Today’s interview is with Tracy Thompson, the author of “The Beast: A Journey Through Depression” and “The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression.” She has won numerous mental health awards, including one from NAMI for her “lasting contributions to mental health issues.”
depression are two countries with a long common border. The terrain is chilly and inhospitable, and when mothers speak of it at all, it is usually in guarded terms, or in euphemisms.”
Question: The first two sentences of your book are brilliant: “Motherhood andYou’re obviously on my team of those moms fighting against the stigma of mental illness. But even I shy away at times — like when someone will joke about another mom being “so schizophrenic” — of telling people how strongly I feel against discrimination. If I’m in a good and confident place, I’ll blab about my psychiatric history. And then I retreat, thinking “oh no, now David won’t have anyone to play with,” and then I blab again, and so it goes. What about you? Do you openly talk about your depression to the moms you interact with on a daily basis?
Tracy Thompson: Do I blab about my psychiatric history? No. Do I talk freely? Yes. By which I mean that when the context is appropriate, I’ll speak up. Recently a friend told me she hadn’t heard from her brother in months. She assumed he was sulking about something. I said, “Make sure he’s not depressed.”
Or there will be a story in the news about some psychiatric patient that people will be talking about, and I’ll have a chance to say, “No, psychotropic drugs like that are not addictive.” And then people will say, “What makes you an expert?” and I’ll say, “I’m not an expert on everything but I do know about this from experience.” This is especially true when the subject is PPD, because new moms (especially first-time mothers) can be made to feel so incredibly guilty about having it, and an amazing number of medical personnel are still ignorant about it.
Just the other day, the Washington Post had a front-page story about a female soldier who suffered a breakdown in Iraq. She’d had episodes of depression before joining the Army; when she went to Iraq, the stress level (she ran a medical trauma response team) was just too much. The Army is actually prosecuting her for attempting suicide. Yeah, I know. It’s medieval.
I don’t go on and on about my own experiences unless somebody specifically asks–but, you know, that’s just basic courtesy. Very few people want to hear the gruesome details of my gallbladder operation, either. But when it’s appropriate, I try to be straightforward and utterly unvarnished. “Yeah, I’ve been in a psychiatric hospital, I’ve overdosed on pills, I’ve self-medicated with alcohol, I’ve even had to have ECT. Fortunately, I’m much better right now”–or some version of that.
I see it as a chance to demonstrate that maybe some of their preconceptions about “the mentally ill” may be wrong. IN a way, it’s like being a combat veteran. You have to walk a line between talking too much and bottling it up inside. “Cautious honesty” is probably the best description of what I strive for.
I get three kinds of reactions. Often, it’s relief. “Oh, thank God, somebody besides me has been struggling with this.” Sometimes it’s amazement. “Really? I would never have guessed” etc.–which is fine; I let that play out according to how interested they are. And there are the people who shut down, or give me this glazed-eyed smile, or suddenly don’t want their kids to play with mine…and that’s fine, it really is. It’s valuable information, just the same as if they had said, “I don’t like immigrants” or “Aren’t these black people ruining the neighborhood.” I don’t want my kids around intolerant people.
When it comes to depression and motherhood specifically, I guess I just have a contrarian streak that gets activated whenever I hear anybody saying something like, “Oh, I just so looooove being a mom,” like everything was a 24-hour-a-day love fest. Usually I’ll say something like, “Yeah, but aren’t there days when you just want to drop-kick the little hellions off a cliff?” If they don’t at least laugh at that, I know their either in serious denial, or they just terminally phony. Or maybe they really ARE like that, in which case I am not up to dealing with them, and that’s my problem, not theirs. I would be cowed by Martha Stewart, too. –Now, having days like that doesn’t make you a depressed mom, but admitting that there are days like that lays the foundation for honesty, and if you can’t be honest about the bad days you can’t be honest about depression.
Finally, when it comes to talking about depression–I guess I’ve reached the point where I realize that there is such a thing as too much talking. Depressed people ruminate too much as it is; we really don’t need too many endless explorations of our misery. What we need is concrete, practical things to do. Somebody to exercise with. Somebody to call us once a day and make sure we’re out of bed. Somebody to take the kids away once in a while for a few hours. The encouragement to keep on trying to find a drug combination that will work. The name of a good shrink. That’s the kind of thing that’s helpful.