Drew Robinson and The Revolutionary Ketamine

Chapter 7 excerpt from The Revolutionary Ketamine

The decision that was supposed to be the end of Robinson's life gave birth to a new passion for spreading awareness about mental health and suicide prevention. The former Major League Baseball player has shared his story with the world since his suicide attempt in 2020.

Case: Drew Robinson

On the morning of April 16th, 2020, professional baseball player Drew Robinson sat at his kitchen table, finishing a note to his family explaining why he would end his life. This young man recently signed a major league baseball contract with the San Francisco Giants and should have felt on top of the world. Suicide knows no boundaries. Being confined by the lockdowns during the COVID-19 crisis for over a month undoubtedly led him closer to the decision. He hated his life; even worse, he hated that no one knew how much he hated his life. Hiding his hate and hopelessness, Drew was living his dream but still wanted to die.

Around 5 p.m., everything came together: a handgun, a neatly-placed letter, a clean house, and some whiskey. He drove to the park in his truck. However, he decided he did not want to die in his truck, so he returned home. Three hours later, alone on his couch, he reached for his gun on the coffee table and discharged a bullet against his right temple.

Over the next 20 hours, he realized his suicide was the beginning of another story. Shortly after the gunshot, Drew looked around, confused that he was still conscious. Disappointed as one could be who wanted to commit suicide, he laid down on the ground and waited to die. Thirty minutes passed. He held a rag to his head, as one would instinctively do to cover their wounds. It did not hurt. He took a shower, then fell and lay on the bathroom floor. Later, he found himself lying in his bed. He even tried to brush his teeth. He remembered thinking to himself how ridiculous it all was. He had a hole in his head and was brushing his teeth. Four hours after pulling the trigger, he was alive, but still planned to let himself bleed.

The following day, he woke up in pain to the sound of his phone buzzing. He went to the kitchen, drank water, and took a Tylenol. The gun was still on the coffee table, but he grabbed his phone instead. He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and did not recognize his face. He again saw his gun on the coffee table and thought about baseball. He wondered, “Could I play with one eye?” He wondered if thinking about the future meant he was trying to survive.

That single Tylenol pill. Was it some subconscious message that he wanted to live? Drew looked at his phone and saw a text from his friend Darryl who had come over to work out in his gym. In the afternoon, Drew returned to the couch where it all started, with the gun and his cell phone on the coffee table. Holding the gun to his head a second time, he dialed 911 and asked for an ambulance.

It was 3:44 p.m. when Drew called 911, wondering how on earth he was still alive.

“I need an ambulance,” he said. “I tried to commit suicide last night, and I made it through. I think I detached my eye, maybe. I can’t open it, and I have a huge hole in my head, and I’m in a lot of pain.”

“What’d you do?” the dispatcher asked.

“I shot myself in the head,” Drew said.

Police in the area rushed to his house.

At 3:51 p.m., police kicked down the front door. They were afraid this might be an ambush. A guy shoots himself in the head and lives for 20 hours?

At 3:52 p.m., the officer asked: “Why’d you shoot yourself?” Drew replied in a whisper: “Because I hate myself.”

At 3:53 p.m., an ambulance arrived and transported Drew to the UMC Trauma Center.

At 4 p.m., the police officer shook his head and said what everyone else was thinking: “That’s crazy that he’s still alive.”

How did Drew live for nearly 24 hours with a gunshot wound to his head? And without medical attention? Few survive self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head like this. The American construction worker, Phineas Gage, survived an iron rod driven through his head. However, Gage’s friends remarked that he was “no longer Gage.” Drew was lucky. He emerged from his experience better, with renewed purpose, clarity, and confidence.

Drew’s right eye was beyond repair. The human eye is a remarkably resilient structure that is surrounded by bones, muscles, and fat. The orbital cavity provides ample protection from everyday life but not from a 9 mm bullet traveling at Mach speed. The fracture in his frontal sinus caused the fluid from his brain to leak, posing a significant infection risk. The bullet missed the major arteries, his left orbital floor, and exited above his left cheekbone.

The doctors had to reconstruct Drew’s face. The first procedure was surgery to save his right eyelid. The second was to reconstruct the eye orbit and to return most of the symmetry to his face. The third was to fix the fracture in his sinuses and stop the cerebrospinal fluid leakage, which, if left untreated, could have led to meningitis, brain abscesses, chronic headaches, and death. The final and fourth surgery was an enucleation, the removal of Drew’s right eye. He lost his senses of taste and smell after the surgeries.

Life is unrelenting. Today, Drew knows mental-health issues are challenging to discuss, and regardless, he wants to share his experience with others that mental illness is winnable. He feels he was supposed to go through a suicide attempt.

“I shot myself,” he says. “But I killed my ego. I’m free now.”

Drew does not glorify what happened. He knows he should be dead. Instead, he is focused on fixing himself and his surrounding relationships while maintaining a professional baseball career. He prefers not to wear his eye prosthesis to show the world what he did and have more opportunities to share his experiences with the world. Drew believes that “I was supposed to tell a story.” When Drew eventually spoke with his brother Chad, he repeated, “I’m meant to be alive, Chad. I’m meant to be alive. I’m meant to be alive. I’m here for a reason. I want to tell the world what happened so I can heal, and maybe I can help others heal, too.”

Drew explains, “how can I go through this and not find a way to try to help other people?” To have this happen and move on with my life the way I was before? There’s no way. This was an enormous sign that I’m supposed to help people get through something they don’t think is winnable."

The reasons leading up to Drew’s decision to attempt suicide are apparent if you study his family history. When Drew’s parents, Renee and Darryl, were divorcing, it devastated him. After the divorce, the Robinson family splintered. The boys went to live with Darryl while his sister Britney stayed with Renee. They found common ground in one place: the baseball field. He remembers asking himself questions. “Is there something wrong with me? Why is Mom so mad at me? What did I do?” The Robinsons didn’t discuss those sorts of things. They just lived one day to the next. The family never handled emotions well, causing stress and internal struggles. “I think we all had this idea of a perfect family and things like that. When it didn’t live up to that, we questioned everything we were doing.”

Drew’s brother, Chad, was drafted to the Milwaukee Brewers in 2006, setting a near-impossible standard in Drew’s mind. Drew became obsessed with an image of perfection. He made varsity at Silverado High School as a freshman and became the best player there since his brother. Professional sports put tremendous pressure on Drew. There were the 4:30 AM wake-up calls for workouts, long bus rides, injuries, and drug testing. Being a professional baseball player isn’t only about playing baseball better than everyone else. It is an accelerated adulthood for 18-year-old, paying bills, managing disappointment, navigating politics, forging relationships, and figuring out how to live in a universe designed to weed out the weak.

Drew’s life seemed ideal: he had a professional baseball contract, family support, and a fiancée. Despite all these positives, Drew could not stop hating himself. Despite powerful support from his fiancée, Daiana, he broke off the relationship abruptly. She thought they were going to get married, and just like that, it was over. Drew was stuck in a rut with never-ending questions in his mind:

“Why does everything suck? Why is this happening to me? Is there something I’m doing wrong? Why can’t you just be honest with everyone and let them know how much you hate yourself? Is it even worth it? Is my life even worth it?”

His self-doubt paralyzed his life. He never felt like he belonged. The voice in his head grew louder and drew more depressed. His suicidal ideation intensified. Understanding that he needed help, he saw a therapist and read self-development books. He wanted to see himself the way he perceived everyone else saw themselves. But the self-doubt compounded into another question:

“Who would care if I’m gone?”

When no answer came, he planned his suicide. Drew visited a gun range in the Phoenix area, and each shot birthed another question.

“Could this be a real possibility? How would I even do it? Where would I do it? No, Drew then told himself. No! That’s too extreme. Just talk to someone and get some help. We can do it. Just talk to someone. Find anyone, even if it’s a surface-level conversation. Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody needs to hear it.”

He continued therapy sessions, but they didn’t rid him of his worst thoughts. His frustration with himself multiplied. He was trying to embrace his vulnerability, but even if Daiana and others saw progress, he saw stasis. He began to feel he wasn’t good enough for her and hated himself. He called off the wedding.

Then COVID-19 shut down the baseball world in March. Drew returned to Las Vegas to an empty house, lonely and no longer knowing who he was. A week later, he purchased a gun and returned on March 30th to pick it up. He had none of those surface-level conversations or light-hearted camaraderie to sway his resolve. Drew could no longer meet with friends or go to the stadium, and he was alone with the negative thoughts built up over two decades.

The days seemed to last forever. Friends checked in with Drew, wanting to plan something for his 28th birthday on April 20th. He ignored them. On April 13th, Drew met with a woman who had a litter of puppies. He petted and cuddled one. Then a heavy feeling weighed down on him. “Sorry,” he told the woman. “I can’t take this dog.” He left hurriedly, noticing the confused look on the woman’s face. “She had no idea,” Drew remembers. “How could she? I couldn’t take the dog because I was planning on killing myself.”

Survivors of suicide attempts, particularly ones as violent as Drew’s, have a wide range of outcomes. The combination of physical and mental trauma typically requires a reset of the body and mind that takes years. When he emerged from anesthesia after the initial surgery, Drew said he felt love for the blanket warming him, for each breath that filled his lungs, and for his family. Never had he felt compelled to say he loved them. Saying “I love you” was just a habit, what you’re supposed to say. Drew was determined that his “after” would be different from his “before.”

“I never will hold back from asking or telling someone, even if it’s something simple,” Drew says. “Hey, this little thing’s annoying me today. Just tell them. They want to hear it. People who love you want to hear it; if you don’t have people who love you, therapists want to hear it. People want to help you. So many people in this world will help anyone go through these things. It might be a specific situation that makes you feel you’re alone, but you’re never alone. “Think about it. Not everyone can do it. So, if not everyone can do it, but some people can, that’s just like having strength. Hey, I reached out to someone today. I told him how I felt, and I felt really good. Why can’t that be a strength?”

Drew had found that strength emerging from those 20 dark hours, from the shadowy details he somehow remembered when he reconsidered his family and the idea of coming back to play baseball, not just to see if he could, but to show others what is possible.

Cleaning Drew’s house after the suicide attempt was something parents should never have to experience. They were entering through the garage and unprepared for what they saw. His mother, Britney, looked up the phone numbers of hazmat cleaners.

“No,” Darryl responded. “We’re cleaning it.” No way was he going to let a stranger into the house to see the remnants of his son’s worst moment. Darryl scoured the walls while Chad wiped the floors, and Britney handled the linens. She borrowed an industrial carpet cleaner from her office. They were on their hands and knees, knowing they couldn’t erase reality, but determined to scrub as much of it away as possible.

Drew needed to experience the house where he almost died. He walked toward the couch and sat in the same spot where he shot himself.

“I wanted to feel it again,” he says. “I wanted to feel the power, not the bad side. I’m still here.” When Daiana, Darryl, Britney, and Chad visited him at the house that night, he walked them through the 20 hours. They were speechless. “No one understands how I made it through,” he says. “No one has to.” He said they could ask him anything.

“They each wanted to know, “what could we have done?”

Nothing. It was my responsibility, not yours.

“How come we didn’t know?”

Because I was good at hiding my sadness.

“Why did you do it?”

Drew didn’t have a good response to this one. He remembered what he told the police officer: I hate myself, and sometimes that’s all it takes.

Suicide attempts leave behind the sort of choppy wake that can waylay even a person who has had years of therapy and proper medication. People who attempt suicide often try it again until they succeed. “I don’t have it all figured out, but I’m working on it,” Drew says. “It’s not something that you just achieve. You don’t just achieve self-growth. You don’t get to a point where you just have it and don’t have to work at it again. You don’t get to a point; oh, I’m happy today. That’s it. I’m going to be happy for the rest of my life. It’s the same way in the opposite. I had a rough day. That doesn’t mean the rest of your life will suck.”

Drew follows a daily regimen. He typically wakes before his alarm. He plays with his dogs, Ellie and Brodi, and then goes into the kitchen, drinks a jug of water, and meditates for 20 minutes. He then goes to the gym, eats breakfast, and goes to the office—one day at a time.

In the afternoon, Drew tries to make at least three phone calls to connect, catch up, ask questions, and talk about how he’s doing. He’ll work out again, either in his gym or at the batting cages, before returning home to listen to music, watch TV, or spend time with his family. Before bed, Drew does some journaling. Sometimes he’ll write a whole page, and sometimes just a sentence. Either way, every entry ends with the same eight words:

I LOVE MYSELF, AND I LOVE MY LIFE!!

Drew’s mission in life has changed substantially. After leaving the hospital, Drew remained in contact with the Giants’ management. He sent them pictures and videos of himself in the gym and field. The Giants psychologist put pieces of tape with the names of each nurse at UMC hospital on Drew’s jersey on National Front-Line Workers’ Day. September 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day, and Drew asked if he could speak to his teammates the Giants’ players, and staff. Playing baseball was important, but if Drew was going to help others, he needed to tell his story. The Giants welcomed the idea. He arrived at Oracle Park wearing a mask with a Giants logo and no eye prosthesis. The players, coaches, and other staff gathered outside. Drew spoke with the microphone and said, “First, I just want to say thank you for everything.” “What I’ve been going through the last couple of months has been the most powerful experience. The lessons I’ve learned from what I’ve gone through are something I want to share.”

“On April 16th, around 8 p.m., I attempted suicide and shot myself in the head. A day later, on April 17th, around 4 p.m., I dialed 911 myself in an attempt to have my life saved. Later that night, my life was not only saved but reborn and restarted.”

Drew spoke about the importance of talking, the need for others, and his intention to give baseball another shot. He saw people crying, and some were undoubtedly thinking of family or friends lost to suicide.

In November, a familiar feeling seized Drew. Something was off. It started with a skipped workout, then a missed meditation session and journal entry. The pressures of his new routine and the new expectations he had set were getting to him. His mind racing, Drew told himself he was lazy and wasn’t doing the work to stay healthy. If I can’t do the work, why would I deserve happiness? If I can’t even do enough to earn happiness, what’s the point?" He didn’t leave his room for a day. One day turned into two, and then three. His negative self-talk sounded like the Drew “before,” not the Drew “after.” “I just felt like the world was ending,” he says. “I had my first passive suicidal thought, which scared me: I wish I’d been successful.” Sticking to his daily routine, continuing to see his therapist, Dr. Zand, and believing in his mission helped him through this challenging period.

Drew will never know what caused him to call 911 that day, but the clues have always been there. In the hours before, he pulled the trigger, and throughout those 20 hours, his thoughts constantly converged on his family and then fiancée Daiana. Reminders of April 16th now surround him. Drew kept the shorts he was wearing, the blood-soaked towel, and the note he had written to his family. His parents removed the plank of wood where the bullet had lodged and made it into a necklace for him.

Today, Drew Robinson has traded his baseball glove for a microphone and is an anti-suicide advocate for the BetterUcare.com foundation, where he is the spokesperson and co-founder. He raises awareness for suicide prevention with a social media platform, along with psychiatrist Dr. Sam Zand and Hollywood actor and entrepreneur Derek Du Chesne.

Source: Personal interview with Drew Robinson and adapted from ESPN article, San Francisco Giants outfielder Drew Robinson remarkable second act. May 11th, 2020. Jeff Passan on ESPN E:60 Preview.