Throughout her professional life Coretta Moore was accustomed to receiving commendations for her performance, until her later years as a bank employee when she was forced into a position she was ill-equipped for and which ultimately led to her collapse into a severe state of depression.

Now at 39, Moore, a mother of two, is still recovering; there are bad days and she still struggles to sleep and at times depends on Valium to get some needed rest. Her illness meant that she had to leave the high-pressure job, which she said saw her going to work early in the morning and leaving late at night. She is now evaluating how she spends her time and what is most important.

It was on Old Year’s Night of 2019 that Moore said she had a mental breakdown but she had known for months that something was wrong, even though she was fearful of admitting she was having issues.

“It was midnight on Old Years night 2019 when there were all the fire crackers and so on. Like it triggered me and I just started screaming and I told my husband I wanted to kill myself…,” Moore told Stabroek Weekend in an interview.

Since then she has been working on getting better and while she said she is still not “100 per cent” she chose to share her story as she believes many people are having mental problems but are too scared to accept it. She believes as well that many allow their work to consume them, scarcely finding time to take care of their health.

Moore described herself as multitalented, as apart from working in the banking sector and Supreme Court, she is also an artist, a painter, and most recently she has written two books, one of which is in the process of being published. But her mental health journey has been the most difficult and has seen her attempting to take her own life on many occasions. She has also suffered side effects from the medication she was placed on.

“While I was in massive depression I tried to kill myself in every possible way. I don’t know why when you are depressed you try to kill yourself but I don’t believe I really wanted to die, I just wanted the illness to end. And reading up on the side effects of some of the medication I was given I noticed that they were responsible for suicidal thoughts,” she said.

Two promotions

Moore shared that she worked in a supervisory position at one of the major commercial banks in Guyana and within six months she received two promotions.

She said that prior to moving to that bank she worked at the Supreme Court and at another bank, but she had left the latter job when she became pregnant.

After several years, she became employed at the last bank where she said she was “doing extremely well. In my career at the bank everybody loved me and my reputation was that I was always hard working.”

It was after she was moved to another branch in the city, Moore said, that things grew a bit testy for her. She shared that she had observed two tellers not following protocols and as their supervisor she spoke to them, but they continued. She later brought it up with the branch’s manager who promised to, but did not address the issue.

Fearing that she would be held responsible for any wrongdoing in the department, Moore said, she wrote to the bank’s management and this triggered an investigation and audit. She is unclear of what disciplinary actions were taken but noted that her branch manager was unhappy with the direction she took, as he felt she had brought the branch into disrepute by complaining to higher management. This, along with the fact that some of her staff, who she previously had very good relationships with and had assisted with lunch and transportation fare, wrote to management complaining about her, saw her being transferred.

Moore said she was given a position that she knew nothing about and was only given a day of training, which was highly inadequate.

She believes she was given that position to fail, as even though she complained and asked not to be given the position as she knew she could not perform to the best of her ability, no one listened.

“When they put me there from the time I saw my mandate I wrote to them and told them that this would destroy my future. It was a two-page mandate and it was just too much… It was a

department of almost a hundred staff and I panicked because I knew I could not do it. My lunch sometimes was at 7 pm and I would go home until 11 pm,” Moore said.

She approached the human resources department and was told by the assistant human resource manager that “maybe God put me there to test me”.

She was assigned a staff member to assist her for one day but after that no other help was received and she felt as if she was speaking to the deaf as no one in management took her complaints seriously.

“I complained to the manager of my branch and the manager who set my mandate about how heavy my job was because I was not getting to eat and sleep and I was falling sick… I started to fall into depression because I was not sleeping; all the staff would approach me one time asking for assistance. I had to run a programme that saw me opening the system and closing the programme, it was just too much,” the woman shared.

“I didn’t know it then, but all of that made me fall into a massive depression. I wasn’t eating. I was overworked…,” she said sadly.

Moore said in the new position she was consumed by fear of failure as she was accustomed to performing above and beyond, but the work was just too much and “inside of me I had this fear of failure. I used to panic”.