Dominique Heinke is easy to pick out in a crowd. Her silver nose ring glints, matching her eight earrings, and her naturally red hair shows a slight blue tint from when she last dyed it. She smiles and laughs, gesturing wildly while she tells stories. People tell her, “You don’t seem depressed.”

But they shouldn’t be fooled by outward appearances, she said.

“What am I supposed to be doing — wearing all black and just moping around?” she said. “You don’t see people’s pain. You just walk by them. It’s not like a little badge you wear.”

Heinke is back at Northwestern for her fifth quarter after abruptly leaving last year to deal with her depression and her boyfriend’s struggle with a brain tumor. She initially had planned to be gone only Winter Quarter, but stayed at home in Elkins, W.Va., through the summer.

“I would have died if I had come back,” she said. “I just couldn’t have handled it.”

‘So beyond depressed’

Heinke’s problems with depression began in childhood. A self-described “smart-ass,” Heinke said she had difficulty making friends in her small town.

“I was never understood. Everybody would look at me and say, ‘You’re so weird,'” she said. “I was the scary girl in high school. Like, ‘Don’t go near her, she’ll tell you off.'”

Heinke said, like many children, she took piano lessons and competed in gymnastics. But she joked about running away and even threatened suicide, saying she would jump out a window or cry until her room flooded and she drowned.

“I realized later that I was depressed as a kid,” she said. “I never really understood what happy meant.”

Heinke began feeling worse when she was 14 and her cousin died in a car accident. Still, because she always had seemed depressed, people didn’t notice her growing unhappiness.

“It’s just how I was,” she said. “It’s not like you saw this major change in me. I got gradually worse and worse and worse.”

Getting worse meant that Heinke spent more time in her room chatting on the Internet and listening to the one CD that matched her mood — Dave Matthews Band’s “Under the Table and Dreaming.”

When Heinke began to isolate herself more, her parents took her to a mental-health clinic. Heinke said it helped to talk someone, but she downplayed the seriousness of her condition and said what others wanted to hear.

“I came in once a week, sat there and bullshitted my way through it,” she said. “I have this way of figuring out what will get me locked away and then avoid that.”

Heinke said she was never suicidal, mainly because she was “so beyond depressed.”

“People who are really, really depressed don’t commit suicide because they don’t have the energy or willpower to do anything,” she said.

She continued seeing the therapist through high school and steadily improved, but when the pressure to excel in school built up and Heinke became more depressed, her therapist said she either would need to go on medication or be admitted to the hospital. Heinke chose medication, which she still takes — and which she said “is the only reason I can function.”

“You can be sad and still be on meds,” she said. “It doesn’t make you happy — it makes you human.”

‘Such a roller coaster’

After starting therapy, Heinke began making more friends in high school, eventually meeting Kyle Geiser. The two were close during her senior year, his junior year. In April 2001 she returned from a weekend away to find that Geiser was in the hospital after emergency brain surgery on a baseball-sized tumor.

The two began dating later that spring, going to prom in outfits made of duct tape and spending more time together that summer as Geiser began chemotherapy and radiation. Having Heinke as company made things “100 percent better,” Geiser said.

“She really made being sick and being stuck on the couch for three weeks at a time bearable,” he said.

Heinke had to balance caring for Geiser with working as a waitress and dealing with her own health. She tried to taper off her medication, and her depression was worsening. When Geiser’s condition deteriorated at summer’s end, Heinke, an aspiring doctor, quit her job and came to his house each day to “play nurse,” checking his IVs and fixing food.

At NU that fall, Heinke found some relief from her stored-up stress and depression by talking to therapists at the university’s Counseling and Psychological Services.

“It’s a relief just to be able to walk in and just bitch at somebody for a while,” she said.

She said she was overwhelmed freshman year by her heavy course load as a biology major and felt stupid in comparison to other students.

“I was surrounded by all these super, super smart people and none of them were having these troubles (with grades),” said Heinke, who now is an pre-med anthropology major.

CAPS also helped Heinke during her sophomore year. She was retaking calculus after failing it and having difficulty with her other classes. Heinke also was worried about Geiser, who underwent another brain surgery and had a seizure over Thanksgiving break.

“It just got really hard to study some days,” Heinke said. “It was such a roller coaster.”

‘Totally different attitude’

When she returned from Thanksgiving break, she had become so overwhelmed and depressed that she turned in a final paper and collapsed at CAPS. She dropped one class and took incompletes in two others, then went home.

During winter she took a job as a secretary, which gave her time to study for the finals in her incomplete classes. When she came back to NU in March to take the tests, she did well on both. Those successes helped her gain confidence.

“I have a totally different attitude about the place,” she said. “I don’t want to quit every time something is due.”

Heinke’s friend Louis Terry, a McCormick junior, praised Heinke’s “tremendous amount of willpower” to tough it out through difficult situations and for having the guts to return to NU after her two-quarter break.

Back at NU this fall, Heinke said her life seems much easier, with manageable classes and fewer worries about Geiser, whose health has improved. She still remembers the difficult periods, but she has no problem talking openly about her depression.

“I don’t see it as something embarrassing or something to be ashamed of,” she said. “This is part of my life.”

Types of Depression

Major depressive, or unipolar: A combination of symptoms that interfere with regular routines such as eating, working, sleeping or concentrating. Major depressive episodes are intense and can occur once or several times in a lifetime. Affects 5 percent of the U.S. population over 18.

Manic depressive, or bipolar: Episodes of major depression and cycles of intense moods consisting of symptoms such as inflated self-esteem, talkativeness and increased physical agitation. Affects 1.2 percent of the U.S. population over 18.

Dysthymic: A more mild but chronic form. Depressed mood continues for at least two years in adults or one year in adolescents. Affects 5.4 percent of U.S. population over 18 during their lifetime.

Types of Anxiety Disorders

Obsessive-compulsive disorder: Characterized by persistent, unwelcome thoughts or images or by the urgent need to engage in certain rituals. Affects 3.3 million U.S. adults.

Post-traumatic stress disorder: A debilitating condition that can trigger frightening thoughts and memories after a terrifying event. Affects 5.2 million U.S. adults.

Social phobia: Also called social anxiety disorder. The condition involves anxiety, excessive self-consciousness and fear of being watched, judged by others or humiliated in everyday social situations. It can surface during just one kind of interaction or many. Affects about 5.3 million U.S. adults.

Generalized anxiety disorder: Characterized by
exaggerated worry and tension, even though there is little or nothing to provoke it. Symptoms include always anticipating disaster, often worrying excessively about health, money, family or work, often without being able to pinpoint the cause. Affects about 4 million U.S. adults.

Panic disorder: Characterized by feelings of terror that strike suddenly with no warning. Symptoms of an attack include a pounding heart; feelings of being sweaty, weak, faint or dizzy; nausea or smothering sensations; and a fear of impending doom or loss of control. Affects about 2.4 million U.S. adults.

Source: National Institute of Mental Health