughter, Tarah, now helps him with, traveling school to school.
“My daughter, she ended up going through her own treatment,” Hipple said. “She was 7 years old in the next room when the gun went off. And when I was going through my stuff, I really wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on there until I got healthy and we were able to address that.”
Tarah Hipple also attended Thursday’s conference and told her story, which she chronicled in her book “Tarah’s Song.”
She adored her brother, who was eight years older than her. One day when she was 7, Jeff was babysitting her and bought a movie for her, got her some water and popcorn. He slowly walked away, giving Tarah a look.
“I was only 7, but it struck me as odd because I knew my brother and that look was not a look that I ever got,” she said. The look broke, and he walked away into the next room and shut the door.
A few minutes later, Tarah heard the loudest noise she ever heard in her life. She tried calling up to Jeff, but he wouldn’t answer and the door was locked.
“My parents continuously reassured my sisters and I that his death was not our fault. Even though I was young, and the word suicide didn’t make sense to me, I still felt like something was my fault since I was there, since I saw that look,” Tarah said.
Throughout the years, she grew up with that ever-growing guilt. She began having panic attacks and night terrors. She was so afraid of the night terrors that she trained herself not to fall asleep for days. When that didn’t work, she started cutting herself.
The cutting got out of control and she could no longer feel them no matter how deep she cut. Her friends finally sat her down and told her that if she didn’t tell her parents, they would.
Tarah told her parents that night. “It was actually my dad who looked at me and said, ‘You can not help others unless you help yourself first,” she recalled.
She went back to a therapist, who diagnosed her in the first session as having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She felt so helpless, she didn’t think she could get help. The therapist suggested Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for her.
Once a week, Tarah, then 18, went into the therapist’s office and relived everything about her brother’s death and recorded it. Then she would go home and listen to the tape once a day until the following week when she would make a new tape. “The whole point was to get about an hour and a half of a story and then over the time put it down to 10 minutes so that the things that were causing my panic attacks and night terrors would get shorter and shorter,” she said.
She didn’t think it would work, but within 5 minutes she began seeing her brother for the last time again. She cried for the first time in 11 years, and over time she grieved for her brother properly for the first time. By the last session, she learned to feel happiness she hadn’t felt since she was 7 years old.
“The point, the reason I share my story, is because everyone in here, you have your own story and those bad things happen. But those bad things don’t define us. What defines us is how we get through it, what we do about it, how we help others and how we help ourselves,” Tarah said.
(Story By The Times Union)
