Man helps inspire others after teacher encouraged him to ask for help as a teen: “I can feel the daylight again”

A simple message from a teacher inspired a student to get help for depression while in high school. Now, years later, this former student is making a difference by sharing his experience with others.

William Hargen was working the soundboard during his high school performances near Atlanta when he confided to his choir teacher, Gamble Everett, that he was suffering from depression.

“I said, ‘Hey, so I mentioned that I was depressed. Well, I’ve been really, really depressed. I’m really struggling. What can I do? What do you think?'” he recalled.

Everett encouraged him to take action and ask his parents for help, emphasizing that they would help him.

William Hargen remembers the moment he decided to talk to his mother, Tracy Hargen, about how he was feeling, saying, “I get up from my room, I go out into the hallway, I knock and I say, ‘Hey, Mom, can we talk?’ I had no idea what I was going to say.”

His mother was surprised when he told her that he had suffered from depression for years.

“He was happy. He was laughing. He was having fun. I mean, I thought he was like a carefree American kid, doing just fine,” Tracy Hargen said. “Finding out he had been struggling since he was 9 was heartbreaking.”

William Hargen said he lived with depression “thinking that’s my experience of life. It’s just like that.”

But with the help of his family, medication and therapy, he began to see a better future over time.

“The biggest change only happened, you know, over a 10-year period,” he said.

One in five teens report experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety, according to KFF Health News, but barriers such as cost and stigma prevent many people from getting help.

Share their experience

Now 27, William Hargen has built a successful career in consulting and is about to get married.

“I can feel the light of day again,” he said. “Now with the medication, the therapy, you know, a different outlook on life, I can sit back and feel and appreciate things. I can see that it’s beautiful. It’s great.”

Now, they share their experience with others by blogging and attending events with guest speakers.

“We’re talking,” Tracy Hargen said. “Will does them with me. Oh my God, when he stands up and speaks… I mean, it’s just amazing how strong he is and how, like, these people come up to him and hug him and… like these big men, and they’ll say, ‘If you can be that vulnerable up there in front of all these people, then I can go and ask for help.'”

When they saw how much their story had helped others, Tracy Hargen decided she didn’t want to stop there.

“I feel like music can reach people in a way that words alone can’t. It just touches your soul,” she said.

Tracy Hargen told her son that his story should be a song. Even though she said he was hesitant, she decided to try.

“I said, ‘I’ll take a chance.’ And I did it over and over again and I just couldn’t, I couldn’t get it right,” she said.

So Tracy Hargen took their story and turned to an AI program to put it to music.

“As soon as I heard it, I felt it in my soul,” she said. “I just wanted this song to reach someone who needed something, a lifeline to hold on to and make them feel like there’s hope. Or maybe they’ll take this song and play it for someone and say, ‘I don’t have the words, but this is how I feel.'”

“I changed my life”

Although the song was intended to help anyone in need, there was one person in particular that Tracy Hargen really wanted to reach: Everett.

“I wasn’t even sure I had the right number anymore, but I texted and said, ‘Make sure you hear the shout to the teacher in the choir,'” she said in her message to Everett.

A few hours later, Tracy Hargen received a text message from Everett.

“Thank you so much for sending me this song. It really warmed my heart today,” Everett told her.

Nearly a decade later, William Hargen and Everett had the opportunity to reunite.

William Hargen wanted Everett to know how much their kindness had impacted his life.

“It changed my life,” he said. “I think you should really know that I don’t mince words at all, that I mean the whole world to me.”