BagongPinay - Pinay Ngayon (Filipina Today) April 2000 - Depression and Mental Illness, Story 1

Giving Up the Silence: Series on Depression and Mental Illness

Story 1:
Many More Silences to Be Broken*
by Cookie Hiponia

Seeking help for your problem doesn't mean you are being weak, it means you ARE taking care of yourself

*The title is taken from a quote by Audre Lorde: “Your silence will not protect you...and there are so many silences to be broken.”

Remember when you were a little kid and you got sick and had to take yucky-tasting medicine? If you were like me, you’d hold your breath and make a face and swallow it real quick to get it over with. And you would dread the next time you would have to take it. The only thing that made you keep taking it was the fact that you knew you would get better soon and you wouldn’t have to take the medicine anymore. But what happens when you grow up? And you have to keep taking medicine even if you didn’t know when you would get better?
Every morning I have to take a little purple pill with my breakfast. It’s not a vitamin; it’s an antidepressant called Wellbutrin. If I were still a little kid, I would probably do all the breath-holding and face-making. But I’m not a little kid. This is for real. Every morning, for probably the rest of my life, I have to take this little blue pill just so I can function like every other human being. And every few months or so, I have to get blood drawn to make sure the medicine isn’t messing with my liver or other organs. I used to go to a therapist three times a week; now it’s down to three times a year.

I was diagnosed with manic-depressive illness on April 3, 1997. The day before, my parents came and got me from school after I broke down sobbing on the phone with my mother. Do you know why I was crying? Because I had to go to class and I couldn’t find my notebook. I started missing all my classes; I didn’t want to be around any of my friends; I only got out of my bed to go to the bathroom; I only took a shower when I started to smell. I couldn’t listen to music because I couldn’t stand the noise that was already going on inside my head. I didn’t read, write or touch my artwork. I didn’t know it then, but I was having a mental breakdown.
My parents took me to see a psychiatrist and two therapists to figure out what was going on. This wasn’t the first time I had been to a shrink’s office, either. Two years earlier, I went to see a therapist after I spent all two weeks of my Winter Break in bed, in the same pink flannel pajamas. But back then, I thought, like so many other misinformed people, that only nutcases went to shrinks. And I was certainly no nutcase. I convinced myself that nothing was wrong and that it was all in my head.

Turns out I was right; it IS all in my head. On the day I was diagnosed, I sat in the psychiatrist’s office in these stinky gray sweats that I had worn for three days straight while he explained to me how my brain wasn’t functioning the way it was supposed to. He used words like seratonin and synapses and told me that some areas of my brain weren’t communicating the right messages with the other areas of my brain. That was why I had started to not be able to form complete sentences and I couldn’t even do simple things like fixing myself a bowl of cereal without having an anxiety attack.

I wish I was joking about this stuff, but I’m not. I would wake up in the morning and the first thing on my mind was, “Shit. I’m still alive.” And I spent every single hour of the day thinking of ways to kill myself. I only tried once, though, and even that was half-assed. And the funny thing is, I may have my mother to thank for it. During one depressive episode, I was coming home from school every weekend because it was the only place where I felt safe, where I felt loved for who I am, not what I can do. One weekend, my mother and I were sitting in the basement folding my laundry and I started to cry because I knew I had to leave my safe place again less than an hour later. I muttered under my breath, “I wish I were dead so I don’t have to deal with it anymore.” My mother started scolding me (get this) because I didn’t appreciate the blessings God had given me.

That’s right. God had given me good grades, great friends, a promising career in community relations (none of this stuff, apparently, could come from my own talents or efforts) and all I could think about was killing myself. “Daddy and I have always worked hard to make sure you kids are happy, haven’t we?” she reminded me. “You have things we never had when we were growing up. You never had to struggle like we did when we first came here from the Philippines. I had to wash our clothes by hand in the kitchen sink when we first came! Did you see me wanting to kill myself?” So on top of being a manic-depressive whose roommates were put on a suicide watch, I was also an ungrateful child. To my Filipino Catholic mother, it seemed the latter was the worse crime. At least I was taking medication and going to therapy to treat the manic-depression; there was no cure for being a brat.

And yet, her words affected me in a really weird way. One night, alone in my second-floor dorm room, I opened up the window and got up on the ledge to jump. As I was standing there, though, I thought of what my mother’s reaction would be when they found my limp body: “Oh God! I can’t believe this happened! Her father and I did everything for her! We don’t know why she would kill herself!” I actually stepped back from the window because I didn’t want to give my mother the opportunity to defend her parenting skills on the 6 o’clock news. Besides, the shame of having the world know her daughter was ill probably would have killed her. And I couldn’t have THAT buggin’ me in the afterlife!

Unlike my mother, my father didn’t scold me for wanting to kill myself. No, he scolded me for “letting” myself be this depressed. Like I woke up one day and said, “Gee, I’m bored. Why don’t I inflict mental illness upon myself, just for kicks?” One time after I got back from weekly therapy about two months after I was diagnosed, my father declared that he was going to take charge of my therapy at home. He said he was going to measure my progress by how much I could do every time I came home from therapy. “For example, if you can read ten pages of your assigned reading today, you’re 1% better. If you can read twenty next time, you’re 2% better and so forth.”

When I objected to his ridiculous percentage-point “therapy”, he yelled at me. “Why are you being so stubborn! You’re not even trying!” And then he REALLY gave it to me. “You just don’t want to get better! Is that it? What a waste that such a smart girl like you would allow herself to become like this. It makes me very unhappy. Do you want me to be unhappy?” I found myself yelling back, “This isn’t about you! This is about me! I have to get better for me, not for you.” That REALLY pissed him off. “Fine. Now I’m the bad guy! I’m the bad father!” Nobody told me I was responsible for keeping my father happy along with taking medication, going to therapy, and fulfilling my obligation to God.

Only a small handful of people outside of my immediate family knew the whole story. I was virtually forbidden by my parents to talk about it openly. Nobody knew that they had helped me arrange to take an incomplete that semester and that I left school two weeks early My doctors thought it would be better if I just went home and got better for a while. But I didn’t leave school because I was ill; they instructed me to just tell people that I needed to concentrate on my studies and had to stop participating in extracurricular activities. Most of my friends and the people I worked with in organizations at school thought I was simply being a slacker, and an antisocial one, at that. They had seen me and worked with me right before I plunged into the depressive episode, when I was a whirling dervish during the Asian American Studies campaign at the University of Maryland. I would later find out that I was having a manic episode at the time. It’s always a little harder to detect a manic episode; as one of my close friends jokes now, “We were all manic during the campaign. You fit right in.”

For a year I thought it was best that nobody knew what had really happened. I felt like I had dented my reputation a little bit because I had let a bunch of projects slip through my fingers and others had to pick up my slack. Even though there wasn’t any conceivable way I could have finished my projects at the time (hell, I couldn’t even finish my sentences), I worried that if people knew I was ill, it would send my good name down the toilet Better to suffer the momentary embarrassment of walking into a meeting with the Task Force for Asian American Studies (on which I was serving as one of the student reps) after being absent for five months than to suffer the ultimate humiliation of being branded a nutcase.

And then one summer day, about a month after I had left school, I was thumbing through a back issue of Bamboo Girl and read about Sabrina’s stay in the mental hospital. It was one of the first articles I was able to read straight through after I began treatment and it inspired me. I thought that if Sabrina, a fellow Filipina, had the courage to admit that she had been ill but was now getting better, then I could, too. It sounds a bit ABC Afterschool Special-ish, but this isn’t a ploy to get on Sabrina’s good side; the article really hit home for me.
Several months after I returned to school to finish my degree, I was asked to be on the planning committee of a women’s leadership conference on-campus. We were brainstorming about workshop themes and someone suggested health issues. Most health workshops I’ve seen in conferences like this one were about sexuality, how to put on a condom, what a dental dam was for and other stuff that you learn in eighth grade gym class. By the way the discussion was going, it looked like this workshop was headed that way, too. Then I surprised myself. I suggested a mental health workshop in which women student leaders would disclose their stories and then talk about how they got help. “Great idea!” everyone chimed in. “But who could we get as the panelists?” I don’t know where it came from, but I said, “I’ll do it.” And right there at the committee meeting, I disclosed for the first time. I had been ill, but I am now getting better.

I did the workshop, titled, “When Being Perfect Becomes Too Much: How to Find the Right Balance.” I invited two representatives from the University Counseling Center to talk about the resources on-campus for people who need help. About fifty women that I had worked with in various capacities on-campus came, thinking that I was going to talk about how to juggle academics and a job and still manage to have frizz-free hair (a la Cosmo). After I told my story, several of them cried and recounted how mental illness had affected their lives, either through their own struggles or through the struggles of a mother, sister, daughter, lover, friend. One woman found the courage to disclose for the first time during the workshop. She had been ill, but was now getting better.

It is unfortunate that so many people, especially in the Asian Pacific American community, are shamed into silence. Many do not get help until it’s almost too late. Even the resources I had available to me aren’t always available to others. Before I was diagnosed, I went to the Counseling Center to see a therapist. After the initial consultation, I was told that I would have to wait three weeks for a personal therapist. Three weeks! And that was because I had checked “suicidal” on my entrance form!

I know that I’m one of the lucky ones. (Ironic, isn’t it, that it was my parents who first got me help?) So, here it is. Every morning, I still have to take a little purple pill, but I haven’t had any episodes in a while. I hope somewhere, another fellow Filipina is thinking the same thing I am: Thank you, Bamboo Girl, for telling your story and helping me to tell mine. It is only by breaking our silences that we can be saved.

After graduating, I moved out to San Francisco, CA, in the hope of building the kind of life I had always imagined for myself. To some small degree, I also figured that in a city as progressive as this one, I would be able to find ways to function “normally”without the aid of medication or therapy. I was beginning to think that my improvement since I was diagnosed relied too heavily on that little purple pill. It has taken me more than 2 years to accept that needing medication or therapy doesn’t mean that I can’t take care of my own mental health; in fact, seeking help IS taking care of myself.

Since the first publication of this article, I have seen mental illness and health become major issues in the public arena. I applaud the efforts of high-profile women like Tipper Gore, who disclosed her struggle with depression. And yet, in our own community, there are still deafening unbroken silences. Below are some online resources for those who are seeking mental health. Please start taking care of yourselves. “Your silence will not protect you...”

This article originally appeared in the Bamboo Girl zine and has been updated for the BagongPinay web site.
Permission to republish given by Ms. Hiponia and by Bamboo Girl.