I was on Relevant Radio this morning discussing depression and suicide with a man I’ve come to call my friend, Sean Herriott, and we started
with this quick prayer to Bl. Enrico Rebuschini, who is featured in 39 New Saints You Should Know. (Following the prayer is an expanded version of our talk.)
Dear God, so many of our
brethren are unhappy and want their lives to end. Through the prayers of Bl.
Enrico Rebuschini who was bipolar, lift their depression and help them to
emerge with a clear vision of Your will and the strength and courage to do it.
We ask these things in the name of Your Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ Who lives
and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.
On Tuesday, I learned a former
colleague of mine had taken her life. This comes about a year and a half after
my uncle committed suicide, and three months after I had gone into the hospital
because I had entertained suicidal thoughts. Depression is something I’ve
fought since I was 9, when I was in third grade.
So I was driving to my counseling
appointment yesterday listening to my favorite drive time show, “Morning Air” and
heard its hourly feature, “Glen’s Story Corner. “ This was followed by Sean
Herriott’s interview with composer Eric Genuis, who does a lot of prison
ministry work, and by coincidence, both focused on reaching
out to touch those who were hurting.
That got me thinking.
 |
| My dear, beautiful, wonderful uncle. |
It got me thinking about my uncle. For
a whole week after he endeavored to end his life—and he lingered for about that
same amount of time, never conscious for a moment of it—I was in shock. I
remember taking a couple of days off from work and one day going to a water
park with my family. And I just sat there with my baby in the wading pool. I
couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, I could hardly think.
My colleague who died in April and
I weren’t close. But you should have seen this woman. Just gorgeous, and her
interior beauty matched her physical attractiveness. Bright, funny, vivacious,
charming, impeccably feminine, she just had a real good head on her shoulders. I
had immediate respect for her.
In both cases, I asked, “Why? What
if? What could I have done differently?”
And the answer is, at this point,
nothing. I had no way of knowing. Just like people would have had no way of
knowing what was going on with me if I had killed myself in January or had done
so the last time I’d had suicidal thoughts before that, ironically the week
before my uncle killed himself, or during my young adult years, or during my
college years and in high school and in junior high school, which, when I was
14, was the only time I actually attempted suicide. People would have asked, “Why?
What if? What could I have done differently?”
We can’t answer these questions any
more than we can undo the past. But you know what? I realized listening to
yesterday’s “Morning Air” program I could do something. So to the extent that I
can help people with this—either because they are struggling with depression
and hopelessness and a deep longing for death to come somehow, someway or they
know someone who is—I want to.
So as someone with almost a whole
lifetime of experience with depression, here’s what I’ve learned.
Yes, life is precious. And it is
great. But let’s be real: There’s a very good reason why we call it a “vale of
tears.”
For me it started with being bullied
all the way through college. After a certain point, each new incident of
bullying just reinforced this already embedded sense that I was worthless. As a
result, I lived with constant depression. On those rare occasions where I
caught myself doing negative self-talk, it was vicious.
To deal with this, I drank heavily,
I ate comfort foods, I spent money foolishly, and I violated Catholic moral
teachings, all in an attempt to either numb the depression or momentarily feel
better. Just to give a picture of how bad it was, I had been accepted into the
University of Utah. I was excited about going.
Then my dad found out about my
considerable drinking problem (having fortified myself with liquid courage
during the lunch break, I regularly spent the second half of the school day
pretty well sloshed). That was it. He wouldn’t pay a dime for my tuition. I
could go out and get a job or join the military, but he wasn’t going to waste a
considerable amount of money on not educating a budding alcoholic. Thank God
for my “Uncle” Jimmy, who talked him into giving me a second chance.
Obviously, there are as many
different paths to mental illness as there are people. A woman with whom I was
hospitalized couldn’t get over the loss of her son. In group session, she would
wear an etched in stone frown that made the Easter Island statues look like
they were laughing in an uproarious fashion. All the while, she would
constantly stroke the wallet-sized senior portrait of her dead boy. Another
woman, her husband walked out on her and their daughter. My hospital roommate’s
father committed suicide, and he had several neurological disorders.
Most depressed people with suicidal ideations feel such shame, and that shame brings on profound feelings of
worthlessness. The first time I attended a monthly healing Mass in the north of
my state, I went up to the priest so he could lay his hands on me.
He prayed over me and half asked, “Baseball.”
“Excuse me?” I answered.
“Baseball,” he repeated slowly,
quizzically. “Did you ever play baseball?”
“Uhm, yes, I did,” I slowly replied, nor sure where this was going.
“How long did you play?” he
inquired, raising one eyebrow.
I told him in a tone that got
quieter and more than slightly sheepish, “Just one year.”
“Why?”
“Because I wasn’t any good. I had a
batting average of .001. Maybe. I think I got one hit the entire season.”
Now up to that afternoon, I had
completely repressed any memory of playing baseball. My coach that lone season
played me in every game, but only because he had to. How I dreaded going up to
bat. How I dreaded trotting out to left field, because I knew that once their
hitters found out I couldn’t field a fly ball, that’s where every hit would
come. I could remember this wrong, but that’s how the memory feels. This
touches on perception skewing, which we’ll dive into in a little bit.
“How did you feel about that?”
Father asked.
“Pretty lousy,” I told him, which
was more polite than, “How the hell do you think I felt, genius.”
“I sense a feeling of shame.”
I didn’t say anything. I looked downward
and off to my left, then straight down at the floor and then straight at him
and gave a trio of stiff nods with pursed lips in affirmation.
“I sense a lot of shame. There’s a
lot of shame in there,” he said, pointing his index finger and drawing it close
to my heart. “People who are wounded like you are deep in shame. I know. I am,
too. I was lousy at baseball, and it was terrible.
“I want you to go back your pew,”
he continued, “and think about all the shame that’s in there, and then I want
you to give that shame to Christ. Invite Him in there because He wants to go
into the places where we’re most wounded so He can heal them. Give Him your
shame. You’ve held onto it long enough. You don’t need it anymore. You never
did.”
Boy, did that open the memory floodgates.
That was a very painful afternoon. Had I not been there, though, I never would
have realized what a profound impact shame has had on my life. Shame at being
bad at sports. Shame at being the last one picked for a team. Shame at being
picked on. Shame at desperately feeling unloved by any of my family except my
maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother. Shame at being the perennial
problem child. Shame at always being a problem, period. Shame at the way certain
fraternity brothers who preached the most about being “bros” were the ones who
accepted me the least and often showed their rejection in cruel ways. Shame,
shame, shame, shame, shame.
That day also led to my eventual
discovery that our dignity as human persons derives from one source and one
source only: The fact that God has created us in His image and likeness. That
He destined us for eternal love with Him in heaven. That He loves us so much
that were we the only ones in history to have ever sinned, He still would have
sent His only begotten Son to suffer and give His life in redemption of those
sins. That through baptism, we were incorporated into the Body of Christ, and
through the Passion, death, and resurrection of that same Christ, we became His
adopted sons and coheirs to the kingdom and are thus a priestly and kingly
people. That is the true and only source of our dignity.
So when someone—a bully, a parent,
whoever—demeans us, does violence to us, deprives us of our dignity in any way,
it is not necessarily indicative that we have a character flaw or that we are
somehow not worthy. Instead, it is more likely a reflection of the problems they have and with which they cope by
taking it out on us. This isn’t always the case, but it is more than
occasionally the case.
Those with depression can also have
skewed perceptions, which may result in a lack of proper judgment. After years
of having one’s opinions invalidated, one not only assumes one’s opinions will
be questioned simply as a matter of course, but, despite however hard one may
fight for those opinions, will desperately wonder whether those who invalidate
them might just be right. This leads to great indecisiveness, which can have the
appearance of affirming the other person’s conclusion that we make faulty
judgments. Then when someone—either through force of reason or, just as likely,
power—overrides those opinions, it only serves to bring more shame, more
insecurity, more of a sense that the world is a damned and lonely place. At
least this is how it has been in my case, and that has contributed to my just
wanting to check out.
For years, I asked myself, “Why did
this happen to me?” I thought if I could answer that question, I could resolve
my issues. The problem, however, was that the “Why?” was not only unanswerable,
it only masked a much more dark question: “Did this happen to me because I am
unlovable?”
Regardless of your situation, when
you’re depressed, life never, ever seems to go your way. You feel cheated,
like the deck is stacked against you, and that often leads to anger (which is
simply a metastasized sadness) and despair (which is sadness metastasized in a
different direction). When you think like that, it’s really easy to feel an
all-enveloping despondency if you’re not careful. And a lot of times, you don’t
even realize this because the thinking that accompanies despair becomes
habitual.
Well, pretty soon, you lose
interest in life. Getting out of bed is an unbelievable struggle. You lose
concern for your appearance. Eventually, a series of thoughts grow into like a
drumbeat: ‘I don’t want to go on. Life will never get better. I want to die.
Please, Lord, let a bus hit me. Please let a semi-truck crash into my car.’
When God doesn’t answer that prayers—SURPRISE!—you start thinking of ways to
end your life, and there are a lot.
So what do you do if you are so
depressed that you have suicidal ideations (i.e., you’ve seriously contemplated
suicide or at least desperately want your life to end)?
These various steps come from what
I’ve learned so far:
1)
Acknowledge
you have a problem
2)
Radically
accept the past
3)
Acknowledge
you can’t fight this on your own
4)
The idea
of needing medication is humiliating at first, but meds are a key component, and they do make a world of difference
5)
Hospitalization
(optional in a number of cases)
6)
Be
aggressive when it comes to getting yourself the best care possible
a.
Don’t let
people – doctors, nurses, whoever – tell you what you don’t need (what you do
need is another story). Fight for your
life!
7)
Get a
support team in place
8)
Push for
as much treatment as your insurance plan will give you.
9)
Regardless
of insurance coverage, do those
things you can on your own
10) Pray
a. Thank
God in prayer
b. Praise
God in prayer
11) Trust God
12) Do something good for someone
13) Smile
14) Forgive
a. Confession and the Mass
b.
The Our
Father “… and forgive us our trespasses as
we forgive those who trespass against us.”
15) Love
Don’t live the cliché,
“Denial: It ain’t just a river in Egypt.”
The first step is crucial: You have
to acknowledge you have a problem. In
the hospital, I took a test that showed I am bipolar. When I grew up, that’s
how you described seriously crazy people. Understand that this is totally inaccurate. Some crazy people are
bipolar, but not all bipolar people are crazy. Indeed, most aren’t.
No one with type II bipolar disorder (which I have) is. Nonetheless, that is why it’s hard for me to admit having this condition even
now, and it terrifies me, frankly, to admit to having this in public. Will people ostracize
me? Will they reject me, avoid me, talk about me behind my back, gossip about
me? (Well, of course, they will; it is human nature. That does not mean I look forward to the prospect. I've spent most of my life being the oddball out/sideshow freak, but since I have chosen to make my condition public, that is the result I will have to expect.) Will opportunities I otherwise may have had suddenly, conveniently
disappear? To say, “Hi, I’m Brian, and I have a mental illness,” even if I only say it to myself
in my brain, it makes me cringe. I hate it, but no one ever gets better by
ignoring the truth. Anyway, acknowledgment of the problem is step one.
Radically accept the
past
Next, you must practice radical acceptance of the past. The
past stinks. It’s rotten we got such a bad break. However, it is gone. We can’t turn back the clock; we
will never get a do over. We can only march forward, as painful or terrifying as
that prospect might be.
The question then becomes: Where do
we go from here? Go up. That can’t happen, though, unless we radically accept
that the past is gone and beyond our reach. I didn’t say it would be easy, but
is our only option if we hope to have healing.
Something else you’ll need to
accept? This will never go away. You will battle mental disease the rest of
your life. Cancer, you can get rid of that. Tuberculosis and other ailments,
you can get rid of them. Mental illness, though? It’s like diabetes. You will
never be “cured” in the traditional sense.
That fact was, putting it mildly, a
little discouraging. All I could see was how exhausting this work can be at
times. If I had prostate cancer and it was caught early enough, I’d have an
operation or chemo or radiation or take some naturopathic treatment, and, boom,
I’d be done.
Not so with mental illness. Bummer,
dude. Again, just accept it and move on.
Humility is your best
friend
Then, acknowledge you can’t fight this on your own. People with
depression and suicidal ideations need professional help, and we need
medications. If you think otherwise, go to any major city and look for homeless
people. You will see many who have schizophrenia and have gone off their meds
because they judged they were doing better and think they are fine now and thus
don’t need them (simply proof of my Rule of Human Existence #1: Humanity’s
capacity for self-deception is limitless). Meds
are a key component. My behavior and outlook since I went on my regimen are
like night and day. I’m much calmer, I’m more in control, and my mood is
stable. That is huge, absolutely
huge. If you don’t believe me, ask my children and beloved spouse what it was
like to live with me—the guy who writes about saints for a living, mind
you—beforehand (mea culpa, mea culpa, mea
maxima culpa).
Don’t fear the hospital
A key thing for me was my hospitalization. That’s not for
everyone, but if you’re suicidal, unless you’re going to lose your livelihood
or something, it is for you.
I got hospitalized in this way: In
early January, I had bronchitis, so at a regular medical appointment, my wife,
who had accompanied me, told our doctor of my saying the previous night I no
longer wanted to live. His eyes got wide, fearful even. The medical appointment
ended there and then. He told me, “I can’t help you with this. I’m not
equipped. No one around here is (I live in a very rural area). You need to
drive to the hospital now, go to the emergency room intake desk, and tell them
you want to kill yourself. They’ll admit you. Don’t wait. Go now. Do it today.”
As depressed as I was, this made me
feel even worse. I was being hospitalized for depression. How low could
I get? Boy, I must really be a loser,
right?
Well, it was the best thing that could have happened. I
received excellent care, and I got to think and reflect. I also did a lot of
writing, and the two together helped me make sense of a lot of things.
You are your best and
truest advocate
Now I could have left the hospital
and been done with it. Of course, I would have eventually gotten back on
the same squirrel cage wheel of being extremely depressed and feeling like I
wanted to die. In other words, I’d be going nowhere fast.
Instead, I left knowing I needed to
be aggressive in pursuing better
mental health. Furthermore, now that I knew what the problem was (despite how
humiliating that felt), the means existed for me to do this. I was actually
excited and hopeful.
Fighting depression and warding off
suicidal inclinations is like fighting cancer. You have to do whatever
you can with whatever means you have to fight it.
The first thing I did was to get a support team in place, and they’re
there to help me if I’m having suicidal ideations. My first line of defense is
my wife. But if she’s not available, I have my cousin and my sister, who I
trust and who I know love me.
Now, I’m lucky. I have a great
insurance plan that covers my weekly visits with my behavioral therapist. If
you do, too, push for as much as they
will give you. Again, be aggressive. This is your life we’re talking about.
A lot of people don’t have such
good insurance, though. Regardless, push
for as much as your plan will give you.
Lack of insurance isn’t
the end of the line
With or without insurance coverage (for those without, see here, here, and here for a few ideas/options),
there are things you can do on your own.
I’m not suggesting these will or should take the place of professional care,
but they will help (see above for what I wrote about how you can not do this on your own).
For instance, I’m convinced I’m
here today because the times when I was most depressed, I took pains to do the
things I didn’t want to such as dressing nicely and making the bed because I
knew it would help.
Pray
In the
morning, I get on my knees, and I pray
a morning offering. If I’m super tired (which lately is most of the time), I
simply garble a, “Thank you, Lord, for getting me through this night, and thank
you for having made me a Catholic.”
Or I might
do the traditional morning offering, or I may riff on it like so:
“Thank You, God, for getting me
through this night and giving me this day, and thank You for having made me an
adopted son of Yours through Your one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. I
give You this day with all its joys, works, sorrows, and sufferings. I entrust
these things to You, for You are all good and have promised me that You have
made plans for my welfare, not for evil, and plans to give me a future full of
hope (cf., Jer 29:11). I trust in this promise because You are Truth, and You
can neither deceive nor be deceived.”
Then I thank God. When you count your blessings—no matter how few they may
seem—it becomes evident that not everything
in your life is wholly rotten. Maybe most of it is, but not everything, and
that’s a start.
But trust God and His grace. Fall into His arms and don’t let go, and
then thank Him and, just as importantly, praise
Him, for He is good and His mercy and love endure forever.
Now if you’re like some of my friends
who have been raped or were the victims of molestation or incest or bullying or
whatever—in other words, people who found themselves in horrible situations
that they didn’t cause—that’s an awfully hard pill to swallow. Fake it ‘til you
make it. Or like the man in Mark 9:24 says, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”
Acts of service/Being
Christ to others
Next, do something for someone else, especially if it is someone whom you
don’t like or with whom you ordinarily wouldn’t associate.
One of the subjects in 39 New Saints You Should Know, Bl. Marie
of Jesus Crucified, wrote, “If you think to do good for your brother, God will
think of you…. [If] you make a heaven for your brother, it will be for you.”
When someone is depressed, they
have an intensely inward focus. By doing a kind deed for strangers or
adversaries or that awkward or uncomfortable person two cubicles down, you
break out of that stranglehold.
The day I left my first healing
Mass, there was a young lady in her early twenties. She was somewhat heavy set,
not huge, but by no means svelte. She wore jeans, a black polo shirt, and a
denim jacket and had her longish hair tucked up under a tan baseball cap that
she had pulled down so low that it practically covered her eyes. She had sat in
the back and did not come up to be prayed over until she was the last person to
do so.
As I sat in my pew thinking about my
shame, praying about all of this, and giving it to Christ and inviting Him
inside, I was also watching her. I saw Father pray over her, her crumple to the
floor and start sobbing, and the attendants gather around her to give her
comfort. I sensed that the Holy Spirit put this sentence into my head: “God
loves you, and He wants you to know this was not your fault.” It seems I was
mean to deliver this “message” to her. Uh. OK. Not real comfortable out doing
this. The push to do so, however, only grew stronger.
Finally, I walked up to her, still weeping
on the floor, expressed how I felt uncomfortable doing this but that I felt
like I was compelled to do so, and delivered the message. Then I went back to
my pew to continue praying.
At the end, the woman attending her
came up and whispered, “Thank you. That was exactly what she needed to hear.”
Was I responsible for this?
Absolutely not. I take no glory in this because I fought it. I didn’t want to
do it at all, but only did so out of obedience. So to the extent it was a
healing action for this lady, I can only credit the Holy Spirit. The point is
that she never would have heard “exactly what she needed to hear” if not for a
willingness to step out in faith to serve someone in Christ, to be Christ to
that person. All of us are called to do this, it feels really good to do it,
and it is especially beneficial for the depressed to serve others, although not
necessarily by claiming to be the vessel of the Holy Spirit, mind you. I
certainly make no claims to be such.
Next, smile. Make it a habit to smile at people you pass by in the day.
If you’re not depressed, your smile—whether at a random stranger or someone you
know—because, as Glen quoted Fulton Sheen yesterday (“A smile across the aisle
of a bus in the morning could save a suicide later in the day.”), you may save
that person’s life. If you are depressed, smile. It will lift your spirits.
Yesterday, after hearing both Glen
and Eric, I made it a point to smile at people and say something simple such
as, “Good morning. How ya doin’?” And people smiled right back. Big beaming
smiles, too.
It was great. It encouraged me to
smile more and to try and brighten someone’s day however I could. Yesterday was
honestly one of the best days I’ve had in a long time. I was in a fantastic
mood. When I came home, even though my wife was grumpy and went to bed early,
leaving me with all the evening chores, and even though the kids weren’t
necessarily the most cooperative little angels on the planet, I felt hardly any
stress.
Smiling really works. It sounds so facile, so simple, even simplistic as to
be moronic, but oh well. It works.
Forgiveness
And for anyone, regardless of their
mental state, forgive. Lack of
forgiveness often is the root cause of so much mental instability. A friend of
mine refuses to forgive a man who broke her heart. Well, that has caused other problems
for her. Like love, forgiveness is a choice. It’s not about forgetting. I have
to daily forgive those people who hurt me during the 13 most formative years of
my life. It’s not easy, but I keep telling God, “Lord, I forgive them. Please,
You forgive them, too.”
If you’ve done something for which
you’re ashamed, whatever that is, forgive yourself. The first step for this is to
go to confession. In fact, keep close to confession
and Mass. Make both a regular part of your life, with Mass weekly, of
course.
Let go of that resentment, hurt,
and anger, especially if it’s toward you. Give it to God. Easier said than
done, I know, but just do it. Again, fake it ‘til you make it.
Love
Finally, love. Love is not a feeling. Rather, it’s an act of the will. It’s
a choice. First, love God. Second, love your neighbor. Third, love those who
persecute you. Finally, love yourself. These are the things Jesus told us would
get us into heaven, where we’ll be happy throughout eternity.
Therefore, ask yourself this: If
these things will make us happy in heaven, then why wouldn’t they during our
time here on earth?
