I\’ve been thinking about Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania lately, and not just because it\’s Mental Health Awareness Month. Fetterman did a very honorable thing when he was very ill: he let the world know. He let it be known that his illness was depression, that he needed a lot of time to recover enough to go back to work, and that he needed hospitalization to do so. And now he is better. He has been helped.
Even though it\’s none of my business, I wonder how her aftercare is going. Do you see her depression as a chronic thing, one that you will work to stave off for the rest of your life? How is her self-care? Are you making time for what your health requires?
I wonder about these things, even though my speculations are all projections. This is because I myself have been hospitalized three times for mental health issues. One such was after my suicide attempt on the night of September 30, 2014, following a day of dissociation while working at The New York Times, where I was editor through the end of that year.
I have had bouts of depression since my teens in the mid to late 70\’s. At first I didn\’t have a label for what I was experiencing. I just knew that there were days when I wanted to fall down in the halls of Manning High School in a small town in South Carolina, just fall, not get up, and admit I wasn\’t going to make it. I couldn\’t get through the next hour, or this life.
I didn\’t tell anyone, of course. At the time, I felt it should remain my secret.
In a bad time as a young man in college, I tried to share my state of mind with two close friends. They shut me down: one avoiding me with blunt frankness, another telling me blatantly that he didn\’t want to hear it. I\’ve learned not to try again. It strengthened me that no one wants to hear about a person\’s depression. I believe it today.
Sure, we\’re more compassionate about the abstract idea of depression, and that\’s progress. But the details of how it manifests itself, those still seem like moral failures that are better left unsaid. They are messy. They are shameful. We try to fill them all the way, when the exact opposite is what will help us improve.
During the depression phase leading up to my suicide attempt, I had struggled but largely withheld it, as I always had. But this year the disease was more serious. My mental illness sneaked out on me a few times in roundabout and, for my personality, bizarre ways as early as January 2014. The biggest warning sign came that June, when a cry for help led to my first, and rather traumatic, one week hospitalization. Afterward, I forced myself right back to normal, taking an out-of-state trip the weekend of my release to get a new puppy. But I had severe panic attacks on the highway whenever the car windows were open.
No, I was not well indeed, I was worse. However, I put on my friendly feature mask and it held up until the day it didn\’t.
On the September day that nearly ended in my death, I got atypically angry at the start of the morning\’s work when I was told to cut a freelancer\’s book review by about 400 words. My objections continued until I yelled, \”Then you can cut it yourself!\” An improper threat, yet it has already happened in a newsroom.
My feature friendly mask held up until the day it didn\’t.
A co-worker later told me that the thought that anger was unusual came from me, as I was usually a polite, reliable gentleman around the desk. But he attributed it to the fact that I finally got some of the normal give and take of our workplace. Most of the others around me, including the friend who told me to cut out 400 words, told me afterwards that they didn\’t notice the outburst at all.
This rare attack, which I had foreseen the night before in a brief but explosive discussion with my partner, felt like an earthquake. The tectonic plates of my mind have shifted, one might say. I spent the rest of the day somewhat doing little work. I mostly wandered the photography and culture departments in a slow trudge, feeling in a bubble, unsure if I or my colleagues were real. I fixed my gaze wordlessly on the people around me, standing a few feet or inches away.
Nobody seemed to notice.
In the evening, after pulling into the traffic on Manhattan\’s 23rd Street (again with my curious gaze as the cars slowed to a stop in front of me) in midtown Manhattan, and then catching a train home during which I i did nothing but write \”I want to die, I want to die, I want to die\” in a notebook I arrived at the dark Ossining, New York, Metro North station, stared at the Hudson River and wandered through the parking lot, knowing I was going to kill myself.
It was the most blissful peace I had ever experienced.
Illness can make sense of everything, somehow, even when it doesn\’t. I didn\’t leave any notes. I just wanted to make the afterlife journey as soon as possible. Passing my partner, who was fast asleep in an armchair, I decided my task.
I didn\’t have a gun at home, I\’m not a gun enthusiast, luckily I tried to slit my wrists. To help me along the way, I grabbed handfuls of prescription drugs. And those put me to sleep before I could cut my veins. In my last moment of semi-consciousness, I must have felt something akin to guilt, because I texted my therapist this: \”Sorry. Knives too sharp. Txvvys$.\”
My therapist saw the text right away and knew what it meant. He tried calling my sleeping partner, who didn\’t answer, so he called the Ossining Police. They found me and took me to an area hospital, where I spent that night and the next day in intensive care. When my partner called, I didn\’t want to talk to him. I didn\’t want to talk to anyone. I was ashamed and sad to be alive.
After a week of hospitalization and another five weeks of full-time outpatient therapy at a nearby treatment center, I was shivering but confident that I had made a health breakthrough following my breakdown.
Both during and after treatment, I told a few colleagues and friends about my attempt. While I still felt guilty and ashamed, I had also hoped that the truth would set me free, as they say. But my truth hasn\’t exactly been accepted.
My two immediate bosses knew this pretty much from the beginning and both were compassionate in small but meaningful ways when I got back to work. Others there and in my circle of friends were mostly sympathetic. But they were also uncomfortable; I had to make them feel good by quickly changing the subject and reassuring them with the guise of the good jolly boy.
Does our reluctance to know about such a catastrophic event help? Or turn a mental health crisis into a Great Unmentionable?
A couple of people told me how selfish I wasn\’t much help, mostly because I couldn\’t have discerned what was selfish at the time. Others tried to appease me with bromides, which seemed dismissive. Some you completely discourage me. I don\’t blame them. I may have been uncomfortable too.
Maybe that\’s why no one recognized some warning signs that summer, including the days I showed up for work, sat down and sobbed at my desk before accepting my first paper. And I was in a friendly environment where I felt safe! Perhaps they were preserving my privacy, then and after my attempt.
However, does our reticence to know about such a catastrophic event help? Or turn a mental health crisis into a Great Unmentionable? Would we react the same way to the news of a heart attack?
Feeling I needed a change, I took a buyout soon after returning to work and spent the last day of my nearly 18 years at The Times during a New Years shift, setting off with a new goal to do something pure by teaching in high school . Now I\’m back to work as an editor, and I\’m very satisfied.
Why tell this story? Because I was a professional and high-functioning, active, spirited person who tried to hide his disturbance from those close to him until he had a near-terminal breakdown. And this shouldn\’t be. We need a radical shift in our national mental health conversation, recognizing depression as the serious everyday illness it is.
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From the point of view of someone on the upswing, I\’d say we still have a long way to go. In fact, I had to think hard about whether it was a good idea to go public with this revelation. When I had my last hospitalization, a week after Thanksgiving 2016, New York City school system policy didn\’t allow me mental health leave, as I had at the Times. I feared losing my job as I tried to heal.
And I recovered, and am now even better benefiting from exercise, medication, meditation, and therapy, albeit still at risk for major depressive disorder. The peace I had felt that fateful night had nothing to do with being alive, which I now fully embrace and celebrate.
The truth is, though, I would feel the need to say I was fine even if it wasn\’t the truth. Because I know we don\’t quite accept this invisible disease the way we accept Parkinson\’s disease, or even substance abuse. Yes, we feel sympathy, or even grief, when Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain or \”mom blogger\” Heather Armstrong die of depression. But above all, we want nothing to do with such struggles.
I\’m a gay man who came out during the early years of the AIDS crisis, like many others. And that exposure made a huge difference in rights and health of LGBT people. Maybe we can learn from this and more of us can come out with our own mental health challenges, like Senator Fetterman did, like I just did. Because Lord knows we need to change the status quo, right?
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