Source: Bravo TV

Sometimes the power of a bad example is as powerful as a good example. I’m thinking of Kim Richards, one of the housewives on The Housewives of Beverly Hills.

My daughter got me hooked on that show when she came home from college on winter break.  There was a time – not too long ago – when that little intellectual dilettante in me would have dismissed such a show as a complete waste of time only to be watched by the mindless, vapid masses. Thankfully, I shut that little dilettante up and now I’m watching all the re-runs – thank you very much.

Watching Kim’s slow, self-destruction over this last season is good for me. I am, like Kim, am a single, somewhat middle-aged, mother whose child has grown up. We are both trying to keep our hair blonde and minimize our wrinkles. I am not going to pronounce Kim an alcoholic, but let’s just say there was a day – before I got sober 13 years ago – that I would have partied with Kim in a heartbeat.

I don’t think about David Funchess much anymore. I watched him die on April 22, 1986 in Florida’s electric chair. He was the first Vietnam Veteran executed in the United States. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder had yet to be discovered when Funchess, a highly-decorated combat Marine, fatally stabbed a couple during a hold-up in Jacksonville in 1974.

Death Row, Florida State Prison

I was a cub reporter and was morbidly thrilled to have the opportunity to cover an execution. The little motel where I stayed in Starke, Florida was excited to see me, too, and had posted “Welcome Christine” on its roadside marquee. This story would be the crown jewel in my growing collection of clips – mostly stories of last night’s school board meeting and car wrecks. That’s how I looked at it.

On a personal level, I was hoping the execution would finally settle my doubts about the death penalty. I was brought up Catholic but having covered a few murders, I was not convinced that the death penalty was unjust. I was on the fence. I had heard of reporters who had fainted or barfed covering executions. I did not know how I would react.

The great thing about being a journalist in south Florida is you get some really weird assignments. Couple of years ago I went alligator hunting with some wounded vets courtesy of the Wounded Warrior Project. I’ve been assigned to go scuba diving to cover damage to coral reefs. Chased oil in the bayous of Louisiana after the BP disaster. Been to more crime scenes than I can remember and lived to write about three hurricanes. I walked on death row a few times. Watched a man die in the electric chair. Even sat in the electric chair during one visit.

So, last Saturday night when I walked into the newsroom for my occasional, obligatory weekend shift and my editor said, “I’m going to rock your world, I knew it was going to be an interesting evening: “You’re going to Mar-a-Lago to interview the governor and his wife,” she said.

Mar-a-Lago is the palatial, oceanfront estate and swank club owned by Donald Trump on Palm Beach. I’ve been there a few times. Once I rode my bike to a fundraiser luncheon and waited in the valet line with the Bentley’s and Roll’s. Amused the hell out of the valets.

Anyway, I went home, put on the LBD (Little Black Dress), lipstick and my red, patent leather, pointy-toed stilettos and headed over to The Donald’s. The thing about these $500/plate galas is you realize, immediately, that rich people – the top one percent of the ten percent – really aren’t that different from you and me. They have money. Lots of money. But that’s it. They are still people – human beings. We may think they are insensitive, arrogant, self-righteous, clueless bigots but I am no longer willing to write them all off as insensitive, arrogant, self-righteous, clueless bigots. They’re people who just happen to have a lot of money. A whole lot of money.

My meds FINALLY came in the mail. Amen. I take three meds, but I ran out of one before the refills came in the mail. Three days without one of the meds. Three days. My brain was starting to feel squishy. I had a horrible nightmare and I could feel a tsunami size headache building behind my eyes. Just a day after resuming the med I felt like my delightful self again.

Am I an idiot or what? I went to my nurse practitioner today and told her about my little refill snafu. She writes me scripts for three months worth of each of my meds. I send them to my insurance company’s pharmacy  and, voila, three months worth of meds arrive in the mail. She explained that I don’t have to wait until I am almost out of my meds to send in the refill prescriptions. I told her I knew that. She shook her head. I know. There is no excuse.

I like Pat, my nurse practitioner. I see her every three months and have been doing that for about five years, unless she changes the dosage.  Then I have to call her and visit her every week for awhile. Kind of a pain in the butt but I trust Pat with my life. She saved me, along with my therapist. You gotta trust the person writing your scripts. This is very, very important. It’s not like the kind of trust you put in the doctor who writes you a script for a Z-Pak and a couple days later that infection is gone.

I am talking about the kind of trust you put in someone to whom you have given your brain. Literally. You have to really, really trust this person because you have only one brain. We’re not talking about kidneys or eyes and ears. You lose one of those and you can still live. But you have one brain. That’s it.

And so that was Christmas…

Another one over, and just one more holiday remaining in the emotional trifecta known as Thanksgiving, Christmas/Hanukkah and New Years. We’re almost there! Just a few more days and the tree comes down, the sales begin and my moods no longer zip around like a hockey puck.

Of the three, New Years is the easiest for me. Thanksgiving kicks off the season with a guilt-inspiring glutton fest. As for Christmas, there seems to be no escaping those despicably sweet diamond commercials or those damn Jingle-Bells-barking dogs. New Years is the home stretch. I am almost there. I have survived.  I have persevered. I have used all the tools given to me by my therapist and the meds prescribed by my doctor. I refuse to ring in the New Year looking like those triathletes who crawl across the finish-line at the Ironman in Hawaii.

My mental health needs a nice, relaxing New Years. I need simplicity, serenity and gratitude – not pointy hats, noisemakers, champagne and wet, drunk kisses. How will I do this? Ix-nay on the booze. Amongst the reverie it’s easy to forget that alcohol IS a depressant. I know it’s hard to believe when you’re dancing on the bar at 11:59 p.m. but trust me, alcohol IS a depressant. Think of it as guilt and regret in a liquid form. Your first thoughts in the new year should not be where you left your car, purse or underwear.

I live in Florida. I know only one person who was actually born here – my daughter. Florida is a state of transplanted northerners (and we are constantly reminded of this by the snowbirds from the New York who incessantly tell us about how things are done in New York. Enough already!)

Many of any us are holiday orphans. Our families are far away in a winter wonderland. Snow flakes. Snowmen. Snow angels. Snowball fights. As close to as we get to snow  in the sunshine state is a snow cone. Christmas in Florida is about as natural as the ridiculously plump lips of women in Boca Raton. It just ain’t right. Then there are the elderly. Widows and widowers. Nursing homes. ACLFs. We have plenty.

True, we don’t have to endure months of seasonal-affective disorder. Still, being alone in Florida during the holidays is depressing. Actually, being alone anywhere during the holidays is depressing. Christmas Eve and Christmas morning are the worst. I know. I used to volunteer to work Christmas Eve just so I wasn’t alone.

Being alone is hard enough during the rest of the but during the holidays our loneliness is shoved into our faces. Could the FCC please impose some kind of quota on those freakin’ diamond commercials? Please? Ditto on the Lexus ads with happy couples giving each other a shiny new car with hint of Lexus jingle on their cell phone? Seriously. Enough already.

So, you want to get a holiday gift for your friend with depression. Let’s start with what NOT to buy.

PETS

Animal therapy is great. My dog dragged my butt out of the house when I was in the deepest throes of my last major depression. However, the time to become a pet owner is NOT when you are in the bottom of your black hole.  This is not the time to become a pack leader. Pets, especially dogs,  need affection, discipline and exercise. They need this from the moment they walk into their new home. Most of us in our healthiest state of mind aren’t up for that challenge.

Remember, puppies can read and they are discerning little rascals. Any leather product that says “Made in Italy” is as good as rawhide. I’ve never had a kitten but I hear they’re like having a little shredding machine. Ixnay on the et-pay.

I started feeling “It” a couple of weeks ago. I thought “It” was a cold. I went from feeling tired to weary. There were weird dreams and the muscles under my eyes had gone slack. I had been around some folks with nasty colds so I figured it was my turn. On Halloween weekend I got two, 12-hour nights of sleep. I felt better.

But something still dogged me and “It” was not a cold. I have this feeling deep down inside of me that I have done something wrong. I have not been working hard enough.  I am not a good friend. Back in my drinking days, this feeling would have been perfectly normal and justified. I was a blackout drinker and spent countless hungover hours trying to piece together what I had done the night before with just a few snippets of memory and evidence. But I haven’t had a drink in over 13 years.

I have been bouncing up and down that last couple of weeks. Pretty happy and grateful much of the time, until  I regurgitated that icky shame every now and then. But I am beginning to spend more time down than up. This morning was bad. It was a perfectly lovely fall morning in Florida – partly sunny, 67-degrees, slight wind out of the north.

Last week the ceiling in my dining room caved in. I knew it was coming. I had been watching a crack grow on my ceiling all summer. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on and then I realized that the leaks (plural) in my roof had something to do with it.

The roof started leaking early in the summer. Nothing a couple of buckets couldn’t handle. Then the crack appeared. Seems water from my leaky roof and saturated my ceiling. There were no water marks up there but that’s what happened.

I live in an 83-year-old house. My walls and ceiling are stucco. Not the new kind of stucco. The old plaster stucco. Heavy stuff. I got the roof fixed but the crack on my ceiling kept growing. Then I got a call at work from my daughter.

Way back in the 1970′s, when I was a teenager, the only depression we knew about was the one in 1929 that made our parents and grandparents tightwads. Back then, teenagers with depression either hid it (like I did), self-medicated (like I did) or were loners – kids who did not fit in.

So when I heard a local couple who had lost their son to bipolar was underwriting Johns Hopkins’ ADAP program at local schools, I had to ask…”What if this had been around when I was in high school?”

The Adolescent Depression Awareness Program is brilliantly simple. It’s common sense at its finest. ADAP provides teachers with a curriculum to use on on how to teach their students about depression.“Through education we will increase awareness about depression and the need for evaluation and treatment.”

• Interactive lectures and discussions
• Video of teenagers describing their experiences with depression and bipolar disorder
• Homework and video assignments to reinforce key points
• Group interactive activities to teach the key message that depression is a common, treatable, medical illness.

This should not be controversial but teaching teens anything about their health can be absurdly controversial. Just say the word”condom” in in some parts of the country and you’re just asking for an inquisition by the PTA.