By Cameron Stout
What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor [and] more unashamed conversation.
— Glenn Close
Alcoholism, anxiety, and major depression choke my family tree like a dark, twisting vine. My father, a celebrated English professor at UC Berkeley, fought alcohol and depression for decades. In 2008, he took his own life. I am an alcoholic, too, and I have fought through two major depressions during my adult life. I have recovered from both, and recently celebrated thirteen years of sobriety. Now that I’m standing firmly on the other side of the abyss of addiction and despair, I feel better in many ways than I ever have.
Over the past ten years, I have shared my story of recovery, healing and hope hundreds of times with students, fellow attorneys, and people of faith. I’m sometimes asked why I tell such an intensely personal story. It’s a simple answer: When we share our challenges, we build an empathetic community; give courage to folks who need help; and shine the bright light of hope into the shadows of stigma, loneliness, and despair.
My first depressive episode started in 1992. The symptoms of depression wrapped me in a psychological straitjacket. As long periods of sadness and sometimes despair set in, I often sat in my car in our driveway, haunted by thoughts of suicide, afraid to go to my law office in San Francisco. People told me that I had a great life. “Cam, why aren’t you happy?!” “Get tough!” To a dispassionate observer, their frustration was understandable. After all, I showed all the signs of a normal, well adjusted, successful person. Moreover, there are no bio-markers for many mental health conditions such as major depression. While brain scan technology is improving, depression cannot be seen the way a tumor can be spotted; techniques such as surgical removal have not been invented, and neuroscientists acknowledge that the three-pound universe between our ears remains in many ways a mysterious labyrinth.
Although well intended, when people admonished me to develop “willpower” over my disease, I just became more ashamed. I tried to explain that I ached to feel joy, to be energetic again. No one wanted me to be happy more than I did, but I couldn’t stem the dark tide of despair and lethargy. The little devil called stigma dug its claws into my shoulder, hissing, “There’s nothing wrong with you.” But there was something wrong with me: I was spinning in the vortex of major clinical depression, a health condition which now affects close to eighteen million U.S. adults each year. My denial, and the pressure to put on a brave professional face, initially kept me from seeking treatment. Finally, in 1992, family members and some close friends urged me to get professional help.
The social prejudice around what are now widely understood to be health conditions, not defects of character, still held me back. “See a psychiatrist? Me? NO! That’s for weak people like my dad.” But I couldn’t talk myself into the sunshine of mental health; and so, for the first time in my life, I started seeing a psychiatrist. I kept it secret. No one needed to know. Once a week, I climbed the wooden stairs in a two-story Victorian on a busy San Francisco Street where I met Dr. Oakes. His office was bright and felt safe. I could share my fears and describe my inexplicable sadness in his gentle, healing presence. It was such a relief to learn that millions of other people had the same symptoms. They, too, saw only dark fog on sunny days, and had trouble recognizing the haggard face in the mirror.
