Furious Seasons

June 26, 2006

Depression In Public

Some of you may have already heard that Doug Douglas, county executive of Montgomery County, Md., dropped his bid to become Maryland's governor last week, citing depression as the reason. Sorry it happened to him, but props for the honesty.

Kay Redfield Jamison follows with an op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post opining that others in public life need to be more forthcoming about their psych situations, in order to foster public understanding, yada yada.

We sure as hell have come a long way from 1972, when Senator Thomas Eagleton (D-Missouri) was forced off George McGovern's presidential team--Eagleton was his VP candidate--after it was revealed he had suffered from depression. I was 9 years old at the time--and for some reason that little incident stuck with me for years. (I was a hyper-aware kid who watched Cronkite.)

Speaking of being public about all this, 7 years ago a former editor of mine refused to let me write about my own wrastling with bipolar disorder, as he feared that the mayor and police chief and so on would not consent to be interviewed by me in the future were it known that I was a head case. I was the city hall reporter at the paper, so I understood his reasoning. I just didn't agree with it. The funny thing is after becoming very public about my situation in 2004, it hasn't caused me a lick of trouble in doing my job.

So time's have indeed changed.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at June 26, 2006 12:05 AM

del.icio.us Digg it reddit

Comments

Hi, Philip. What's wrong with this picture? You're the one supposed to be the cynic and I'm the one supposed to be the optimist.

Lincoln wouldn't stand a chance of being elected dog catcher today, thanks to stigma and unrelenting media scrutiny. Neither would the one in four of the first 37 presidents who had a mood disorder. Back in Lincoln's day, his "melancholia" was well-known, but living successfully with the affliction was seen as a character virtue, analogous to working his way up from poverty.

Our population gets screwed from all over: Very little research dollars, unconscionable personal abuses, precious little legal protections, hundreds of thousands of us warehoused in overcrowded jails with sadistic guards, homelessness, a health system that's a national disgrace, and on and on.

Whew! I needed to get that out of my system. Tomorrow you go back to playing bad cop and I'll play good cop.

Posted by: John McManamy at June 26, 2006 01:36 PM

It must be nice for Ms. Jamison to be able to be in a field where she can be out and in the open about her Bipolar condition. I tried that once and I have been paying for it ever since. Maybe she can help me find a 65,000 a year job and the goverment health benefits I once had until I decided that it was okay to open.

If we only lived in a perfect world.

Posted by: Angie at June 26, 2006 02:42 PM

I found the The WaPo article discouraging, but what mental health bloggers are saying fucking destroys me. Why bother. Not a single inquiry, just catapault the propgaganda, it goes without saying we're constitutionally defective, it's a genetic path, and it's set in stone.

So the House is going to hold hearings on "Mental Illness and Brain Disease: Dispelling Myths and Promoting Recovery Through Awareness and Treatment."

Words fail.

Posted by: flawedplan at June 26, 2006 05:10 PM