Beyond Blue: December 2008 Archives

Although I've suffered from depression and anxiety from the moment I was induced from my mother's womb, I officially joined the elite club in 1989, my freshman year at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, when I went by the Counseling and Career Development Center to inquire about local support groups (I was a just few months sober). One of the therapists politely invited me back.

A few months later she rattled off a few diagnoses: obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorder, anxiety disorder, and depression. She strongly suggested antidepressants, but I resisted.

"They are happy pills that will compromise your sobriety," some hard-core 12-steppers said. "The world needs God, not Valium," preached a priest in his homily. Meds were the easy way out. And at the time, I was all about feeling the pain so that I could transform into a more spiritual person.

"Life doesn't have to be this hard," my counselor told me and gave me a copy of Colette Dowling's book, "You Mean I Don't Have to Feel This Way?" A year and a half later, when I was experiencing suicidal thoughts, I finally cried uncle, clinging to the lifeboat (or prescription) God sent me. After a few trial and error experiments, my doctor and I stumbled on the combination of Prozac and Zoloft, which allowed me to concentrate enough to study and pray, yet relax enough to tell a joke here and there.

Then I got married, in 1996, and had kids (David and Katherine are 5 and 3 now). After I had them, though, my hormones huddled together to ask each other what the heck they were supposed to be doing now that no baby was in the womb or at the breast. My neurotransmitters (responsible for feelings of well-being) scattered for good, and I had an honest-to-goodness mental breakdown. I lost twenty pounds because I had no appetite, I contracted one urinary tract infection after another because my immune system was breaking down, I breathed into a paper bag every morning during a panic attack, and I trembled and flailed like Linda Blair in the "Exorcist" because my anxiety was so acute. Oh, and let's not forget the endless sobbing: at the grocery, at my son's soccer practice, at preschool fieldtrips, in church, and everywhere else.

It took two trips to the psych ward, six different psychiatrists, and 23 different medication combinations over a year and a half's time to get me well again. In other words, I upgraded to the platinum membership in Club D. As an authentic manic-depressive with Bipolar II disorder, I graduated beyond the my-primary-care-physician-can-give-me-my-meds, to the regular check-ins with doctors specializing in mental health.

Although I have many times cussed out God and asked what he was thinking when he designed my brain, I agree with Kay Redfield Jamison, author of "An Unquiet Mind," that "tumultuousness, if coupled with discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing. In other words, unless one wants to live a stunningly boring life, one ought to be on good terms with one's darker side and one's darker energies."

My real faith, the engine that propels me to love better and be better, was born in my dark night. Blindfolded, I felt my way through the woods to the campfire, where a crowd of fellow depressives welcomed me. They taught me which voices to listen to (Go for it!), which to ignore (You're a failure.), and how to get out of bed the days your sickness has attacked every muscle in your body.

A friend and fellow depressive once told me that illness and anxiety are helping hands to help people tell their stories. I guess that's what I hope to do here.

One resolution I'm making this year is to surround myself with the people I most admire and respect. So first I had to list them and what they've taught me.

All of the following people have endured their share of hardships and then some. But they managed to climb to the surface as stronger, more loving human beings. My goal is to imitate them, however poorly, if only for a minute here or there.

Michael Leach (co-editor with me of two books, my mentor, and foster dad): "Always err on the side of compassion."

Carleen Suttman (my high school religion teacher): "Anything is possible if you take it one day at a time."

Deacon Leroy Moore (responsible for converting Eric to Catholicism!): "The gospel is really about having coffee with people you love."

Father Dave Schlaver (a missionary in Bangladesh who helped me meet Mother Teresa): "Service work begins at home."

My mom: "This too shall pass."

Betty Moore (the 82-year-old wife of my 85-year-old running partner, which should give you an idea of my pace): "Think positive. And when you can't, think positive some more."

Father Joe Girzone (the priest who inspired me to write): "Live and write like a bulldozer in low gear, plowing through all the mess that's in front of you."

Phyllis Kaminski (my theology professor at Saint Mary's College): "Life is about learning how to maneuver in the gray."

Ann Omohundro (my guardian angel and first bipolar friend): "The deeper your sorrow, the greater your joy."

Who are your heroes? 

To read more Beyond Blue, go to www.beliefnet.com/beyondblue, and to get to Group Beyond Blue, a support group at Beliefnet Community, click here.

The more I research and read about depression, the more questions I have about this brain disease, and the more I realize I don't know.

For example, it's difficult to wrap my brain (no pun intended) around the "circuit-board" model of major depression--the connection between specific sets of nerve cells in different regions of the brain--explained by researchers like Helen S. Mayberg, M.D., professor of psychiatry and neurology at Emory School of Medicine.

I'm fascinated by research programs that use high tech brain-imaging to define what Mayberg calls "the critical neural pathways that mediate normal and abnormal mood states."

I'm intrigued by this not-so-new notion that depression is not just a chemical imbalance in the brain. It's much more complicated and involved than that--which is why neurology and psychiatry have to work in tandem to figure out how best to treat it.

In her exceptionally well-researched article, "Depression: Beyond Serotonin" (Psychology Today), journalist and editor Hara Estroff Marano clarifies so many confusing myths and concepts about depression that are simply out-dated based on the emerging field of neurobiology.

The article is too long and complex to throw at you in one post, so I'll split it up into bite sizes over the next few days.

Here's the beginning:

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New research is challenging the assumption that the world's most common mental ailment is just a chemical imbalance in the brain.

Melancholy is a fertile muse. No sooner had William Styron become the poet laureate of depression after describing his bout with madness in "Darkness Visible" when all manner of confessions followed. Mike Wallace. Art Buchwald. Dick Cavett lined up to disclose their own struggles with the disabling disorder. It quickly became acceptable, even chic, to publicly confide vulnerability to depression.