“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.” — Barbara Kingsolver

“I didn’t want my picture taken because I knew I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.” – Sylvia Plath

“I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something so wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.” – Margaret Atwood

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re ‘not at all like yourself but you will be soon,’ but you know you won’t.” — Kay Redfield Jamison

So May is National Mental Health Month. It’s a month in which those in the mental health field try to bring awareness to the plight of the mentally ill in this country and to do what we can to help end the stigma surrounding mental illness. In honor of ending the stigma, here’s my story ….

My mom died when I was thirteen. I was number five of seven kids, but the oldest left at home because my older brother left for college about a month after her death. My little brother, age 4 (almost 5) and my little sister (2) were also still at home. My dad was completely overwhelmed because my mom had literally run the entire household while he went off to work. So we didn’t talk about her death. At all. Other than to talk about how amazing and wonderful and awesome she had been, we didn’t discuss her death or the gargantuan hole that was left in our family. I’d always been her “little ray of sunshine” and I continued that trend. Stuffed my feelings, cried myself to sleep, but certainly never talked about the pain.

That lasted about three years until I was sixteen and had my first suicide attempt. A brand new bottle of Tylenol and a bottle of peach schnapps. While my dad and siblings were home. I thought I could just go to bed and no one would be the wiser. Which may have been true …. Until I woke up vomiting violently, all over my bedroom floor, wall, and down the hallway. My dad found the empty bottle of pills in my room and asked, “WHAT IS THIS?” to which I responded, “I WANTED TO DIE, OKAY?!”

Stomach pumping number one. No overnight stay in the hospital. Just a referral to a therapist.

I lasted another three years. Then I drove to the park, put Amy Grant on the cassette player, and dug into my wrist with an Exacto knife. I even cut the “right” way! And in a park where Rangers NEVER patrolled, a Ranger came up to my car. Paramedics were called. I was treated like I was an idiot and rode in the back of a cop car to the ER where they stitched me up and then sent me home. At that point, I’d been seeing a psychiatrist and she directly admitted me to her hospital: that was my first admission to the psych floor.

There were several overdose attempts after that. Thirty Xanax and plenty of booze at Kent State and a night in ICU. Another psychiatric hospitalization. Two boxes of sleeping pills and booze in a hotel room at Franciscan University. More ICU and lots of hallucinations. Another psychiatric hospitalization. Graduation from college, got a “real” job, and downed some Prozac and Trazodone. Another psychiatric hospitalization. I was becoming a pro at having NG tubes shoved down my throat and throwing up charcoal. I knew the ins and outs of the psych floor. I was on my way to a life of being a victim of mental illness.

I don’t know what the change was. I was definitely motivated to make changes each time I was in the hospital. I learned about affirmations and relaxation and all kinds of different coping skills. After the Prozac and Trazodone overdose, my fiancée postponed our wedding (as well he should have). That was hard. That was really, really hard. And I redoubled my efforts to avoid suicide attempts. I made it two years without any hospitalizations. We got married. We got pregnant. And once I had those girls of mine, I thought I would never again even be tempted by suicide. I certainly would never try it, again. I’d never leave my girls the way my mom left me (not that she had suicided, but I had felt abandoned by her death).

Through the years, psychiatrists and therapists have been constants. I’ve done a couple of Intensive Outpatient Programs, too, when things in my world have been rocked to my core. And there were certainly times when I thought about ending it all—where I stockpiled pills, hid them in various places, or slowly bought box after box of sleeping pills …. “just in case.” I honestly thought that everyone felt like I did, that everyone contemplated suicide fairly regularly and it was a battle to stay alive. I realize now that’s not true. I realize now that my clinical depression coupled with some really crappy personality traits led me down that path of suicidality.

Most people never knew the depths of my depression because of the mask I wear of “happy Jenny”. Most people told me, “You have a great life! What do you have to be depressed about?!” And sometimes they were right: I had nothing to be depressed about. But that’s not what depression is, anyway. Depression is because the neurotransmitters in my brain are out of whack. Depression is “in my head” the same way epilepsy or Alzheimer’s is “in the patient’s head”. Nope, you can’t measure it quantifiably, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a biochemical cause. That’s the maddening part: there can be “NO REASON” for depression just like there can be “NO REASON” someone develops cancer. It’s just crappy genetics and some environmental influences.

Depression is blackness. It’s unyielding and unrelenting. It’s the ultimate liar. It whispers in your ear, “You’re no good. You’re pathetic. You’re useless. You will never amount to anything. You will never feel any better. You are a burden to everyone around you. You are nothing.” And it’s really damn hard to separate that voice from your own soul. Do you even have a soul, anymore? You wonder. Depression is like being trapped in a deep well. The walls are made of dirt and every time you try to crawl up and out, the soil crumbles under your fingers and you get nowhere except dirtier. There is no light. There is no glimmer. There is no chance of getting better. There is only horror and shame and despair and WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU THAT YOU CAN’T FIX THIS, YOURSELF? EVERYONE SAYS YOU SHOULD BE FEELING BETTER! HOW CAN YOU NOT EVEN CONTROL YOUR OWN MIND???? It’s suffocating. You can’t breathe. You don’t even want to breathe, anymore. All you can think about is ending this fucking never-ending pain. The pain. It’s all-consuming. It takes over your body, your soul. You don’t even know who the fuck you are anymore. Certainly no one that deserves to be happy or have a chance at life.   You see the frustration in all your loved ones’ faces! They can’t even stand you, anymore! What is the escape? How do you make it stop? How do you end the pain? How do you catch your breath? How do you have any chance to ever get out of this torturous black hole that you’ve dug for yourself? Suicide. That’s the escape from the pain. That’s the only way to silence the screams of “WORTHLESS!” in your head.

That’s why people try suicide. Not to punish the living. Mostly not to punish themselves. It’s just to stop the unrelenting, crushing, overwhelming, suffocating pain.

With good meds and great therapy (and, if necessary, electroshock therapy for some), the depression can subside, of course. But that’s hard to see or believe in the throes of it—especially when you’re young and you don’t have the perspective that life (and depression) has its ebbs and flows over time. I don’t think about suicide, anymore. Not actively. I still get the occasional desire to never wake up, or I’ll hope for a fatal car crash, but at 44, I know those feelings are exactly that: feelings. They will come and they will go. That’s years of therapy kicking in. Finally. Like AA, “It works if you work it.”

So judge me now, if you’d like. I’m used to it by now. It doesn’t phase me, anymore. Because who I am is a woman who has wrangled with depression most of her life. It doesn’t define me, but it certainly has helped to create the person I am today. And I like the person I am today. Very much. I still have lots to work on (boundaries and health relationships), but I’m doing the work. I’ll get there.