The Face of Depression: A Journey from Hell to Healthy

By Schatzie Brunner

You feel something’s just not right—or you know you’re depressed and just can’t live with it anymore

Either way, you may not be ready to risk telling anyone. It’s hard enough making yourself look “normal” every day. I should know. That’s me on the cover and I did it for years during a high-powered and very public career with CNN, except for those times when depression kept me hopeless behind closed doors, waiting for the darkness to lift. If any of this sounds familiar, you know it’s not about just “getting it together.” Through years of trying many medications while living through personal trauma, I finally did find a way out, and I share all of it in The Face of Depression. We’re in this together. With this book, you already have at least one person you can count on to understand. You can get through this, too. SCHATZIE BRUNNER

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9780997213379

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

God damn it … I’m still alive … Had I slept? My eyes stung as I began to cry again realizing I had to face one more day. Then I remembered the party the night before when my crying began.

It was April 1975 and I was twenty-eight years old. My date and I were at a friend’s home. I recalled talking to the publisher of the Wall Street Journal as my mind hummed with fear, feeling a desperate pressure to appear informed.

As we talked I suddenly began to cry, in mid-sentence, convinced that my face was on fire. My date quickly ushered me into a bedroom to help me lie down, thinking I would soon collect myself. But I kept crying.

When the crying continued uncontrolled, my date got our coats, made our apologies, and hailed a cab.

As I continued to cry in the cab on the way home to my apartment on West 57th Street, he looked at me and asked, Are you having a nervous breakdown?

By then my weeping had become a strange wailing. I could hear it but I didn’t know where it was coming from. I heard the sound without realizing I was making it.

Once we arrived at my apartment I asked my date to leave. In spite of his concern for me, he agreed. Finally alone, I felt overwhelming relief; I could weep as much as I wanted.

Among my shattered thoughts as I awakened the next morning was the realization that every inch of me hurt. Every muscle in my body was soaked in excruciating pain. At the same time, oddly enough, nothing mattered.

I had no idea how many hours had elapsed as I lay there looking around my apartment, wanting and hoping to die. I began to weep again. Murky thoughts of wanting to disappear kept coming up.

I slept on a convertible couch in those days. The metal bar supporting the mattress bit into my side. That’s where I lay, curled in a fetal position. I thought I would never get up. I didn’t care.

Actually, I didn’t care about anything. As I took in the room around me there was a strange sense that I wasn’t part of it; as if I were peering down from a corner of the ceiling, like a television perching above the bed in a hospital room.

The shelves that held my books and records hung from flat, white walls. My white sofa bed sat facing another one just like it with two small, square glass coffee tables separating them. This was my living room, transformed into a bedroom each night when I unfolded the sleep sofa on which I now lay.

The long chest of drawers separated the sofas from a table and chairs, a dining room of sorts. Large metal-encased windows overlooked a courtyard with a garden in the center of the apartment building.

I had been living a soul-deadening life on West 57th Street in an unprepossessing pre-war building with thick walls and heavy doors.

Long, uninviting hallways of polished linoleum led from each apartment to the elevator and incinerator. It was the world where I had been stretched to the limit for months, not knowing that the thin wire of my will would soon snap.

I hadn’t realized that confusion had been accompanying me everywhere. Now I couldn’t collect my thoughts. I just kept wondering why I was crying, wishing I could simply roll over and die.

I must have slept some during the next few days but I don’t recall. Time was irrelevant. I wondered if the pain I felt was what people experienced when they were tortured with sleep deprivation. I don’t know how long that went on. At some point I got up and stumbled into my tiny kitchen for a diet soda.

The entire kitchen was just big enough for me to stand and turn to use the small sink, stove, and refrigerator.

Just another New York kitchen in another apartment in another building in a big cold city.

It was April 13, 1975, the beginning of the many years it would take me to recover from the physical and psychological black hole into which I had fallen. I couldn’t have known it then, of course, but I had had a complete breakdown of the chemistry in my brain, losing my psychological bearings on the world.

It would be years before I could cross a street comfortably, go to the grocery store down the block without being overwhelmed by terror, tolerate being touched even by those I loved, or get dressed without being frozen by the pressure of choosing what to wear.

I couldn’t seem to clear my head. I wondered if shaking my head, literally, would clear my thoughts. I was too tired to try. The torture from sleeplessness persisted. The crying continued. I was drained without the energy to cry. Even so, I couldn’t stop.

CHAPTER TWO

At some point over the first few days my older sister, Jo, called to tell me to get into a cab to come to her apartment. She insisted. I couldn’t understand why.

The thought of putting clothes on and going downstairs to hail a cab was overwhelming. I decided to lie there a while longer.

Eventually, I must have pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater. I didn’t bother to comb my hair or brush my teeth. I didn’t care what I looked like. I remember grabbing my dog as I headed to the elevator.

When I arrived at Jo’s apartment on the Upper East Side, I couldn’t understand why she kept asking me what was wrong. While the injuries to my mind couldn’t be seen, there were no words to describe what I felt.

I sat down in her cheerful living room and cried. Trying to come up with an answer for her was more than I was able to do. I remember thinking Why do I have to answer her? Not having an explanation terrified me. The best I could do was mumble apologies.

I wondered if I just kept quiet, no one would ask me anything. They might forget I was there. It felt better to think that than to think about trying to find an answer to her question. So I continued to sit on the edge of her sofa without saying a word.

Dinnertime arrived. Jo lit the candles on the dinner table and brought our plates to our places. It was a routine I knew well from the many times over the years when I had visited her and her husband.

Now I felt as if I wasn’t really there; once again watching the room from a corner of the ceiling. As we sat down I noticed the red wine at my place. I thought that if I had a couple of glasses of wine the fear might recede. I found an ally in alcohol. Between the glasses I was consuming I wept quietly, no longer caring why.

CHAPTER THREE

Jo insisted that I not go back to my apartment. Again, I couldn’t fathom why and I didn’t care enough to put up an argument. At some point she asked me if I wanted our mother to come from her home in Florida.

I was surprised to hear myself say No, I don’t want Mom here. I didn’t want her anywhere near me.

A day or so later I looked up from the kitchen stool, everyone’s perch when Jo made a meal.

My mother was standing in the kitchen doorway. I sat there, without saying hello, just staring at her, empty of hope and wondering why Jo hadn’t heard me. But being deeply depressed I couldn’t get my thoughts organized enough to ask her.

I now believe that if I had had a sense of self back then I would have been angry with Jo. But that would have taken far more self-confidence than I was capable of feeling. At the time, I thought of it as just another confirmation of my not being worth paying attention to.

My mother continued to stand there looking at me. She didn’t move toward me to hug me. She just looked at me. I didn’t move to greet her. This was especially odd because Mom and I had had what we always proudly called a very close relationship.

I did finally flatly say Hi, a very different greeting than either she or I had used for as long as I could remember.

Mom turned and walked back into the living room to talk to Jo and her husband, David. I vividly recall what she said. Five words. This is not my fault.

It would take many years of therapy to recognize the absurdity of her remark. I would come to learn later that the dynamics of my family had worked their awful alchemy, culminating in my coming apart.

I had never learned compassion for myself because it had never been modeled by my parents. They didn’t have it for themselves. They owned ego without self-love. That must have been immensely painful for them, especially for my mother.

At that moment, however, my numbness kept me in a fog without feelings.

Dinner arrived again. And there was the wine. Maybe I ate. I don’t know. But I do know how relieved I was when the wine began to take effect. I began to feel less terrified. I was alone in my own world, absent from my mind and soul. Separate from everyone.

Fear coated the inside of my skin.

CHAPTER FOUR

I now know that the sooner one gets help, the faster recovery can be. What I didn’t know then, but will always be grateful for, is how quickly my family got on the phone and found a psychiatrist. He saw me within the week of my breakdown.

For weeks, or maybe it was months, before the breakdown I had been screaming as I slept. The only reason I knew I had been screaming was that my boyfriend would wake me several times a night on the nights he stayed at my apartment.

I also vividly remember during those months that my senses seemed to be out of kilter. For instance, I would perceive the car I was riding in was moving … when it was in park.

One time as a family friend and I sat in the parked car he had been driving I yelled at him Watch out! convinced we were rolling backward when we weren’t. He looked at me in a strange way and gently said Schatzie, we aren’t moving. It should have been a clear clue that something was very wrong, but somehow neither I nor anyone else drew the connection to depression. No one was sensitized to emotions in the ’70s the way they seem to be now.

As a high functioning, twenty-something adult living in New York during the years leading up to my breakdown, I never suspected that something could be wrong with my mind. I did however sense the frenetic pace of my life. I proudly thought of it as being ambitious and motivated. Years later, my mother told me that I never stopped moving during my visits with her in Florida.

I did have a subtle, nagging feeling that something wasn’t right, so I confided