Search Results for: Depression

After Three Children, Reclaiming My Body and My Mind

Illustration by Tiffany Baker

Ukamaka Olisakwe | Longreads | September 2019 | 22 minutes (5,546 words)

Nurse Ruth’s face was set in tense lines of seriousness as she probed my cervix with a metal instrument. I knew this procedure by heart, having been through it five times in the past 17 years: dilate the cervix, measure the uterine cavity, insert the intrauterine device.

But Ruth was frowning. The last time, another nurse said the depth of my uterine cavity was too short. Twelve years ago, after the birth of my third child, I learned that my retroverted uterus had yet to properly settle itself nicely inside my pelvis and that my cervix had partially descended into my vagina.

Now as Ruth brought out the instrument and gazed at the blood smear on the tip, I trained my eyes on the crumple of her brow and tried to decipher what she wasn’t saying. In another life, I would not set my foot within a 10-mile radius of this place. But here I was, 36 and frightened, and I willing her to say something positive; I willed her to say that childbirth hadn’t ruined me that much.

But she didn’t say those words. Instead, she worked until I could no longer endure the discomfort of metal scraping against the soft of my womb. Because my cavity was still so short, Ruth suggested an alternative contraceptive — a progestin implant. She feared my uterus would expel an IUD if she went ahead and inserted it.

True, the last IUD had snapped and poked at my insides all night until the following morning when I found a doctor, who pried open my cervix and got it out. The one before that, my body began to act strangely and I experienced unexplainable vaginal bleeding whenever sex was vigorous.

“I have heard terrible things about the implant,” I told Ruth. “I hear it can reduce me to the biblical woman with the issue of bleeding who was healed by Jesus.” She laughed, despite the seriousness of the moment, but then she had positive and convincing things to say. She invited me to the clinic’s family planning seminar scheduled for that week. She gave me an emergency oral contraceptive for the time being, and we agreed to have the contraceptive inserted into my arm at my next visit.

I smiled and thanked her. Then I cried all the way home, ignoring the curious looks of concerned passersby, some of whom paused, as Nigerians are wont to do, to ask what made me cry.
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Fugitive Justice

Illustration by Lily Padula

Jennifer Lunden | Longreads | September 2019 | 25 minutes (6,331 words)

Our fuchsia had vanished. The empty pot lay broken on the front porch where just the previous day the fully flowered plant had hung, splendid and cheery. I found one lone tendril in the driveway — its three pink and purple blossoms still miraculously attached, its roots still flecked with soil. I tried to piece together the mystery, but I could not.

Later, I got an email from our tenant, Annie:

Someone absconded with one of the hanging fuchsia! Because I am a person with a strong sense of justice, I tracked a trail of blossoms and stems up to Cumberland Ave this morning, where I found the pot smashed and the tendrils scattered.

She had reclaimed our busted pot and left it on the porch. Annie chalked it up to a drunken lark, a random act of vandalism. But somebody had climbed our front steps, unhooked our hanging fuchsia, and left a trail of uprooted stems all the way around the block. Who would do such a thing? I wondered. Why?
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Paul Clarke Wants to Live

Photos courtesy of the Clarke family

Rebecca Tan | LongreadsAugust 2019 | 13 minutes (3,006 words)

I. “A death sentence”

On May 16, 2016, scores of adoring parents gathered at Franklin Field on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus, beaming as 2,225 undergraduates threw their mortarboards into the air, colorful graduation cords swinging from their necks. Paul Clarke, a 22-year-old with brown hair and pale skin, was meant to be on that field. He was meant to have his name emblazoned in black under the list of economics majors, his portrait sitting snugly in the yearbook among the rest of the class of 2016. Instead, the young man was seven miles away, alone, in a dimly lit house littered with half-burned joints, beer cans, and hidden bags of opioids.

In the months following that bright Monday, as Clarke’s classmates settled into high-paying jobs in New York City and San Francisco, he overdosed on heroin three times.

When he was admitted to Penn in 2012, Clarke was a precocious, first-generation, low-income 18-year-old plucked from Kensington, Philadelphia — a neighborhood where heroin is sold often and openly in public — and ushered into the ivy-cloaked buildings of a storied campus. Despite a history of drug use in high school, Clarke stumbled along for his first three years there. He slipped into intense bouts of drug use during his summer breaks, but would always return to school in August, earning a near-perfect GPA. Between joining a fraternity and picking up a binge-drinking habit, he managed to make the dean’s list twice. Then, over the course of Clarke’s senior year, undiagnosed mental health problems sent him spiraling into addiction. As the summer turned into fall of that year, he switched his beers out for painkillers, stopped attending classes, and started crying himself to sleep.

Soon, Clarke was placed on academic probation, kicked out of his fraternity house, and forced to move back home to Kensington — a decision Penn officials said was based entirely on his poor academic performance that semester. He had failed two of his courses and had either failed or taken an incomplete in another, which according to university policy, meant he had to be “dropped from the rolls” and required to take time away from school. As he struggled to keep his spot at Penn, he found little in the way of support.

His friends and family spent months protesting his suspension, arguing that sending the 23-year-old back to Kensington was not only going to worsen his addiction, but could very likely kill him. In one of multiple emails sent to five of the university’s top administrators, Clarke’s half brother John Foley wrote, “I’m not convinced Paul will survive this time away.” In another, he stated plainly: “For Paul, a year away is a death sentence.” Aside from some contact with administrators focused on student wellness, who claimed to have no control over the situation, Foley’s emails went almost entirely unanswered.

The story of how an Ivy League student goes from the dean’s list to overdosing half a dozen times before his 25th birthday exposes a question at the heart of how universities respond when students face addiction: Allow them to stay on campus or send them away? Clarke’s efforts to claw his way back into school, to graduate, and just to survive, are a stark reminder of the stakes for students like him.

***

From the day he arrived at Penn, Clarke stood out from his peers. (Disclaimer: I went to Penn as well, and was enrolled at the same time as Clarke, although we never crossed paths socially or academically.) A 2017 study by the Equality of Opportunity Project found that 71 percent of Penn students come from the top 20 percent of the income scale, the second highest figure in the Ivy League. Outside the confines of what students call the “Penn bubble,” 26 percent of Philadelphia residents, including Clarke’s family, live below the poverty line.

But Kensington, the neighborhood where Clarke grew up, isn’t just poor. In October 2018, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature on the area by Jennifer Percy, dubbing it the “Walmart of heroin.” Alongside a photograph of drug users shooting up underneath the Kensington Avenue underpass, the magazine describes the area as “the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast.”

In his admissions essay to Penn, Clarke wrote about the moment he learned that his home was different: “I found my mom’s coke straw after a tip from a friend who was asked to buy her a 20-bag,” he wrote. “I found out how my dad really died. I found out my house was always cockroach-filled and disgusting. I found out none of the things going on in my house were normal.”

When he arrived as a freshman in the fall of 2012, Clarke lacked some of the skills his classmates took for granted. He didn’t know he could email professors if he had problems, for example, and he found it hard to maintain eye contact with anyone, said a former girlfriend of his, Lody Friedman. In addition, Friedman said, Clarke’s “post-traumatic stress was very, bleedingly obvious.”

“And I’m not surprised,” she continued. “He experienced acute trauma his entire life.”

Clarke was 14 when he first took drugs. It was the summer; he stole a bag of marijuana from his stepfather and smoked it in his bedroom. Later that year, he asked one of his stepfather’s buddies for cocaine, but mistakenly got a bag of heroin. By the time he was in high school, Clarke was sampling from an extensive menu of substances. When he turned 15, he started taking Xanax, and at 16, picked up Klonopin. His preferred cocktail was a combination of cocaine and benzodiazepines.

“This behemoth of an institution brought him in like, ‘Look who we found from Kensington.’ But when he encountered the problems that they probably could have predicted, they sent him back.”

The summer after his freshman year of college, Clarke overdosed at his grandmother’s house in Port Richmond, a neighborhood bordering Kensington. When Foley, who lives in Washington, D.C., contacted Penn about the incident, Student Intervention Services, the department in charge of crisis situations, assured him that there would be a dedicated administrator monitoring Clarke in the coming semesters. This worked for a couple of months, until Clarke stopped responding to administrators and they stopped reaching out.

Two years later, Clarke found himself battling a major depressive episode more or less alone. Foley, who watched from afar, believes this was when the university failed his younger brother.

“This behemoth of an institution brought him in like, ‘Look who we found from Kensington.’ But when he encountered the problems that they probably could have predicted, they sent him back,” he said.

Friedman, who is now a teacher in Boston, feels similarly: “Students are expected to advocate for themselves, which is fine for those coming from affluent families, but it’s not fine for someone who has raised himself. If you knew Paul and understood his background, it’s pretty fucking obvious why he wouldn’t respond.”

 

II. To Reset or Derail?

It’s common practice at colleges and universities to encourage students struggling with severe addiction to take time off from their studies. At first blush, this policy seems reasonable: College campuses, rife with substance-fueled social events, can often be hostile to recovery. But this policy rests on some assumptions that, with students like Clarke, don’t apply.

At Penn, administrators are eager to emphasize that students struggling with their academics or health are urged to take a leave of absence in order to “reset.”

“We’ve tried to destigmatize the idea that a leave is failure,” said Rob Nelson, the former executive director for education and academic planning at the university. “The actual idea is that something is going wrong and you need to take time off. … Any kind of separation from the university usually has the effect of helping students succeed.”

For Clarke, this wasn’t the case. Sending him back to Kensington, by his own account, exacerbated his problems with addiction not just because his environment offered a steady stream of drugs, but because sending him away robbed him of one of the most important anchors in his life: being a Penn student.

Clarke spent four months at a recovery house in Collingswood, New Jersey, while participating  in a now-defunct recovery program called Life of Purpose in nearby Cherry Hill. There, trained mentors guided residents through recovery with the aim of transitioning them back to school. Similar collegiate recovery programs have existed since the 1970s, though they remained relatively unknown within higher education until about five years ago. According to the Hechinger Report, there were only several dozen collegiate recovery programs in 2013; today, there are around 200.

At Penn, the central resource for students struggling with addiction is the Office of Alcohol and Other Drugs, housed under the office of the vice provost for university life. The office’s director, Noelle Melartin, said in an email that they offer a program called First Step, “a brief intervention for students whose alcohol or substance use is at a lower level of severity.” Students like Clarke, with more severe cases of addiction, are referred to “appropriate outside services,” she wrote.

By the time it became clear to Penn that Clarke was struggling with addiction, he had already overdosed once and secured a steady supply of drugs from Kensington.

At elite universities, collegiate recovery programs can sometimes be seen as bad PR, experts say. James Winnefeld, a cochair of the nonprofit SAFE Project lost his college-age son to fentanyl-laden heroin in 2017. He told the Hechinger Report, “[Universities] don’t want parents walking around campus seeing posters that imply there is any kind of a substance abuse problem on campus.”

And yet, substance use among college-age Americans is clearly an issue. Figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation show that in 2017, more than 4,760 people ages 0 to 24 died from opioid overdose. According to a 2017 report from the Centers for Disease Control, the number of drug overdose deaths of people ages 18 to 25 increased 411 percent from 1995 to 2015 — the greatest increase of any age group.

Despite this, a 2018 report found that fewer than 5 percent of universities in the United States have in-house recovery programs. Penn, in other words, is not the exception but the rule.

In December 2018, the Ruderman Family Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on disability inclusion, released a report that concluded that Ivy League institutions are effectively using leaves of absence to push students off campus in order to avoid legal liability and bad press.  Read more…

Anaphylaxis of the Mind

Azurhino / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Alyson Pomerantz | Longreads | September 2019 | 21 minutes (5,316 words)

About 12 years ago, at my law firm’s holiday lunch, something strange happened when I took a bite of the crab appetizer. There was a tickling sensation in my throat. I say tickle, which makes it sound playful, but it was uncomfortable. I tried to clear it with a sip of wine, but the tickle stayed put. I went to the bathroom because the privacy of a small toilet seemed a better place for me to investigate what was wrong, despite the fact that it was poorly lit and I couldn’t open the door without it hitting the sink.

Of course, I could divine nothing in the tiny bathroom about what was causing the tickle deep in my throat. I sat on the toilet and tried to breathe, but my breathing only grew more labored.

I decided to call my doctor, who also happens to be my father. Though he worries about his children, he has that doctor way of being calm and cool in an emergency. Reciting some figures about anaphylaxis, he told me I should get to a hospital right away.

One of my co-workers helped me find a cab. The driver reminded me that he was not an ambulance, but I didn’t have a lot of experience with emergencies, and so I pleaded with him to take me to the hospital. At New York Presbyterian I stumbled toward the front desk, gesturing at my throat. I could barely whisper my name when the attendant asked.

They ushered me to a curtained-off space where I was given a huge dose of Benadryl. I was examined, but the doctor saw and felt nothing, which she said didn’t necessarily mean anything one way or the other. She implored me to breathe and told me she would be back to check on me. This was in 2007, before smartphones could entertain us, and so I eavesdropped. The curtains were thin, and apparently everyone else there knew enough not to come to the emergency room by themselves. A woman on the other side of the curtain pleaded with the person she was with to stop touching “it.”

Eventually the doctor told me I was stable and could leave. My orders were to get an allergy test as soon as possible to sort out what had happened. I didn’t yet know that the allergy test was going to raise more questions than it would answer.

After the doctor left, I weighed whether I should splurge on another cab. The thought of riding the subway seemed daunting after what I had just been through, but I was fine, wasn’t I? The woman next to me urge her loved one to stop doing whatever he was doing again. The attentive badgering made me suddenly desperate for my own mother, who had been gone six years at that point. My mother was the one who always told my sister and me to treat ourselves after we’d been through something hard, but my father’s voice, the practical one, also loomed large in my head. I was 30 years old, wishing my mother were alive to give me permission to take a cab.

At that moment, nothing seemed sadder to me than sitting in that hospital, alone, convinced that but for a dose of Benadryl, I would be dead.

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One Man’s Poison

Richard Baker/via Getty Images

Kyoko Mori | Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents | University of Nebraska Press | September 2019 | 19 minutes (3,670 words)

 

Before my mother’s suicide the year I turned twelve, my father and I seldom saw each other. An engineer who became a board director at a steel-manufacturing conglomerate, Hiroshi traveled all over the country on business. Even when he worked in his office in Kobe, he left early and came back — if he came back — past midnight. My mother waited up, but he often called from some noisy bar to claim he was leaving on a business trip. Other phone calls, from women looking for him, made clear that my father had several girlfriends who vied for his attention. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that he was a liar and a cheat and that women were attracted to him all the same.

Since his free time was devoted to playing rugby with former college teammates, Hiroshi seldom joined my mother, brother, and me on family vacations or outings. He did once attend a family reunion — for his side of the family — at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Kobe. My brother, Jumpei, four years younger than me, was still a toddler. When we got to the restaurant, our relatives hadn’t arrived yet, the banquet room wasn’t ready, and my mother had to take Jumpei to the bathroom. I was left to sit at the bar with Hiroshi while we waited. He must have had to help me up to the barstool, but I don’t remember him lifting me or holding me on that occasion or any other. What I do recall is the woman behind the bar placing a glass of soda pop in front of me, smiling in an exaggerated way, and saying, “You look just like your father. How lucky for you. He is so very handsome.”

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When Your Social Worker Thinks You’re Ungrateful

Illustration by Dola Sun

Dina Nayeri | Longreads | August 2019 | 13 minutes (3,210 words)

In the last two years I’ve become entangled in the workings of the homelessness prevention arm of London’s Camden Council. Camden is the borough that includes the British Museum, the British Library, a small sliver of Regents Park, and a huge chunk of Hampstead Heath. It also has its rough parts, with subsidized or free council housing, artists on grants, young mothers on benefits — as in most of London, Camden’s residents are a varied lot and everyone, whatever their socioeconomic class, uses some kind of government service.

Minoo is an Iranian refugee with two bright children and a sick, immobile husband. In Iran, she was an experienced nurse, her husband an engineer and Christian convert. Her daughter is clever and witty, her sharp eye taking in every detail. Her son is a football star with a head for math. The four escaped religious persecution and possible death in Iran, spent months as asylum seekers having their story scrutinized for lies, then slept in a roach motel for a few more months before being recognized as both refugees and at risk for homelessness. Now, having been granted asylum, they share a tiny room in a Camden hostel and wait for permanent housing.

Minoo and I met two years ago, when her church contacted me to befriend a new refugee who was at risk of depression. She was my age, a mother, like me, and came from my hometown in Iran. We had fled for the same kind of apostasy, though I had been a child and she was in her 30s. We met for coffee. She was bedraggled but smiled for my sake. She insisted on buying my coffee. She had sad, kind eyes, with a drop of something, like a tear, lodged near one iris. To bridge the class divide, and to put her at ease, I made a clown of myself, and soon she opened up to me. “We can’t breathe,” she said. “My son is almost a teenager. My daughter is suffocating.”

The family’s Camden hostel room has a single bed that they share: sick husband, wife, pre-teen boy and girl. From the bed, you can touch the bathroom door and the kitchen table. Three large steps will put you at the opposite wall. Every day, they face potential homelessness, and yet, for two years, the Camden housing authority has run them in circles. It’s important to stress that the family’s status has already been decided. By the (conservative) government’s own estimation, they are at risk of homelessness, and given the husband’s condition, entitled to public housing that includes separate rooms for the boy and girl. And yet, accessing it has been humiliating, repetitive, and opaque. Recently it’s become vindictive, too.
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When Running Toward Yourself Looks Like Running Away

Illustration by Greta Kotz

Amber Leventry | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (3,796 words)

“No one is standing in your way anymore. Not even yourself.”Maryam Hasnaa, clairsentient and spiritual healer.

Once upon a time, not long ago, I presented as someone else. Like so many people, I’d received discouraging information about who I was supposed to be — from my family and from our culture — and I constructed a false identity, held loosely together by shame, alcohol, and obligation. The longer I perpetuated the lie of who I was, the harder life became, and the more I suffered. I was desperate to change; I knew something was missing, but I didn’t yet know what. I was terrified of making even one new choice because of all that was attached to the false ones. Just as one lie leads to the creation of many others in order to maintain your cover, deconstructing just one will inevitably lead to the unraveling of the rest of them.

The truth kept intruding on the false quiet I tried to maintain in my mind. I kept drowning out the sound of it with gin, until it got so loud I had no choice but to listen.

In the space of two short years, after a lifetime of uncertainty and denying what was true, I became committed to being real. I became sober; I came out as nonbinary; I left my female partner of nearly 20 years. I examined everything in my life that I thought defined me and realized in my rush to find myself I had never really been lost, just hidden.

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‘The Survivor’s Edit’: Bassey Ikpi on Memory, Truth, and Living with Bipolar II

Space Frontiers/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Naomi Elias | Longreads | August 2019 | 24 minutes (6,573 words)

 

Bassey Ikpi remembers the Challenger explosion; she can recall the exact moment it happened, in 1984. She can remember, in exquisitely painful detail, how she felt watching that tragic accident unfold on live television, in 1984. Yet Google and the history books tell us it happened in 1986. “What is truth,” Ikpi asks, “if it’s not the place where reality and memory meet?”

The blurry line between emotional truth and fact is stylishly captured in an optical illusion of a book cover (designed by Matthew McNerney) for Ikpi’s new memoir-in-essays, I’m Telling The Truth But I’m Lying. The Nigerian-American author takes up the project of remembering, with great dexterity and compassion for herself. Ikpi opens up about living with bipolar II; “Imagine you don’t fit anywhere,” Ikpi writes, “not even in your own head.” We experience her life pre- and post-diagnosis; her adolescence in Stillwater, Oklahoma; her early twenties touring as a spoken word artist with HBO’s Def Poetry Jam; her sleepless nights; and her hospitalization.The latter proves to be a turning point, one that finally gives her a name for her mental illness and — as the book demonstrates — a framework for understanding the story of her life.

The diagnosis is clarifying; it allows her to see how mental health impacts her relationships to her family and friends, and to herself, often determining what she feels and remembers, and how she remembers it. In this way Ikpi also uses her book to interrogate the nature of memory itself — how fragile it is, how it can be colored and recolored by trauma and guilt and self-preservational drive. “I learned how to take the truth and bend it like light through a prism,” Ikpi explains in the book, “I learned to lie beautifully.” Rather than present readers with a sanitized cluster of biographical data, Ikpi offers a memoir that places the reader inside her mind, conflict and all. Read more…

Conversations with My Loveliest

Photo by Loverna Journey

Melissa Berman | Longreads | August 2019 | 10 minutes (2,413 words)

 

I saw her through the slit of the partially open bathroom door. She left it slightly ajar because she’d started thinking about these things.

She didn’t tell me so, but the slice of light peeking into the hallway said it all. We were taking that turn, the one I never thought would come, though, how could it not?

She was out of the shower now, drying herself off. I walked into the den to casually pretend I was oblivious to the whole thing.

“Can you come here please?” she called out.

So it is happening, I thought.

I looked over to the chest of drawers, the emergency call receiver with the red button — the HELP in such big white letters. The button was bigger than her hand. And the special alert pendant she was supposed to have around her neck, in case she fell or something, sat next to it. The cord was perfectly coiled, looking pathetic, like an ugly necklace no one would ever wear.

“Hell-lo?” her impatient voice curled around the cracked-open door and floated down the hallway.

I picked up the necklace and put it around my own neck.

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The Young Man and the Sea Sponge

Original sketches by Stephen Hillenburg

Darryn King | Longreads | August 2018 | 13 minutes (3,214 words)

In January 2012, Eric Bettanin, an Australian Army officer, took his brother-in-law’s Jet Ski out for a spin off the coast of Victoria. About 10 minutes in, the engine failed. As night fell, he drifted away from the beach and out of sight of family and friends. He spent the night bobbing around in the Southern Ocean, battered by large waves and howling winds.

Fortunately, Bettanin was wearing a pair of bright yellow SpongeBob SquarePants board shorts. He had picked them up for five Australian dollars, thinking they would get some laughs over the Christmas holidays with the family. As temperatures dropped, he took the shorts off and wrapped them around his head.

The next morning, one of the search boats fruitlessly trying to locate Bettanin was on its way back to shore. They had all but given hope when they spotted it — a telltale speck of SpongeBob yellow on the ocean.

That’s what the internet said anyway. If the headlines that week were slightly overblown, they were in keeping with the upbeat and outlandish spirit of the Nickelodeon cartoon. “SpongeBob SquarePants saved my life.” “SpongeBob Saves.” “SpongeBob SavePants.” Read more…