My name is Sharon Easton. I'm a sergeant for the Patterson police department in Patterson New Jersey.

It showed up in my life through one of my best friends. And when I got there, she looked out her window and she wouldn't open the door. And we'd been friends for over 30 years. So, just open the damn door, you know. And she goes, no. And she's looking real funny in her face. And then when she does open the door, she tells me that you know, you're not my friend, you're a backstabber and so forth.

I found out that she had left her job. She had got, receive complaints from her bosses that she had been coming to the job after they'd fired her. And as her best friend, I had not known that she was going through this and for the last...

This happened in 2004 and she's, since then, she's been locked up. They put her in an institution where she stayed there for 3 months. When she came out, we all, all the girlfriends, got together and we explain to her what she had done, so that she can, to make sure that she continues to take her medicine.

And she was just so depressed after hearing what it was that she had done. I didn't know what schizophrenic was. I didn't know any of those words. And you know I talked with her cousin, and she said that's what she suffers from.

And so, we've never known. If we would've known earlier, you know, we would have been more, much more supportive with her. You know, to me she's like a sister to me. So, you know, this really, the depression, you know, really hits home, because I'm hoping that one day we can all, that she takes her medication. She's the godmother of my daughter. You know they asked about her so.

With me being a police officer, I've had incidents, that for a time I suffered from post traumatic stress... can I talk about that?

One night I was at work, and I'm walking off a porch. And as I'm walking off the porch, I hear the sound like something had hit a building. And when I turned around, a car had hit a young man. And he was flying in the air. He was doing cartwheels in the air. The impact hit him so hard that he was going, he probably went up maybe 50 feet in the air, and he was going cartwheeling over the cable, the cable cords that were in the street. And the impact hit him so hard that it actually hit him to the next block. And as I'm running to him, another car runs him over.

'Cause initially that whole week, I just kind of just went through the motions, and I just thought, I had not a clue what was going on. I just thought, am I going crazy? Now I can't get on an elevator, now I can't, now I have to have all the lights on, all the windows open. You know, it just that you get these anxiety attacks like you just can't breathe. I don't want to be in small places, and I had no a clue what's going on.

And I actually went to New York to see the therapist and he explained to me post traumatic stress... he explained to me what it was, and how it can just come about. That you can see an accident, something that could have happened maybe five, six years ago. And something can just bring it up and out.

So he just gave me, (I'm sorry), he told me how the breathe, and I'd just seen him a couple of times and he gave me some medication that I took for a short time, and now I know how to control it.