Beverley Callard looked at the sexy black PVC outfit in the corner of her dressing room and broke down in despair. She was feeling so low that the very idea she would have to dress up as Coronation Street barmaid Liz McDonald – let alone muster the energy to play her extrovert personality – filled her with horror. She had sunk into such a deep depression that she’d lost all her confidence. “At first no one knew I was struggling,” says Beverley, 59. “I wanted to keep it a secret. “But I was getting worse and worse each day. I was getting ready in my dressing room and I couldn’t take it any more. Liz had to be dressed up for a certain scene – she had to wear a PVC outfit. “Fear took over and I started to cry. I thought, ‘I’m not confident enough to put this on. I can’t do it’.”
A film that aims to change the way communities look at mental illness will make its debut at Yale University’s Davies Auditorium at 5 p.m. April 29. Judy Murray, an East Haven resident and founder of Dignity and Advocacy Network (D.A.N.), will be presenting at the event. She lost her son to suicide in 2014 after his long battle with what doctors diagnosed as Bipolar 1 Disorder and believes he was failed by the “medical model” mental health system. “It’s the whole approach that were using that isn’t working.” Murray said. “My son, he heard voices, he had visions, he was told that he had an illness and that he would have to ignore it, suppress it.” Murray said that while her son told her he did not think or feel he was ill, being told that he was over and over made him fall into invalidating his own experience.
While I always recommend making time for relaxation, there’s one facet to having time on your hands that I must caution about. All too often people with mental illness are left with idle time, myself included, which can lead to trouble. Spare time means more opportunity to worry and overanalyze things that happen. This is common among anxiety sufferers, but it can be even more of a problem for people in my situation, namely people who are living with schizophrenia. Sometimes, when we have too much time on our hands, our minds go to places that are intense and scary. Troubling ideas can manifest themselves in any number of ways. Whether it’s paranoia or delusions, depression or hallucinations, our minds are all too susceptible to spiraling out of control. That’s why I think it’s important that we have something to do. I’ve talked about creative flow before. You find your flow when you engage in a creative activity that’s so engrossing you lose track of time. Creative hobbies are important because they keep us occupied and focused on something other than our worries. It can be drawing, painting, woodcarving, writing, working at an easy job or really anything that allows you to flow. For me, writing is where I find my flow. If not there, then in photography and walking or hiking. These seemingly nominal tasks are incredibly important for maintaining my stability and, while I don’t do them as often as I should, I’m well aware of what can happen when I have too much free time.
Many like to use the metaphor of darkness when it comes to depression. My experience is more like a fog: a thing descending slowly; a thick something that surrounds me and distorts the vision of myself and the world around me. One day, there is nothing but sun, and without warning, things that felt like they were on the right path suddenly take a detour into a spiral of failure and rejection that I never saw coming. It floods my chest with what I know, or hope, must be the falsehood of my unimportance. My mind wanders into a list of my mistakes and missteps over the last few decades, and something in the darkness whispers, “You are a failure. Why are you here?” And then sleep decides it wants no part of me. Midnight stretches into 4 a.m., then rolls into 5 and then 6 until it becomes too late to sleep. The alarm will startle me into a new day soon enough. So I just lie there alone, like the forgotten, staring at the blurred walls or ceiling of my bedroom, having given up on wiping the tears from my face. I’ve lived with depression (or something like it) my entire life. I have slid in and out of it as easily as the size 2 jeans that fit only when I know that it has fully welcomed itself back. It is like a rumor that grows quietly and steadily, causing no problems or distractions, reminding me of the time I left the stove on or the last heartbreak or the project that fell through, and that whisper of failure becomes the soundtrack; the blaring, broken jazz in my mind.
Mira Aztil, a clinical psychologist with the Israeli NGO IsraAid, recalls the traumatic stories she’s heard from her refugee patients in Lesbos, Greece: One Iraqi woman described how she had suffered through an encounter with “The Biter,” a spiked metal tool used by the Islamic State to clip off the flesh of women deemed to be immodestly dressed. Another woman, a Syrian mother of four, had been racked with guilt since her husband died on the trek across the snow-laden Syrian-Turkish border. She was convinced that her urgency to get the family to safety quickly had caused his heart to fail.
Severe trauma cases are seen on a daily basis on Lesbos, the pastoral Greek island currently serving as the front line to Europe’s largest wave of forced migration since the Second World War. Since January, 2015, 1.2 million refugees have entered Europe, almost half of whom (48 percent) are from Syria, according to figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The Guardian recently reported that nearly 450,000 of them have come through Lesbos.
Whenever I hit a depression rut, where I feel disabled by the illness and therefore pathetic for being brought to my knees by a bunch of thoughts, it helps me to review celebrities — esteemed politicians, actors, musicians, comedians, astronauts, writers, and athletes — that I admire from both the past and present who have also wrestled the demons of depression andbipolar disorder. I feel less alone knowing that this infuriating condition doesn’t discriminate, and that I’m fighting alongside some of the world’s most talented and accomplished people. Here are a few of the luminaries that have, over the course of their lives, shed some of the stigma of mental illness with their stories and who serve as inspiring role models for those of us in the trenches.
1. Ashley Judd
While visiting her sister, country singer Wynonna Judd, at a treatment center in 2006, counselors suggested that the actress and political activist check herself in, too. So Ashley Judd did just that and spent 47 days in a Texas treatment facility for depression and emotional problems. In a Today interview, she told Matt Lauer:
I was absolutely certifiably crazy, and now I get to have a solution. And for those who are codependent or suffer from depression, there is a solution.
In her memoir, All That Is Bitter and Sweet, Judd describes the abuse and neglect in her turbulent upbringing that led, in part, to her emotional pain and breakdown — and also the hope she feels by focusing on humanitarian work around the world.
Mindfulness training can trigger brain changes that help veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) manage disturbing memories and thoughts, according to a new study of war veterans. The goal of mindfulness training is to help people develop in-the-moment attention and awareness. This study included 23 U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who all received some form of group therapy. After four months of weekly sessions, many had reductions in their PTSD symptoms. However, some of the participants received mindfulness training, and only those veterans showed brain activity changes that could be detected on functional MRI brain scans. Before mindfulness training, when the veterans with PTSD were resting quietly, they had extra activity in brain regions involved in responding to threats or outside problems, the study authors said.
The link between depression and comedy is well known; Woody Allen shot to fame joking about low self-esteem, while currently, Maria Bamford and Louis CK turn depression into comic gold — even if, in Bamford’s case at least, the off-stage struggle with it was painful and scary. The British Journal of Psychiatry found in a 2014 study of 523 comedians that they scored “significantly higher” than the norms for depression in four areas, noting, “Most striking was the comedians’ high score on both introverted anhedonia and extroverted impulsiveness.” “Introverted anhedonia” is a good way to describe the humor of talented standup comedian Aparna Nancherla, whose pithy expression of the depressive mindset is gaining her an impassioned following on Twitter, where she contributes one-liners that rival Allen’s in their self-deprecating moroseness.
The relationship between insomnia and mental illness is bidirectional: about 50 percent of adults with insomnia have a mental health problem, while up to 90 percent of adults with depression experience sleep problems. Sleep problems can also create a loop, slowing recovery from mental illness. People with depression who continue to experience insomnia, for instance, are less likely to respond to treatment for depression. They are also at greater risk of relapse than those without sleeping problems. It is unclear how insomnia makes a person more likely to develop mental illness. Research suggests, however, that it may affect our ability to process negative emotions. In one study, sleep-deprived people were found to show greater emotional reactivity to unpleasant images than to pleasant images or images with neutral emotional content. People who weren’t sleep-deprived showed no differences in emotional reactivity. In another study, brain scans revealed that people with insomnia showed greater activity in the brain’s emotional processing area when they used a strategy to reduce their negative reactions to images than when they did not use this strategy. That suggests insomnia makes it difficult to react appropriately to negative emotions. This may exacerbate their sleep difficulties and make them vulnerable to experiencing depression.
Sixteen months after the horrific, near-fatal accident that claimed the life of of one of his closest friends, funnyman Tracy Morgan made a triumphant return to Studio 8F in Rockefeller Plaza. Fellow comedian James “Jimmy Mack” McNair died in the multi-car pileup on a rain-soaked highway in New Jersey, and Morgan was lucky to be alive, he told the Saturday Night Live audience. “I’m back. It feels so good to be here,” Morgan exclaimed from center stage. “You may have seen on the news I was in a terrible car accident a year ago. It was awful. But it also showed me how much love and support I have in this world.” What he did not say as he opened the show that night—and what the audience could not have possibly known—is that after eight days in a coma and amid months in a hospital bed, Morgan suffered a debilitating mental collapse and contemplated taking his own life. “I was in a very dark place,” Morgan told Rolling Stone. “I was sitting right here, contemplating suicide.” His path to recovery was as much about the rigors of physical therapy as it was about making peace with himself and embracing the road ahead.
Morgan battled what is known as “survivor’s guilt.” As he spiraled into depression, trapped in a fog of grief, Morgan blamed himself for the tragic collision that killed McNair.