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 am a dual-diagnosed alcoholic. Alcoholism is not my only mental illness. I also have hypomania – bipolar II – which I fueled for years with drugs and alcohol. Now, 13-years clean and sober, the memories of the drama and chaos that were my life when I was drinking are a faded. I am at the point in my sobriety when many recovered alcoholics begin to believe that they have licked their “alcohol problem” and can drink again. That’s where Kim comes in.

Kim’s behavior – even when she is NOT under the influence – reminds me how I used to think, behave and rationalize away all the stupid, thoughtless, self-centered and self-righteous stuff I used to say and do in my drunk years.

I had forgotten how much chaos we bring into other people’s lives. We’re late. We don’t show up. We cause a scene. We look like crap. We pick inappropriate people for our relationships. We hurt our family and we damage our kids. We blame it on everyone else. When Kim missed her flight to Hawaii for her brother-in-law’s birthday, then missed the boat for a day of sailing once she finally got there, she shrugged it off: “Everything happens for a reason.” Yeah it does, but it never dawns on us that the reason is our drinking.

When her sister, Kyle, confronts her about it several weeks later, Kim – looking totally wasted – gives her sister the old “Hey, I can’t live up to your expectations of me! I’m sorry I can’t be like you!” There’s also the old “Hey, you’re the one who is upset. I’m fine. Get over it.” Then there are the flat out lies: Kim drinking champagne in the back of a limo, then 10 minutes later telling another one of the housewives that she’s staying sober.

Oh man, that was soooo me. Kim makes me appreciate my sobriety. I watch her relationship with her sister disintegrate, just like mine. I watch her make poor choices in her relationship, just like me. I watch her and realize how staying sober has been the best thing I could do for my depression and bipolar. I don’t look down on Kim at all. But for the grace of God…you know?

Sometimes I want to grab her by the shoulders, shake her and tell her to sober up. I want her to know how great her life would be if she would just surrender, listen, take suggestions and ask for help. Find a good therapist. Find a good psychiatrist. You can do this, Kim. Just remember, you are setting an example and the power of a bad example is just as powerful as a good example.

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.

Here is what happened: I didn’t react. I felt nothing but the adrenaline rush you get when covering a big story. I knew I should have felt something, but I didn’t. Maybe that is why I don’t think about David Funchess much.

Until last night. I was watching the movie The Green Mile, with Tom Hanks portraying a prison guard on death row, when David’s death came rushing back. I was just sitting in my chair with my dog when the movie’s first execution scene came on and instantly every muscle in the back of my neck went into gridlock. The clenched muscles pulled my head back and I got one of those shivers down my spine like you hear about in cheesy novels. I thought of Funchess.

Why was this affecting me like this after 26 years – most of which had passed without a thought of Funchess. Another, horrific execution scene came on and I got the same spontaneous reaction. Why?

I had never been the kind of person who discussed her feelings. We just didn’t do that in our family. You kept your feelings to yourself. We had several emotions and that was it: happy, sad, neutral, pissed off and seething. We displayed these feelings but didn’t talk about them. My dad was an alcoholic – not at all affectionate towards my mother. He was way more affectionate towards that dog than any of us. We had a white elephant, too. It just sat in the middle of the room and we pretended not to see him.

It wasn’t until I started coming out of my last and worst major depression that I started “dealing” with my feelings. I hated it. Thought it was stupid. I could see no logic is reliving the past and dredging up feelings I had not felt the first time I went through it. But when I was told I needed to learn to “feel my feelings” in order to prevent another major depression, I jumped at the chance.

Within in hour of my nurse practitioner telling me that I needed to “deal with my anger,” I was at a junk yard with a baseball bat. When my therapist urged me to go to a treatment center to resolve “family issues” – I went. Feeling began oozing out of me. Then they spilled and finally I regurgitated decades of repressed feelings. It was painful and incredibly uncomfortable. It left me exhausted, crying and shaking at times. It felt like someone had taken a potato peeler to my soul.

I learned…learned and learned and learned. A part of depression for many women was anger turned inward. Codependency had completely distorted my ability to respect myself. My anger came out sideways – usually as passive-aggressive sarcasm – because I did not know how to appropriately deal with it.

I still have issues with “feeling my feelings.” Sometimes my eyes well up when I am speaking about something dear or funny and people ask “Are you crying?” I have learned strenuous exercises to release my anger. My favorite is lifting a weighed ball over my head and slamming it as hard as I can on the ground. I tell people how I feel – especially my daughter – who seems to have and emotional radar detector to tell her when her mother is not right.

I have spontaneous emotions, like I did last night, in the middle of my living room watching a movie, and I let them out. I am not ashamed of my feelings. I don’t try to hide them. I recognize them and deal with them asap because I now know what will happen if I do not.

And I’m not going there if I can help it.

Prison photo available from Shutterstock.

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.

I used to hate rich people. I carried a huge chip on my shoulder for decades. It started when I was 7 years old and we moved from a small, rural town in northwest Wisconsin to a wealthy suburb in southwest Michigan. These kids belonged to country clubs. We belonged to the Elk’s Club. The girls wore monogrammed sweaters. I taped the holes in my uniform with masking tape. I didn’t like these kids. I was not as pretty, didn’t have their wardrobes or their trust funds. As time went on the resentments grew.

My senior year in high school one of the girls in my class had a tea at her country club for all the girls going “out east” to school. She was going to Smith. I was going to Detroit – which was east of our community in southwest Michigan but apparently not “east” enough. I did not get invited.

You would think the last place I would want to live is Palm Beach but that’s where my career took me. I got married, had a little girl and went right back to work after 6 weeks of maternity leave. I resented having to work. I wanted to be a stay-at-home mommy. I started hating stay-at-home mommies. During the summer I dropped my little girl off at the town’s recreation center for camp. I was dressed for work. The other mommies were dressed in their cute little tennis outfits and sported monster diamonds on their manicured wedding finger.

I grew more and more resentful. More spiteful. I became the victim. I compared myself to them. Some days I would snicker at them, thinking they were so vapid and I was so deep and intellectually superior. Other days I shriveled and told myself what a loser I had become. How dare they be unhappy with that much money!

These resentments festered and stewed for years. As I aged, my resentments did, too. They lived in mansions with gardeners and cleaning ladies. I had a 70-plus-year-old,  1,200 square foot house in what used to be a crack hood. They drove Lexus SUVs and wore Lilly Pulitzer shifts. I looked ridiculous in pink and green. And on and on and on it went. In reality, these women had done nothing to me. If it seemed like they wanted nothing to do with me it was because I was throwing off some really negative, self-righteous energy.

Finally, I crashed. I had experienced a few major depressions before but this one was a doozy. I finally admitted I needed help. I couldn’t work, couldn’t eat and couldn’t read or write. I started on antidepressants and within a couple of months my depression slowly lifted. But my nurse practitioner told me the meds were not enough. I needed to get rid of all my anger.

What anger?

I started seeing a therapist and she helped me see my anger and resentments. These feelings triggered chemicals in my brain that made my depression worse. The more resentful and angry, the greater likelihood that my depression would linger or get worse. A lot of learning, journaling and a trip to the junkyard with a baseball bat helped with my anger. But those pesky resentments kept popping up – especially toward rich people. I had no idea how to deal with that.

It was explained to me that my resentment toward rich people was the result of me passing judgment on them. Always looking at what they had and I did not. Or what I had – a career – and they did not. I had never identified with them.

“Of course I haven’t identified with them because we have nothing in common!” I yelled.

“But you do. Even if it is nothing more than the fact that you are both women, mothers or both just got soaked in the rain – focus on what you have in common – not what separates you.”

And the clouds parted and I felt like the little grasshopper at the feet of the Kung Fu master.

Of course, this was not as easy as it sounds. I sucked at it for a long time. It seemed like all I had in common with these women was anatomy. But I stayed with it and the more I focused on our similarities the more similarities I noticed. I began initiating conversations with these rich women and they were perfectly lovely, kind and generous. I actually felt compassion for the ones who were not – the bitchy ones who tried so hard to act better than. I realized they are exactly like I was – always comparing – never identifying.

So, there I was last Saturday night with the richest of the richest mingling about. The governor and I talked. I interviewed a former ambassador who was simply stunning in her LBD. Of course, her diamond earrings were probably real but hey, we both wore LBDs and kind of had the same earrings.

I left before The Donald showed. I have interviewed him and met him several times before. Actually, I sat behind him in church last Easter Sunday. I’m a kneeler and he is not. So, every time we kneeled during the service my face was in the back of his head and that hair of his is seriously weird. But I digress.

I really can’t think of anything that The Donald and I have in common. Of course, we’re both homo sapiens and we both went to church on Easter Sunday – and that’s a start.

Red high heels photo available from Shutterstock

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.

No one really knows how antidepressants work, how long they will work or whether you need an  monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), tetracyclic antidepressants (TeCAs), selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. So, you have to trust that the psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse practitioner writing your prescription knows what she is doing.

In my humble opinion – and this is only my opinion – you should only take antidepressants from a doctor or nurse who has some kind of specialized training in prescribing these drugs. Would you allow your family doctor to write you a prescription for an Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s medication? No. You would go to a specialist. So, why would you allow a doctor who has little or no training in treating illnesses of the brain write you a prescription for a medication that no one understands how or why it works?

I trust Pat. She knows her stuff. She’s not just a nurse. She is psychiatric nurse practitioner, which means she is all about treating mental illness all the time. She doesn’t treat people for ear infections, broken bones or yeast infections. For Pat, it’s depression, bipolar, OCD, ADHD and anxiety. She is good at it. I trust her with my brain and that’s saying something.

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.

And now a few words about reminiscing: Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. If you must reminisce be a little more careful than you were when you parked your car, dropped your purse or took off your underwear.  I used to think my thoughts were like the tropical storms we have down here in Florida. Unpredictable and uncontrollable. They come out of nowhere, hit hard and leave behind overwhelming sadness, loss and desperation.

It came as a shock when I – the ultimate control freak – learned I could control what I think. Letting my thoughts run wild leads to rumination, which leads to anger, sorrow, remorse and all kinds of other nasty feelings that can lead to depression. Remember, you can control your thoughts – at least you can if you are not drunk.

I’m going to chill with a good movie and my dogs. I doubt I will make it until midnight. But I will be up for the sunrise and I can tell you from experience that for me, there is no more beautiful sunrise than on New Years morning, when all the hungover party goers are passed out and my world is quiet, serene and full of gratitude and hope for a happy and healthy new year.

Woman at sunrise photo available from Shutterstock.

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.

These days it’s just my daughter, me and the two dogs. We used to get all dressed up, pull out the family China and crystal and have ourselves a merry little Christmas dinner. The single-mom’s valiant attempt to stage a Norman Rockwell meal. This year her boyfriend’s family has invited us for dinner. God bless them.

Here is my suggestion. Today think of someone in your life who will be alone on Christmas or during Hanukkah and invite her to have holiday dinner with you. Those of us with depression love to wallow in our isolation throughout the year and Christmas Eve is the Super Bowl of our pity and isolation.

Naturally, that lonely soul will likely say “no.”  That used to be me. Then it was explained to me that when you say “no” you are depriving your host the opportunity to feel as good as you do when you help someone. Do you really want to take away that gift?

I don’t.

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.

SWEETS, CAFFEINE, ALCOHOL

Have you seen that ride at that fair where they put you in some kind of rubber-bank like harness and then drop you? You jump – you’re almost weightless – and you bounce up and down and up and down. This is what happens to your brain when you eat sugar. You get a spike of energy, then you crash. Spike. Crash. Spike. Crash. If you really want to give something sweet, check the labels and pick a product that has the least amount of sugar. Nuts and fruit are better than food with processed sugars.

On to caffeine. It’s a drug, pure and simple. Yes, in moderation it can be fine but if your loved one is bipolar, the last thing she needs when she is manic is a stimulant. Trust me, I know. I used to drink caffeine, especially coffee.  A few cups of Joe on top of even a mild mania and I was pawing at the ground like a racehorse in the start gate. Yes, it gave me a badly needed jump start when I was down. Still, it is a drug. Don’t believe me? Try quitting. The headache is a doozy.

Alcohol? Double-ixnay. Alcohol is a depressant, even the comfy drinks like spiked egg-nog and apple cider.  Champagne for the happy times? No. Alcohol and depression do not mix. Trust me. I’m a dual-diagnosed alcoholic. It took decades of hangovers to figure this out but and I can unequivocally say I know what I’m talking about. Alcohol is a depressant. Period.

MUSIC

Music therapy, like pet therapy is great. However, it doesn’t matter how much your friend loves Pink Floyd, Nirvana or Chopin, check the playlist. For classical music, look for anything in a minor key. During the holidays we think of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and those beautiful little sugar-plum fairies. But he also wrote his Symphony No. 6 in B minor Op. 74  (aka Pathetique). Blink-182′All the Small Things makes me dance but Adam’s Song makes we want to drop a toaster in the tub. I’m just saying, check the lyrics.

BOOKS

Even if your friend loves to read, depression will shorten her attention span to that of a goldfish. As an avid reader myself, you cannot imagine my frustration at not being able to read a book. I couldn’t even make it through a magazine article. I couldn’t focus and I kept forgetting what I had read.

If you must give a book, avoid William Styron’s Darkness Visible or the biography of anyone who committed suicide. Take a good look at a self-help book before you buy it and remember, the shorter the paragraphs and sentences, the better. When I wrote my own book, Hoping for a Happy Ending: A journalist’s story of depression, bipolar and alcoholism, I kept that in mind. In my last major depression I was terrified that I would never be able to write or read a book again. So, short sentences, simple words and easy content are best. Maybe even a coffee table photo book of a place where your friend enjoyed a vacation or would love to visit.

I’m sure there are a lot of other things that don’t make good gifts for our friends with depression. So, please share them with us! Only 15 more days till Christmas…

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.

I rode my bike to the park with my dog, “Dog,” like I do every morning. But everything looked and felt thick and heavy. Exactly 24-hours earlier I made the same ride and was feeling wonderful. Nothing had much changed since then. I still hadn’t dusted or vacuumed and the grass needed cutting.

This is my depression. This is how it works. It comes in little waves at first. Ebb and flow. Ebb and flow. Then the big rollers come in, followed by the breakers and finally the tsunami. Game over.

On days when I feel fine, when the water is perfectly still,  my depression doesn’t cross my mind – even while I am opening up my prescription bottles to take my meds. Same for my alcoholism. Most days I don’t even think about a Corona with lime. But the seas can turn rough very, very quickly for no apparent reason other than some phantom, icky shame.

So, I tell myself: “You are not a bad person. You haven’t done anything wrong. You are not a bad person. You haven’t done anything wrong.” Over and over and over and over and over and over and over…

Because, you know, I am really not a bad person and I really haven’t done anything wrong.

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.

“Mom, the ceiling just caved in,” she said.

“Was anyone hurt?” I asked.

“No, but the dogs are totally freaked out,” she said. She called again an hour later.

“Mom, more of the ceiling caved in. When are you coming home?”

So, now I needed to find someone who knew how to fix an 83-year-old stucco ceiling. I also needed to find the money. A few days later, I heard some dripping coming from the closet where my air conditioner’s air handler lives. Seems the condensation line got clogged and all that water had been dripping on my Christmas ornaments for – who knows? – maybe a week.

Did I also mention that the leak in my kitchen faucet, which I discovered last year, has finally gotten so bad that I must encircle it with sponges when I turn it on. Oh, and the pool pump died, too.

On Monday I got a letter from my mortgage company explaining that my monthly mortgage payment was going up $600 a month because there had not been enough money in my escrow account to cover the ridiculous increase in my hurricane insurance premium last year.

What does any of this have to do with my depression?

Obviously, a lot. These are the kinds of things that could put me over the edge. I could fall right into that woe-is-me victim role that I do oh-so-well. I could fret over my finances, and I did for awhile. I could blame the universe, which I also did for awhile. But I did not feel sorry for myself and sit on my pity pot. I blamed no one. I told myself this is just life. Stuff happens, like ceilings caving in.

Still, crap like this challenges the coping skills that I learned after my last major depression a few years ago. Frankly, I thought I was handling my homeowner nightmare fairly well until I shared my litany of woes with a friend.

“Hey, at least you have a roof over your head,” was the response I got.

True. My problems are luxury problems. I know that. I know no one is going to cry me a river because my pool pump died. But how about a little empathy?

At a certain point, we disqualify and mock people’s feelings when we tell them they are not entitled to them. We minimize a person’s problem when we remind her that she is super-woman and she can certainly deal with a collapsed ceiling. For the record, God does give us more than we can handle. That’s why we need each other.

Everyone, especially those of us with depression, need our feelings validated. Few things will suck me into my black hole faster than guilt (“He’s right. How dare I feel sorry for myself when so many people are homeless? Suck it up! Get a grip! You have nothing to complain about.”) or self-pity (“Nobody cares about me and my problems. I am all alone.”)

I know that feelings are not facts, but they still hurt like hell.

Empathy is so easy.

“Bummer.”

“What a drag.”

“I bet you needed that like you need another hole in your head.”

Exactly. Thank you.

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.

Besides having the reputation of Johns Hopkins behind the program, ADAP has taken much of the controversy out of the debate: They don’t screen the kids for depression – something that seriously upsets Scientologists. (I will probably get a ton of comments for even mentioning this.)

“We don’t ask them a question about themselves,” said Dr. Karen Swartz, who heads ADAP at Johns Hopkins. Not surprisingly, it’s the parents who cause the biggest problems – especially those parents who refuse to believe that depression is a medical condition and that their child is mentally ill.

“Deciding it doesn’t exist does not change the fact that it exists,” Dr. Swartz said. “If you have the illness you have the illness and you’re going to have worse grades and behavioral problems.”

For me, the litmus test of any mental health education program is whether it recognizes and teaches about dual-diagnosis. I am dual-diagnosed and when I did a timeline of my life after my diagnosis I could clearly see that my drinking and drugging began when my depression and hypomania turned me into Sylvia Plath’s stoned twin – at about age 15.

Yes, ADAP does teach about dual-diagnosis and self-medicating – not only with drugs and alcohol but with other substances and behaviors, such as eating disorders. It’s not extensive instruction about the co-mingling of addiction and depression and bipolar, just enough to let the parents, teachers and kids know that IF ALL YOUR ILLNESSES ARE NOT TREATED, YOU ARE SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR RELAPSE AND FAILURE. (Take it from me, the girl who rode that merry-go-round for a few decades while swigging on a bottle of chardonnay/Corona/Veuve/Boones Farm/peach schnapps/vodka/wine coolers…)

I learned about ADAP from Dusty and Joyce Sang, who created a foundation to honor their only child, Ryan, who died of bipolar disorder. Here in Palm Beach county, where Ryan went to school, the Sangs are underwriting the cost of ADAP training at 4 private schools this year. Their hope is to get ADAP into the curriculum of every school in the county – public and private.

To date, more than 10,000 students in 47 schools in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Minnesota, North Carolina, & Washington, D.C use the ADAP curriculum. Best of all – ADAP is free. Thanks to underwriters like Joyce and Dusty Sang, not one school has had to pay for the  program.

I’m not one to sit around and “what if…?” the day away. It serves no purpose. What matters to me now is that kids like me will get a shot at a happy, healthy life when they are still young. They won’t have to wait until they are middle-aged to figure it out.

The only problem with ADAP – and it’s not really a “problem” per se – is that you never know if and when it works. You can’t count how many arrests, overdoses or suicides it will prevent. But it will. I know that. I really, really know that.

And that makes me very, very happy.

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt, available under a Creative Commons attribution license.