REPORTER SHARES HER DEPRESSION STRUGGLE
I toured the sprawling campus of McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Belmont, during a health reporting fellowship on a rainy afternoon in May 2016. I couldn’t have known then that I’d be back a little over a year later — this time as a patient.
I had struggled on and off since I was a kid. Depression is a trick candle of sorts. Just when you begin to think you’ve mustered enough energy to conquer it, it flickers and the flame returns.
The day before I began the two-week treatment program, a man with a firearm committed one of the most horrific acts of mass violence in the history of the United States, killing 58 and injuring 546 at a country music concert in Las Vegas.
Social media lit up with warnings about the dangers of allowing guns in the hands of the mentally ill. “We’ve gotta keep guns away from crazies!” people screamed from behind their computers.
The next day, as I sat in a circle with others living with depression, bipolar disorder and various other psychological conditions — in what I jokingly would come to call “sanity school” — it occurred to me that we were the “crazies” people feared.
Looking around the room, that seemed absurd. Like me, these people were desperate and exhausted — but they weren’t at risk of hurting anyone. Except, of course, for themselves.
Some cried at times, some fell asleep during group, overcome with the exhaustion of doing the work to get out of their psychological holes.
Some nervously sketched intricate doodles full of lines, squiggles, sharp edges and distorted hearts. Mental noise put on paper. I would
have framed some of them.
A few were there because traumatic life events had pushed them near the edge: those mourning loved ones, people still reeling after witnessing the marathon bombings. But they weren’t violent. Still, I couldn’t believe I was there, in that capacity. Not as a reporter.
Mental illness will do that. Take our lives in unimaginable directions. While no two people who have been diagnosed are battling identical beasts, those of us affected can agree that the illness — at one point or another — has made us unrecognizable.
For people who haven’t struggled with depression, it is nearly impossible to describe. But because I tell stories for a living, I have to try.
Here is what depression is for me.
As a health reporter, I have heard years worth of deeply personal stories from people who’ve demonstrated unfathomable resilience. A man who survived a 20-foot fall, two nights in freezing temperatures and made his way back from 90 minutes of cardiac arrest. Parents who have buried their children. People who have fought addiction and won, who have become the voices of a deadly epidemic in the face of vicious judgment and scrutiny.
Depression is the voice that has told me, time and again, that I am weak. Ungrateful.
“Look what these people have been through,” it says. “What is your reason for being so pathetically inconsolable?”
Depression is the notion that no one deserves the inconvenience of being in my presence.
When a longtime friend grew tired of my inability to keep plans, my shutin behavior and her futile attempts to help, she told me she had reached her limit.
“I can’t be friends with you right now,” she told me during a Sunday phone call in September. “I’ve tried to be there for you and you won’t let me.
“I’m hanging up now,” she said.
Depression is the voice that told me — while I sat stunned and glassy-eyed on the other line — that I’d had it coming.
“See, you’re a burden,” the voice said. “You’re disposable.”
Here is what depression isn’t.
It is not a choice. It is not chronic pessimism. It is not an unwillingness to put in the effort to be happy. And it is not beatable without help.
I battled for years to stave it off on my own. I tried to exercise it away, will it away and drink it away. It’s as useless as trying to shrug off a kidney stone. No matter how much the pain ebbs or how much you ignore it, at some point, the stone has to pass. Depression is not sadness. Sadness is a weight — sometimes an excruciating one, yes — that people must carry within them until it shrinks to a manageable size.
Depression dwarfs sadness. It swallows you whole so you are a passenger watching from the inside, the person you thought you were getting smaller while it grows.
That is where I found myself in late September, lying in the dark, wondering if I should clean out my closet so my family wouldn’t have to. I had come to the realization that the thought of living that way for the rest of my life was scarier than the uncertainty of death.
And that’s when I made the decision that saved my life.