Will's Choice

by Gail Griffith

  In July, a family friend tipped us off about an opportunity worth investigating. City Year DC, an initiative of AmeriCorps, still had a few remaining openings in Washington for the program starting in late August. City Year places young people, ages eighteen to twenty-four, in public schools to mentor elementary-school kids in the basics.

  The program was looking for high school graduates, with good “people skills,” and it offered training in mentoring, a monthly stipend, transportation to and from the schools, a yellow jumpsuit emblazoned with the AmeriCorps logo, and a couple of thousand dollars upon completion of the program, money to be applied toward college tuition. City Year required a one-year commitment. The program sounded tailor-made for Will.

  Will was intrigued and decided, after some nudging on our part, to apply. On the application he was asked to “describe a challenge you faced in your life and how you managed to overcome it.” He wrote:

  A year and a half ago, I suffered from severe clinical depression. I tried several medications, spent time in a psychiatric hospital, but still continued to sink lower and lower. Finally, I came to a point where I was torn between my sense of obligation to my family and friends and my complete disinterest in continuing to live my life. My depression got the better of me and I tried to commit suicide in March of 2001.

  Since then, I have made an almost full recovery—I have found medications that work for me and I am feeling positive about where my life is going. It is a drastic change from how I felt before and it has taught me that absolutely no problem or negative situation is without a solution.

  I looked over the answers he had typed into the spaces allocated on the application, and when I got to the line “It is a drastic change from how I felt before and it has taught me that absolutely no problem or negative situation is without a solution,” my heart soared.

  Will turned in his application and set up an interview with the program directors. He was accepted into AmeriCorps’s City Year and was scheduled to begin his volunteer job the third week in August.

  One afternoon a week after receiving the acceptance notice from City Year, I was hastily fixing dinner when Will floored me with a question.

  “Mom, do you think I should look at junior colleges in San Francisco?”

  My first thought was, “Huhhhh? What’s up with this?” Yet another stealth maneuver from our Will? What was behind this latest turn-about in his thinking? Did the appeal of a college education suddenly smack him like a bolt between the eyes as the best possible option? Or was it a fallback for lack of direction or lack of enthusiasm for the City Year job?

  “Gee, Will, are you really thinking that’s something you’d like to do?” I feigned casual interest and studiously continued slicing tomatoes for a salad.

  “Yeah, well, maybe. I don’t know. I was just thinking…Maybe I could get into San Francisco State. I went online, and because Dad’s a state resident, I am too, so all I need to apply, with my SATs and all, is a 3.0[GPA]. And I think the community college in San Francisco has to take me if I just show up.”

  “Okay, Will, let’s go online and figure out what your options are.”

  Now we had two balls in the air: college and the City Year offer. He was going to have to make a decision. Soon.

  “Willy, Willy, Willy,” I whispered to myself, “where are you going with this?” He didn’t exactly have a track record of reasoned decision making. For better or worse, most decisions of consequence had been made for him. And when it came to making decisions independently, his modus operandi was to dally and agonize over the choices. Or not make them at all.

  A few days later: “Mom, I think I want to go to college in San Francisco. I can live with Dad and Melissa for a while and then Max and I can get an apartment. If I take classes at City College in San Francisco, it’s a feeder to the UC [University of California] schools, so maybe I can do that for a couple of years and transfer.”

  The fall semester at San Francisco’s City College began August 22. He would have to show up for placement tests on the nineteenth. We would have to move on a dime. Wow! My head was spinning.

  “What’s up with this last-minute change of heart about college, Will?”

  He grinned and offered facetiously, “Well, I figured out—that’s where all the cute girls are.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. We both burst into giggles and exchanged a “high-five.”

  What was the real reason behind his last-minute decision? I don’t know. Maybe there were many reasons; it didn’t matter to me. (Who could fault him for wanting to be in the company of pretty young women?) It may have been as simple as this: he was ready. Ready to move on and put the last year and a half behind him.

  I was delighted that he wanted to be closer to his brother. From time to time, Will and Max had talked about finding an apartment in the Bay Area and living together. They were still extremely close and I could count on them to look after each other. He would also be nearer the West Coast cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. And with his dad and Melissa there, ever vigilant, he would be secure and well loved.

  With a mixture of trepidation and relief, Jack and I packed Will off to San Francisco—and off to college in mid-August. For all of us, Will’s decision to attend college signified a gradual return to normalcy. A year or even six months prior, I never thought I’d be saying, “Will is headed off to college.” The conventional is comforting. We had been down the road less traveled and we were more than ready to embrace “conventional.” The entire family applauded this turn of events.

  So what does the future hold for Will and for countless others like him?

  Just as I was finishing this book, I had an opportunity to attend the annual conferences of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), which was being held in Washington at the Washington Hilton Hotel, just a few blocks from my house. At the gala dinner concluding the four-day conference, NAMI celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding. The organization has come a long way, and its membership now numbers in the hundreds of thousands; it includes families, educators, advocates, clinicians, and the individuals who struggle every day with mental illness.

  The closing ceremonies were held in a ballroom resplendent with banners, and everyone was elegantly attired. We were reminded that NAMI’s celebration coincided this year with the third anniversary of 9/11, and we bent our heads in a moment of silence in recognition of the innocent lives lost. I couldn’t help being struck by the irony of the coincidence: each year we lose as many young people to suicide as were killed in the World Trade Center bombings. It is both a secret, hidden tragedy and public-health crisis.

  In July 2003 the President’s New Federation Commission on Mental Illness announced its findings after undertaking a “comprehensive study of the U.S. mental health service delivery system”3 and issued its recommendations to the president. In its October 2002 interim report, the commissioners stated:

  The mental health delivery system is fragmented and in disarray—not from lack of commitment and skill of those who deliver care, but from underlying structural, financing, and organizational problems…The system’s failings lead to unnecessary and costly disability, homelessness, school failure, and incarceration.4

  Hardly a surprise.

  When the commission articulated its goals for the future in the final report, it recommended sweeping changes, a “transformation,” and the development of services and treatments that are “(1) consumer and family driven, not focused primarily on the demands of bureaucracies, and (2) provide real and meaningful choice of treatments, services and supports—and providers.”

  Two of the commissioners attending the NAMI convention gave a briefing entitled “Using the New Freedom Commission Report to Transform Mental Health Care for Children, Adolescents and Families.”5 During the question-and-answer period that followed, two salient details emerged. When the commission was given its charge, the members were told to return with “budget-neutral recommendations,” meaning th
ere would be no funding for the massive “transformation.” The government’s cost-cutting measures have left local and state entities short of funds required to prop up the existing system; there will be no “transforming” in the near future, as far as I can see.

  The second item off-limits for the commission study was insurance parity. The administration did not want them to touch the political hot potato that would require insurers to guarantee that our children’s mental health receive the same level of coverage as their physical care. So where exactly does that leave the consumer and family who is supposed to drive this stunning transformation of the mental-health system? Right back at the beginning, with no government funds to support the state, local, or federal agencies needed to simply sustain the existing system, and with no consideration to the millions of persons whose insurance won’t cover their children’s psychiatric care.

  Our family is a member of a small percentage of the population fortunate enough to have the emotional, financial, and familial resources to steer them through this type of crisis—and for us it still required a titanic lift on the part of everyone involved. I am tormented by the reality that there are millions of families out there who are not as lucky as ours.

  Will spent six months from the time he graduated from Montana Academy getting back on his feet. It was not a seamless transition, but overall I was guardedly optimistic that he was well again. He had been to Bedlam and exited two years later a person with a large measure of insight and compassion. Finally, he appeared to be at peace with himself. From my perspective, it doesn’t get much better than that.

  One sultry afternoon in August, Will and I sat in the kitchen eating lunch. The next day I would put him on the airplane headed to the West Coast—and to college.

  “So, Willo, I want to ask you—in the long run, what do you think made the difference in your depression? Was it the meds, or the talk therapy, or was it being so far away in Montana? Or a little of all of those things combined? What do you think now, Will?…I really want to know.”

  He looked up from his sandwich, shifted his gaze away from me, and stared out the window at the tubs of plants profuse with summer blooms arrayed around our wooden deck. After several seconds, he turned back to me and in a matter-of-fact tone answered, “It was just time, Mom.”

  Just time.

  Epilogue

  IN WILL’S OWN WORDS

  I’ve been asked to write an epilogue. You know, a little something to wrap it all up, one of those “what have we learned” bits. But to be honest, I don’t know what to say. I’m no good at that heart-to-heart, embrace-life bullshit, and if you’re reading this, odds are I don’t know you.

  If I were to meet each person who reads this and tell them individually what it was like to go through depression, a suicide attempt and all, I know it would change every time. All stories change even if the same person tells it. What really matters is who’s listening. That makes this all the more difficult. I’m not sure I really want anyone to know my so-called story. And I’m not actually a writer. Writers know that they’re going to be read. Most everything I wrote in this book was never intended for outside consumption. All of a sudden you know that people are going to read your shit and you can’t think anymore.

  But where am I now? Depression doesn’t bother me like it used to. Maybe that’s really all you need to know. I’m feeling much better. Thank you for listening. You don’t need to know where I live or what I do. It’s enough to know that I’m embarrassed about what happened—the suicide attempt. I hurt a lot of people, which is something that I have a particular aversion to doing. It makes me uncomfortable talking about it. And how do I convey my feelings about what happened in five to ten pages without sounding like (a) a jackass or (b) a high school motivational speaker?

  These days I work and take classes at a community college; I ride the bus a lot. Most of the time when I’m on the bus I just sit there and read my books, but every once in a while I’ll be too tired or just not interested and I’ll just sit and watch. I like people watching. I enjoy it more than reading, and sometimes I get so engrossed that I end up sitting there way past my stop.

  Twice now I’ve sat at my window and listened to homeless people try to harmonize with overactive car alarms. I’m wondering if it’s something that I should try to sell commercially. MTV is always looking for that cutting-edge shit.

  And I like sports. Most Sundays I play baseball with some of my friends and family. I’m a terrible ballplayer. In fact, most of us Sunday players are. I can run and catch well, but I’m a poor hitter and a minor birth defect left me with a pretty weak right arm, so my accuracy’s nonexistent. That doesn’t matter, though. I love playing baseball.

  One time last summer I was on a team with a couple of my friends, my cousin, and her half-sister. We only had six players, which is just enough as long as the other team pitches to itself, and you don’t mind having a giant hole in your infield (we didn’t). The odds were stacked against us. The other team had better hitters and more players (seven). We never cared who we were playing against, or how good they were. We’d rather lose than split up our team to make it more even.

  We took the field tentatively and we paid the price early on. Man, we must have given up fifteen runs in the first two innings. We were dropping balls in the outfield, throwing over each other’s heads. On top of our ineptness, the other team had some kind of disease where they couldn’t stop hitting home runs.

  I’ll tell you what, though, we made losing look good. We would slide into bases unnecessarily and try stupid flip plays at second base—shit like that. My friend Roberto would sing Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” every time he fucked up in the outfield. We were down by at least ten runs and it only looked like it was getting worse by the inning. But, hey, who really cares anyway? Not us.

  But suddenly the tables turned. The gods of baseball (or of pity) smiled on us and we were the New York Fucking Yankees. We ended up winning by five or six runs. It was a kick. Who knew we could play if we just stopped caring? We laughed about the game the whole way home and had a few beers when we got back. A proper celebration.

  That was in August of 2003. I tried to kill myself in March of 2001. Not once during that baseball game or the evening that followed did I think about depression, suicide, or how any of it had affected me in the past two years. That is what recovery means to me.

  I still take antidepressant medication, and I really have no problem with it. At night, I take Remeron, which makes me very tired and very hungry in a short amount of time. Before I fall asleep I always want to eat, but much like having the munchies, and no amount of food really satisfies my hunger. The more tired I get, the hungrier I become. I find myself desperately trying to shovel cereal into my mouth, falling asleep, forgetting that my mouth is a wad of undigested corn flake mush. Very pleasant.

  When I was severely depressed, the pills didn’t try to kill me, I did. And there’s really nothing more I want to say about that. And so what if the depression comes back? It’s nothing new, right? I would be hard-pressed to handle it worse than I handled it the first time. I’ve pieced my sanity back together and the cracks have faded over time. If it comes apart again, I’ll fix it again. But like a puzzle I’ve already solved, I now know where the pieces go. There’s less confusion, less uncertainty, I can see what’s wrong. But who thinks about that anyway? When you’re happy, be happy. Don’t analyze it; just enjoy it.

  Now it’s fall and the first cold days of the season change me. In summer, nights and days blend so seamlessly that I lose track of time. (How do people in the southern hemisphere manage to stick to New Year’s resolutions?) Monday evening spills into Tuesday morning without my noticing. Next thing I know it is Wednesday afternoon and I’m still laughing about last weekend—and about baseball.

  But autumn makes it very clear who’s who and what’s what. Night somehow pushes its way into the middle of the day. By the time I get off work I’m wondering how soon I can go to bed
without feeling antisocial. When the first cold day hits my face I’m reminded of how much time has passed. I have a clock hanging on my wall and exactly once every second it reminds me how much time I’m wasting. Sometimes it feels like I’m slowly going nowhere, but, for the most part, I’m just enjoying the ride.

  —Will D.

  Autumn 2004

  MEGAN’S BIOGRAPHY

  Megan Mathews attends Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where she studies philosophy and psychology. She plans to travel, perform volunteer service, and write before enrolling in graduate school. Megan still suffers from occasional bouts of depression, but she manages her illness with medication and therapy. She and Will remain good friends and stay in close touch. They only occasionally discuss the depression that first brought them together.

  ORGANIZATIONAL RESOURCES FOR FAMILIES OF DEPRESSED TEENS

  Active Minds on Campus: Active Minds on Campus is a student-run mental health awareness, education, and advocacy organization, which utilizes peer-to-peer outreach to promote its educational mission on university campuses across the United States.

  Web address: www.activemindsoncampus.org

  American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP): AACAP aims to promote understanding and treatment of the developmental, behavioral, and mental disorders which affect children, adolescents, and their families. Their series of informational pamphlets, “Facts for Families,” are available online. (Also see “ParentsMedGuide” below)