Depression, Suicide, Loss of Hope

I received a message today from a childhood friend who informed me another mutual childhood friend committed suicide yesterday. He apparently said "I have had enough". What did that mean and why?

Then, I began to remember when we were teenagers and how he first entered my life. He was friends with my older brother Michael and Michael and I had the same friends. Brown hair, brown eyes and not very tall. However, he had a presence about him that demanded notice. He drank a lot but I cannot say he had a problem with alcohol as we all probably drank more than we should have back in those days. I dated him for a very short time when I was about sixteen. He went into the Navy after he graduated from high school right after my own brother joined the Navy.

I remember going to his wedding. It was the best wedding and I remember how much fun we all had. I was already married to Joe and was the mother of three little boys under 5 years old. He married a girl who was a nurse. They had children. They moved into Winchester Park. I did not see him much after that except at house parties or weddings then funerals of some of our other friends.

Today, I felt sad. I received Donna's message right after I facilitated a group between 11a to 12p. Group discussion was about Depression and suicide and the importance of being medication compliant. I spoke about "Hope" being the light at a very dark and long tunnel and I told my group to hold on with both hands to the hope because the darkness will pass. Once group was over I looked down at my phone and read the message.

I have had friends die from various reasons but I believe I never had a friend commit suicide. Eddie died in an alcohol related car accident. Cheryl died of a heart attack. Danny died of liver disease. Frenchie died of lung cancer. Now, Al is gone too.

Part IX Depression Suicide

Mike Wallace: Speaking to a Nation

In April of this year, the world lost one of its most respected journalists. A journalist who could hold the feet of world leaders to the fire and get them to respond to the tough questions that needed answered.
Born in 1918, Wallace was one of the original correspondents for CBS’ groundbreaking investigative journalism show 60 Minutes, which debuted in 1968. He worked as a full-time correspondent for the program until 2006, and until 2008 as an occasional correspondent.
However, it is not only his career as a respected journalist for which he will be remembered. He will also be remembered for his openness about his diagnosis and struggle with depression.
Wallace’s depression was brought on by a lawsuit in 1984 that was filed against him and several other members from CBS over a documentary about the Vietnam War. Wallace had been the chief correspondent.
As Wallace wrote for Guideposts in 2002, “I found myself suddenly struck, then overwhelmed, by something—an emptiness, a helplessness, an emotion and physical collapse—I’d never experienced before.”
At the time Wallace did not realize he was experiencing depression. He tried to keep going as usual: doing research, conducting interviews. However, the pressure of routinely going into the courthouse and having accusations thrown at him began to eat away him. He began to think that perhaps he had done something wrong; that perhaps he was a dishonest person.
The following month brought a brief period of respite as he was able to leave the courtroom and travel to Ethiopia for a story. He believed he was getting his old self back, back to normal.
But as soon as he returned, the feelings of depression swarmed over him again. One night, his depression came to a head when he took a large amount of sleeping pills. His wife found him unconscious at 3 a.m. and he was rushed to the hospital. Doctors were able to pump his stomach. At the urging of his wife, Wallace finally went to go see a doctor. At the time, his doctor warned him that admitting that he was having emotional difficulties could potentially do damage to his reputation.
At the end of year, after battling the flu, he was admitted a hospital with what CBS announced was “exhaustion.” In truth, as he soon found, it was actually clinical depression.
After the trial ended—the other side dropped the lawsuit—Wallace thought he would go back to feeling as he did before the trial. But he didn’t.
As his doctor told him, “That’s not how depression works. You don’t just snap out of a serious illness. You have to stay on the treatment and give it time to work.”
Because of the stigma associated with having depression and other mental illnesses, Wallace did not disclose his personal struggles with the public until 1988 when he appeared on Later with Bob Costas. His initial intention was not, however, to discuss his depression, but he soon realized that it was an opportune time to address the issue and could offer hope to the people watching who may also be struggling with their own illness.
Mike Wallace continued talk about his depression, including on the PBS program Healthy Minds in 2009.
Wallace understood that the people around him were what helped him stay strong through difficult times and was willing to give help to others. In a NAMI Blog, Helen Singer describes how even a single phone call from Wallace helped her greatly.
With the support of the people around him, Wallace was able to find strength. As he wrote in Guideposts:
“In a way, that’s been the key to my still going strong for all these years. Every time I reach out beyond myself—to my family and friends, to my doctor, to my coworkers and the public to whom we bring the news, to the whole community of people who battle depressive disorders, and to the one I have turned to ever since I was a boy in Brookline—I find hope that has led me out of the darkness.” (NAMI)

Part VII Depression Bipolar Suicide

Becoming One's Own: The Powerful Words of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, born in England in 1882, is considered one of the greatest modernist and early feminist writers of the 20th century.
Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and A Room of One’s Own (1929).
Woolf also struggled with bipolar disorder and died from suicide in 1941.
She experienced her first depressive episode at age 15, after the death of her mother and then her half-sister two years later. In 1904, after her father died, she experienced her second episode of depression and was briefly hospitalized. Sexual abuse from half-brothers also contributed to her mental illness.
Throughout Woolf’s life, mood swings often resulted in periods of convalescence that compromised her creativity. Episodes would begin with migraine headaches and sleeplessness and eventually lead to her hearing voices and experiencing visual hallucinations. In 1932 she wrote in a letter: “My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring, diving and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”
Woolf’s passion was for modernism in the arts—reaction to industrialization, urbanization and the horrors of World War I. It rejected traditional (realist) art forms in favor of radical reassessments and innovations, not only in style but also in considering the human condition and value of technological progress. Woolf experimented with stream-of consciousness narratives in her novels which revealed psychological and emotional motives of characters and other untraditional forms. In Flush: A Biography, for example, a semi-fictional biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the narrator is Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush.
Ironically, the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf (1962) by Edward Albee, has nothing to do with Woolf the writer—except for the title. It reflects Woolf’s modernist perspective and is intended to ask “Who is afraid to live without illusion?” (i.e., peeling back social pretensions until raw motives and emotions are exposed).
Woolf’s greatest novel, Mrs. Dalloway, includes criticism of the medical establishment of the 1920s in its treatment of mental illness. One level, it is about a woman in London on a single day, preparing to host a party that night. But parallel chapters told from the perspective of a “shell-shocked” World War I veteran, who today would be referred to as living with posttraumatic stress disorder. Like Woolf, in her own experience with bipolar disorder, the character isolates himself, hears birds singing in Greek and ultimately dies from suicide.
In 1941 after finishing her last novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell again into depression, which also coincided with the onset of World War II and destruction of her London home by a German bomb. In a note she left for her husband before she died, she wrote: “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I don’t think two people could have been happier ‘til this terrible disease came.” (NAMI)

Part VI Depression and Suicide

Gandhi: Depression’s Spiritual Transformation

Mohandas Gandhi was one of the principle leaders of India’s movement for independence from the British Empire. Independence was achieved in 1947. He is also recognized as the world’s foremost proponent of non-violent civil disobedience as a force for change, which greatly influenced the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
Gandhi was born in 1869. During his life, he lived through episodes of depression, including a suicide attempt as a teenager. He was also said to be shy and sensitive.
Following India’s independence, he endured his most severe episode of depression. India faced many tragic problems, including poverty and hunger. These issues weighed heavily on him as the “father of his country.”
Gandhi also felt a sense of personal failure. Independence was achieved at the cost of India being divided along religious lines into two separation nations: India, where the population was predominantly Hindu, and Pakistan, where the population was Muslim. The partition led to bloody riots in many cities between Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi saw it as a rejection of his philosophy of non-violence and collapse of his life’s work.
Gandhi spoke of his depression openly, confounded and frustrated because he lacked patience and “technique” to overcome it.
He once believed he could live to be 125, but told a reporter, “I have lost the hope because of the terrible happenings in the world. I don’t want to live in darkness.” The tone of his speeches, his “voice,” grew less optimistic.
Gandhi’s sense of failure and depression led to deeper reflection over his philosophy of non-violence and his life’s work. In a sense, he revisited choices he had made over the years, struggling with self-doubt. The result was reaffirmation, and to some degree, transformation.
Reflection often is part of cycles of growth in all people, especially those confronted by loss. This includes individuals living with mental illness as part of a process of recovery.
As a lawyer in South Africa, early in his career, Gandhi led opposition to legal discrimination against the Indian minority. It was the period when he first developed his philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience. When he returned to India in 1915, because of his work in South Africa, he became known as “Mahatma,” meaning “Great Soul.”
It was a title Gandhi did not like, until the last year of his life, as part of his transformation. He told a granddaughter: “I am a true Mahatma.”
His outlook included a sense of fatalism. Because of his teachings and work, he always believed he would die at the hands of an assassin, a death he said, he would gladly accept. In 1948, a Hindu extremist shot Gandhi to death, as part of a conspiracy whose members believed he favored Muslims in trying to end India’s violence.
Much of this article, including quotations, is based on the essay “From Mohandas to Mahatma: The Spiritual Metamorphosis of Gandhi” by Karen E. James in Essays in History, Vol. 28, pp. 5-20 Corcoran Department of History of the University of Virginia (1984), at http://www.lib.virginia.edu/area-studies/SouthAsia/gandhi.html. See also A First Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness by Nassir Graeme (Penguin Group, 2011). (NAMI)