Some things you just don’t talk about.
Even with your closest friends.
Until you are ready.
For me, this verboten topic was clinical depression. Mine.
I was in my early 40s when the darkness that descended on me felt as terrifying as it did shameful. Why couldn’t I rally myself from this helpless state that felt like my mental capacities were sinking into a quicksand all their own? I’d been through tough times before and figured out how to navigate through them.
Why, this time, couldn’t I pull myself together?
Fortunately, as this was happening, I had the good sense to reach out to a therapist with whom I’d talked a year earlier after I’d tried to become a mother on my own by using donor insemination. I’d done that after spending several years of talking with other women considering single motherhood. With them and friends, I’d weighed the pros and cons of doing this on my own until I decided to go ahead.
Editor's Note: Melissa is sharing her experience with clinical depression and hospitalization for the first time in anticipation of being a guest on "Shining Light on Shadows: A Candid Conversation About Mental Health" hosted by Neil Parekh and Dawn Helmrich Neuburg.
This blog post is reprinted with permission from her Substack, "Let's Row Together" (January 17, 2025). You can watch the live show Thursday, January 23 at 7pm ET / 6pm CT OR the recording on Facebook, Twitter*, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram* and Neil's website.
*We won't know the exact urls for Twitter or Instagram until we go live. For now, those links go to Neil's accounts.
By the time I met with this therapist in the summer of 1992, I was a year out from when I’d ended my failed year-long attempt to get pregnant. I’d quit after hormones I’d taken to stimulate egg production landed me on a horrible roller coaster ride of my emotions.
From there, I’d moved on with my single life, including an extraordinary year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Within a month of that fellowship ending, I secured my first book contract with Random House. Since I’d taken a buyout from Time magazine, I planned to pair my severance package from Time with my book advance to write this book about unmarried motherhood in America.
I wrote about this experience in my book, On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America (Random House, 1997)
But plans don’t always go as you think they will.
By the fall of 1993, when I renewed my visits with this therapist, I was interviewing women and researching my book, and even starting to write it. I was also experiencing fearsome spells of sadness and uncertainty that I didn’t understand. Progressively, these bouts worsened and lasted longer.
Until there wasn’t any break.
Here are my therapist’s summary notes from my first visit back with her: “9/30/93 – She was depressed and anxious with early morning awakening, low appetite with weight loss, feels isolated and scared at times about being able to finish her book, especially because she was having trouble concentrating.”
In her notes, I find I’d shared worries about a friend with cancer who was going through a rough spell in her treatment. I’d talked about a small surgery I’d had that summer (all had gone well) and the medical workup I’d recently undergone for cardiac ischemia. (None was found.) I also let her know about a large amount of money I’d lent friends and how I realized the debt was not going to be repaid at a time when I’d left my job at Time and was without a salary for the first time in my adult life.
Thankfully, I’d signed up for Time’s COBRA health insurance.
As I reread her summary notes today, I see how hard I’d tried to come up with all kinds of external reasons as to why I felt as disoriented as I did. Her notes remind me of how deeply I had buried my residue of emotions after abruptly stopping my efforts to become a mother. Even in this comfort zone of my therapist’s office, I was not surfacing them.
Perhaps I sensed that if I retrieved them, I’d have to confront those heavy feelings again, which I didn’t want to do.
Besides, I believed I’d moved on from contemplating motherhood and parked my emotions in a place I didn’t plan to revisit.
But that wasn’t possible, which I discovered that fall.
My next visit: “10/8/93 -agitated and not feeling like she could be productive and less self confidence particularly about her book.”
I returned home. Went to bed. Slept restlessly. Barely ate.
“10/13/93 – same symptoms but worse – started antidepressant, Paxil 10 mg a day.”
A few friends saw me slipping, and they’d call to talk. They tried everything they could to boost my spirits by telling me all I was capable of doing. I heard their words, but they didn’t penetrate. It didn’t seem like they were talking about me. Or to me.
10/20/93 – more depressed, no appetite, not sleeping past 4 a.m., agitated and really down – sent her to Mt Auburn Hospital ER – hospitalized.
I was relieved when she suggested that I be hospitalized. I said “yes” right away. I didn’t want to go home. I feared being alone, scared of what might happen next.
10/25/93 – discharged from the hospital on Paxil still. I saw ML that day. Staying with friends for the week. Issue of having a child is at the forefront - afraid she’ll be too lonely and isolated as a single parent.
At last, those emotions had surfaced, and now I had no choice but to confront them, again. But now I had help.
10/30/93 – a little better mood – less agitated – “less weepy,” she says. Thinks the Paxil is helping. Able to sleep later.
Being hospitalized did help, but when it came time to leave, I wasn’t ready to be at home, alone. Close friends took me in, and the week I’d planned to be with them stretched to three weeks until I returned home. Tentatively, and with the encouraging support of a tiny circle of friends and my literacy agent in whom I had confided my circumstances, I gradually resumed work on my book, as I settled into my single life.
Though I turned my book in two years late, Random House published it in the fall of 1997. When it was time to take On Our Own on its book tour, my then one-year old daughter Maya, who I’d adopted from China three months earlier, accompanied her unmarried mother. (My friend, Christine DeLisle, travelled with us to be with Maya when I did media gigs.)
Why do I share this story now?
Let me return to how we began:
Some things you just don’t talk about.
Even with your closest friends.
Until you are ready.
Well, I’m ready.
I was ready several months ago when I saw that my friend, Neil Parekh, was hosting a digital series of talks with people about their mental health issues. Neil had shared his own lifelong silence around his mental health experiences, which he’d broken when he began hosting this series with the goal of lessening the stigma that still surrounds mental health. I emailed Neil to let him know about my experience, and before I knew it, I’d agreed to talk about my clinical depression on this online series called “Shining Light on Shadows.”
I will join Neil and his co-host Dawn Helmrich Neuburg next Thursday evening, January 23 at 7:00 ET. You can join our conversation by tuning in on a number of social media platforms.
Kommentare