When I applied to the Medill School of Journalism, my admissions essay hinged on one fact: I wanted to tell the stories of ordinary people that others didn’t take the time to or didn’t want to, see.
Little did I know that one of the most powerful tales I could tell would be my own.
Under the broad umbrella of mental health are a number of disorders that affect adults and children alike — from depression and schizophrenia to eating disorders and anxiety. The startling fact is that any one of these can be an impetus to attempt suicide, which, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, claimed 29,350 lives in 2000.
Mine could have been one of them.
Looking back to that November in high school, there are a lot of reasons it happened. I was sexually abused. I detested my body. I was crying out for help. But most of all, I was drowning in depression that six years of psychotropic cocktails and hours on the therapist’s couch had failed to lift.
The first time, I ingested several bottles of pills after getting a B on an English term paper. I passed out on our living room couch for eight hours before my family noticed, at which point I was rushed to the hospital and revived.
A later, more serious attempt in April 2001 landed me in several different hospitals for about a month. There I — my high school’s valedictorian, class president, newspaper editor and prom princess — shared a room with a prostitute and my life with a dozen other teens in similar situations, all of us looking for a safe way back to the center.
Officially, I was diagnosed with severe depression, borderline personality disorder and an eating disorder, not otherwise specified (meaning that I display habits of anorexia and bulimia, but that neither is full blown).
More than two years later, my life has calmed and stabilized. But what happened will always be a part of my identity, and the vast majority of people I encounter every day have no idea what I’ve been through. On the surface, I look and act like any other Northwestern students.
Which is precisely why this problem is so misunderstood. It’s easy to live under the illusion that you’re alone, that you’re the exception to the rule. It was only in following the December 2002 suicide of Weinberg freshman Charles Kim that I realized what private wounds we nurse. The Daily, obviously, does not catalogue suicide attempts — but by keeping our ears to the ground, a murky picture clears.
Students are suffering, and the stories they don’t have the heart to share are of a private hell. But those people lucky enough to never have experienced such darkness, or to have known someone at the brink, remain in blissful ignorance of the burdens that others shoulder.
Later this quarter The Daily will launch a series of stories on mental health. We want to shed light on the struggles students face: the suicide attempts, the search for successful treatment and the shadows of depression that cloud lives every day.
To do it right, we need to hear your side.
Remaining silent is not the answer. It took a great deal of courage to write this column, but in doing so, I am freed from the task of masking part of my identity.
But my story is not the end.
Only in openly sharing our tragedies and our triumphs can we hope to understand a topic normally shrouded in secrecy.
Raise your voice, quavering or clear. Send an e-mail to [email protected] and tell us about your experience.
It may not stop one of your peers from going over the edge. There isn’t always an answer, particularly in approaching so complex a problem. But you do have a choice to make your voice heard, or to let the story go untold.
