Depression is a Patient Stalker

RUTH PENNEBAKER

Go back with me—way back.

It’s the mid-1950s and I am about six years old. My mother, sister, and I are hiding in closets while a woman bangs on our front door and screams for us to let her in. Outside, her pea-green car sits on our driveway.

The woman’s name is Mrs. Schultz (back then, adults didn’t seem to have first names). She is mentally ill, my mother says. How does Mother know? Well, Mrs. Schultz recently put her children in a rabbit hutch in their backyard.

We live in Wichita Falls, Texas, a small, desolate city close to the Oklahoma border. The wind blows dust most of the year, tornadoes bludgeon neighborhoods now and then, the sun blisters your face and arms, and the big red ants sting. It’s not the kind of place where you’d want to leave your kids—or even your rabbits—in a rabbit hutch.

I don’t remember what happens after that. Mrs. Schultz must have finally given up and gone home. My mother, sister, and I must have cautiously exited the closets, relieved to have escaped the presence of someone who was mentally ill.

Mentally Ill: In my child’s mind, it was always capitalized and related to rabbit hutches.

Two or three years pass. Mrs. Schultz hasn’t been knocking on our door again. But a middle-aged woman in our small Methodist church—whom I’d once shared a hymnal with—has deserted her husband and their recently adopted daughter to run away with her boyfriend. She and her boyfriend even rob a bank together somewhere in Wichita Falls, and their faces are on Wanted! notices at the post office. Members of our church show up at the post office frequently, just to check on things and maybe buy a stamp or two.

In the meantime, my mother isn’t doing well. She is very tired, she says. She stays in bed a lot. Sometimes, when my sister and I come home from school, she’s still in bed. But she never sleeps.

One Saturday morning, Daddy, my sister, and I drive Mother to the hospital. She cries and tells us good-bye. She’ll be back as soon as she’s well. Afterward, Daddy takes us to get ice cream cones. He tries to talk to us, but he doesn’t really like children—or maybe he just doesn’t like us. We are all scared, we have all had a hole torn in our hearts, but we don’t talk about it. What is there to say?

Years later, when I’m a teenager, I see a medical insurance form my parents have filled out. It refers to Mother’s hospitalization in Wichita Falls, but it also mentions another, earlier hospital stay a week after my birth. I ask Mother about it.

“All I could do was hold you and cry,” she says in a low voice. “I was very depressed then.”

We had finally started using that word in our family: depressed. It gives us a little structure, but not much. It is a very private word. You have to speak it in a whisper and then only to members of your immediate family.

But what does depression mean? To me, as a child and adolescent, it means unmade beds and long silences and darkened rooms. Like all my childhood memories, it lies in the empty plains of North and West Texas, in a hard and hostile climate. I always wonder whether a certain kind of tough and unflinching people have been drawn to this harsh place—or whether the land has made them this way.

In any case, it isn’t a world that’s sympathetic to any kind of weakness. And depression, we all seem to know intuitively, is born of weakness.

After all, you can’t see depression on an x-ray, can you? You can’t remove it surgically like a tumor, you can’t see it like a rash on the surface of a body. It’s hard, even, to describe it in a way that others really comprehend it.

So maybe it’s not even real.

Mother continues to be depressed off and on for the rest of her life. Her relationship with me is painfully bad—or just painful, period, for both of us.

All I know, in every inch of my being, is that I will never, ever be anything like her. I won’t be a housewife, a mother who tells her children she’s given up everything for them. I won’t live in windswept, small towns that obviously turn women into depressives, bank robbers, and rabbit-hutch abusers. And I will do anything, I tell myself, not to be depressed like her.

So, I deliberately try to become everything she isn’t and travel where she’s never gone. I marry a smart, ambitious man. I go to law school and graduate high in my class. I ditch law and become a writer. I have two children but continue to work full time. I live on the East Coast, spend time in Europe, come back to big cities in Texas, all the time pushing and striving, writing books and newspaper columns and magazine pieces. Standing still would be like death to me.

But, you know, I am more like my mother than I want to believe. And depression is a patient stalker, waiting for its time.

Twice, in my mid to late twenties, I am blindsided by massive depressions. I wake up in the mornings, wondering if that black curtain will fall on me again. I spend my days wracked by pain and darkness. Sometimes, I don’t know if I can bear to live the next five minutes, since every second has its own agony. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. I am too paralyzed to do anything.

I have an excruciating memory of stepping out on our back porch and looking down at our sleeping dog. I would have given anything to trade places with that dog—to sleep, to be free of emotional torture and self-loathing. Two decades later, I tell a friend this story, which I consider to be one of the lowest points in my life. She brightens immediately. “I understand!” she says. “I’ve always wanted to be a dog!”

But that’s one of the many problems with depression: those who don’t suffer from it don’t get it. You say: I feel terrible, I feel hopeless, I am wracked with pain, I can’t endure this . . . And they answer: Hey, wait a minute! You’re having a bad day, that’s all! You’ll feel better tomorrow. You’ll be fine. Think of all you have to be grateful for. You have such a wonderful life; how can you complain?

You then end up feeling worse, guiltier, for feeling bad. Since you already hate yourself so much that you wish you’d drop dead every second of the day, you really don’t need more self-recriminations.

So you go to psychiatrists—or I do, anyway, and she listens to my many problems and watches me cry and prescribes pills.

The pills—old-fashioned tricyclics which were the best they could do in the late ’70s and early ’80s—make my mind fuzzy and my mouth dry. I’m looking at the world through rippling, filmy water. I don’t care. Gradually, the drugs numb me and block my pain. I don’t care if blocking my pain isn’t curing my pain, if the pain is only masked and goes elsewhere. I will do anything not to feel that pain. It’s in this place that I understand why people commit suicide; the psychic pain is unbearable.

Like my mother, I am also diagnosed with breast cancer. At forty-five, I get a bilateral mastectomy and go through chemo and radiation. I am very brave. I know this because everyone tells me this just about all the time. They also bring dinners to our house and presents and cards. I am their inspiration, many of them tell me. I join a survivor’s group, march in pink-hued parades, and mention my bad breast cancer year on a regular basis. I also write about it in newspaper columns, a young-adult novel, and in my blog. I am so proud of myself for being a breast-cancer survivor that it defines me for years.

Breast cancer, like depression, used to be a disease of great shame, spoken of in whispers. Now, its on parade banners, and football helmets, and T-shirts. Its survivors are treated as heroines, but I knew the bravest I’d ever been in my life was summoning the sheer guts to get up in the mornings when I was wracked by depression. Of course, only my husband and a couple of close friends knew about that. It may have been almost fifty years after my mother’s depressions first changed our family’s life, but the stigma and shame of depression linger. No one brings you casseroles or calls you a heroine when you’re depressed.

In 2000, the teenage son of one of my cancer survivor friends kills himself. I know Chase was depressed because his mother talked to me about it and asked my advice. She and her husband did everything they could to save him—therapy, drugs, advice from experts. But it didn’t work.

At the memorial service, my friend and her husband publicly open up about the cause of Chase’s death and the suffering their son endured. They hold nothing back.

Sitting in the church, witnessing the grief of Chase’s family and friends, I realize how silent I have been about my own depressions. I have an op-ed column in the Dallas Morning News, for God’s sake, where I have frequently written about my breast cancer and have been praised for my honesty—but my depression, never. Where’s the bravery in that?

So, I write a column about Chase’s suicide and my own depressions. I ask my husband to read it over, which is something I rarely do. I want him to ask me not to publish it. He won’t. He thinks it’s fine. He thinks I should publish it.

I get more response from that column than from any other I’ve ever written. There are so many of us out there, people who have struggled with depression. To look at most of us, you’d never know. We compensate so well, we look so normal. We’ve kept the silence. We’ve perpetuated the stigma.

Since Chase’s death and that newspaper column, I try to write about depression and speak up about it whenever I can. I’m sick of the ignorance and lack of empathy about depression that crest whenever a famous person commits suicide. I’m furious that we’re educated and living in the twenty-first century but we still cling to ancient notions about mental illness. So much suffering is endured silently and so many lives are lost or ruined because of depression. And all our silence and shame about depression? We need to lock them in the nearest rabbit hutch.