The Depression Book

My dad worked in commercial real estate in Manhattan, and uh for a guy you know who went to night school and got its bachelor's degree when I was like four. He did quite well, but I was anxious as a kid. I know what it's called now because of the field I work, and it's called trick at tillmania, where you pull your hair out. I can remember doing that when I was like four or five, and then I did some grunting noise with my throat that my parents sent me to see a doctor who said stop doing that.

And then I did something with my jaw. So there was a lot of anxiety. Or I would be in second grade and have to urinate like twenty times a day. I remember the teacher yelling at me. I'm not sure

where the anxiety came from. That's Mark Redmond, executive director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services, storyteller and author of the memoir called Mark's is a story about the stigma and shame surrounding depression and a temptation to keep silent about it, and the courage and liberation that comes from telling it. Like it is about something that affects so

many of us. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I suffered from what we now call impostor syndrome. So

I would do really well in school. I mean, I was a good student from my first grade on, but I can remember, you know, fifth grade would end and I'd be like at the top of the class, and then all that summer, I think is sixth grade the year when they finally find out I'm really not that smart, you know. And of course I do really well in sixth grade, and then the next year I'd be like

is the next year where they were? You know? So we call that imposter syndrome now, so I definitely had that going on as well, but I pretty much had anxiety baked into my personality. I think early on, how did your parents handle it? The various ticks, and you know, this was not at a time where there was so much psychological awareness of the way that kids would, you know, go through various things. There wasn't nearly as much infrastructure of help available for that. There was definitely not. I

mean they probably did what most parents then did. They would say, hey, stop doing that, stop pulling your hair out. You know. Tell me a little bit about your mom. My mom grew up in Brooklyn. Her mom died when she was three years old. Her mom died of a heart attack. Her own dad then died I think when he was like fifty five. My dad's died when he was eight. There was a lot of early death in our family. I think there was a lot of early death in that generation. My mom had cousins who fought

in World War Two who never came back. I think the Great Depression made a big impression on both of my parents. I know that really scarred my dad. You know, just that after his dad died, they really weren't the security benefits you have now for families. I remember him taking me to like a Brooks Brothers store and making me trying all these suits, which I hated and I hate now. And uh. I turned to my mom and I said, why does Daddy make me put on all

these outfits? And she said, because when he was your age, he got all of his close second hand from the church. So he wants you to have what he couldn't have then. So they knew what it was like to want, you know, and I think they would determine to give us, including a college education. It's one of my dad's proudest things to this day that he sent all five of his

kids to private colleges without one dime of debt. When it comes time for Mark to go to college, he's still struggling with the same impostor syndrome he's experienced since grade school. He applies to a bunch of Ivy League universities but doesn't get in, so he decides to go to Villanova, a good school and familiar to him because his cousin goes there. But as he enters college, Mark is uncertain about his path. I remember the end of my senior high school you had to fill out some

form and you had to pick a major. You couldn't go in undeclared back then. So there were four boxes. One was nursing, one was Arts and Sciences, one was engineering, and one was business. So I turned to my dad and said, Hey, which box should I check? So he said, well, what do you want to do with your life? And I said, I don't know. I'm seventeen. I don't have a clue. He said, well, put down business because that's what he was. It made sense. He was a businessman

and had provided him of the very good life. So I said, okay, I'll be a business major. So that's what I did, and I went through four years. I didn't really enjoy it. I didn't like it, I wasn't interested in it, but I was good at it. I never really questions until my senior year of high school what I was gonna do. I really felt like I'm

destined to, you know, probably work on Wall Street. But I read a cover story this Philadelphia native, a young guy who had been working in Guatemala after a terrible earthquake there, and he was now walking from Guatemala to his home city of Philadelphia to raise money to go back and help the people in Guatemala. And I read

that and thought, wow, that's like amazing. So a couple of weeks later, I played in the rugby team in Villanova and our big rival was Georgetown, and we're down there in d C. We would all need in the in front of the statue of Georgetown. And I'm sitting there waiting for my teammates and I see this band there and it's got all these balloons and it's all these little kids and it's like a fun run or a fun walk. And then I see this young guy

in his twenties. He's tan, and for some reason he comes over and he starts talking to us and he asks us who we are. We say, we're going over rugby, and he goes, oh, I went to Georgetown. I played rugby, And all of a sudden, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is the guy. This is the guy I read about a couple of months ago. I guess he's made it to d C. So anyway, a couple of weeks later,

I always went to church on Sunday. Of Villanova. The most popular mass was the six pm Mass, and the priest gets to give the Homily and says, the guest Homilist today is a young man named Edward Fisher who has walked from Guatemala all the way here to Philadelphia. I'm like, oh my god, this is the same guy.

So he gets up there and he shows slides of the devastation in Guatemala and what he's doing and how they're trying to rebuild, and he talks about his walk and how he says, I look out at you kids, and I see myself a couple of years ago when I was in college at Georgetown, and you know, I had money, and I had a car, and I had a career, and now I have nothing, and I'm as happy as I could be, and I can't wait to

go back to Guatemala and help the people there. Well, at the end of that mass, I just stood there. I was like the last person staying there in the in the chapel, and I was just so moved by what he said. You know, in fact, I felt like screaming out to all the other students, where are you all going? How can you all just now go and leave and study and you know, whatever you're studying after what we just heard. Funny, I go back to Villanova

every five years to my reunion. I know exactly where I was sated in that chapel that day, and I go back and I look there and I think that's where all this started. That was the first inkling I ever had that maybe I wasn't going to end up on Wall Street, maybe my career wasn't going to be in business. Emboldened by his encounter with Edward Fisher, after Mark graduates, he immediately joins the Peace Corps and he

sent to Guatemala coincidence. Mark wants so badly to help to adapt to the landscape, not to feel like an impostor, but he struggles. I think I wasn't really realistic, and it just like hit me when I got down there. I just suddenly felt like what am I doing here?

And they were like, you know, you'll start the first three months here with the other forty volunteers, but then we're all going to send you to different parts of the country alone, and you know, maybe you'll see another volunteer once every few months, because you know, the roads are really bad and they wash out and it's no transportation. I thought this was for me, This is not for me, and I was not the first one to go. There are a bunch of people who never made it to Guatemala.

We had to go to Miami for an orientation first, and about four four people jumped out of that, and then I think out of the forty two of us, a good fourteen or fifteen would eventually leave. But I was one of the first ones. I was literally home in ten days, and I was embarrassed as heck. You know, I had told everybody, Oh, I'm going down to Guatemal. I turned down all these corporate jobs on Wall Street. You know, I'm doing this great thing. And I was

just humiliated. I just wanted to tide in my basement for two years and then crawl out and say, hey, I'm back. Of course, Mark cannot stay hiding forever. He needs to buckle down and get a job. Still disappointed in himself for leaving the Peace Corps, he explores other opportunities, other paths. Altogether, he ends up with a great job, a management training program at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. It's nineteen seventy nine and Mark heads into this new career.

He's finally putting those Brooks Brothers suits to us. Their office was in one Madison Square, and I showed up and I met the other nine, you know, trainees. Most of them had graduated from IVY League schools, some of them had their m b A. I was one of the few with just a bachelor's degree from a non IVY It was supposed to be a three year training program and we were gonna do different rotations throughout the company.

You know, I t sales marketing, and then we were going to be the future leaders of Metropolitan Life, and a lot of ended up that way. First year, they put me in an office on Long Island, so I lived in my parents basement. And then the next year they moved me into the city. So I got a wonderful studio apartment on sixty two Street between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue, and I would walk down Park Avenue every morning to my job at one Madison Avenue. At first,

I was elated. This is Gray, My life's back on track. You know. I had my college girlfriend in Philadelphia. Well, a lot of my Villanova friends were living in the city. We'd all go to the same bars, and we were always poor in college. You know, we have money in our pocket. We do go to restaurants I thought, this is it, but I hated the work. I hated the work. It didn't take me long to realize crunching numbers, learning about insurance policy. It just not that it was wrong

or it just wasn't me. I knew I was just playing this role. It wasn't me, you know. So what was the turning point? I had a friend she started at ABC News after college and left. They had to start working at Covenant House, which was a shelter for homeless teenagers in Times Square, which is still there. She said, we need volunteers to come here at night. And then I went back to villan Nova to visit a friend and she said, Hey, there's an event on campus. It's

about this. It's this volunteer fair. I want why don't you come with me? And I was like, yeah, okay. And it was different nonprofit organizations and somebody from Covenant House was there and they showed this film about the work that we're doing with homeless teams. So I went up to this elderly woman, she looked like a suburban grandmother, and I said, you know, I'm interested in volunteering. I'm living in New York City. I just moved in there and I don't know, maybe I can help out one

night a week. So she we exchanged phone numbers and I went to visit her, and I'll never forget. She said, you know, we'd love to have you volunteer here. You know, whatever night a week you want to come. But you know there's a group of us who are full time volunteers. It's a one year program where you live here in Times Square and we give you twelve dollars a week and you work full time. But the kids, I think

you should consider that. In fact, you have to come on an orientation and I've got an opening in May. I'll put you down for it. I thought, let the nice little lady put your name down for the week in May. It's so easy to get out of this, just one phone call. Just humor her. So that's what I did. I said, okay, yeah, yeah, put me down. And then I started going Every Tuesday night. I would instead of taking the Lexington Avenue line, I would take the R train and I'd get off the Times Square

and Rolling Stone Magazine Cold. Times Square the sleaziest block in America. And it was, as my brother said recently, yeah, back then you ran through Times square, So I would kind of scurry over to Covenant House. Uh, and then I would have a gym bag and I would change into like sneakers and jeans and a T shirt and I would play basketball. I would hand out snacks, that kind of thing. And I would say doing that week after week after week, like I can't read, I can't

remember one moment. It's just kind of doing to me, like this is what I should be doing. I remember going to some meeting at met Life, me and the other nine trainees, and we met with some senior vice president. He said, you know, we're now at eighty billion in assets. It's the beginning of the decade, and our goal by the end of the decade is to get to billion in assets. And that's the goal. That's what you all have to work towards. And I remember sitting there thinking,

that is not my goal. It's fine if that's somebody else's goal. That is not what I wanted to dedicate my life to to get in a hundred and twenty billion in assets. I would rather be dedicating myself to the kids a Covenant House and helping homeless kids get off the street and find a better way to live. That's my goal. We'll be right back. In pursuit of his new goal, Mark switches gears, he leaves MetLife and

goes to work full time for Covenant House. He's there for two and a half years, during which he's elected to be the leader of all the full time volunteers. He gets to travel too, back to Guatemala in fact, as Covenant House is expanding, opening up divisions globally. Also during his time at Covenant House, he falls in love with another volunteer. They get married. He gets his degree at n y U and ends up at another nonprofit

organization to help homeless kids called Epiphany. Epiphany, however, is a difficult place with a difficult history. There's corruption, theft, Some staff members are even selling drugs to the kids. Sometimes there's physical harm and danger. Eventually, though, Mark helps the organization to repair and creates a model program for homeless youth. He's following his credo, best illustrated by a quote from the psychologist Abraham Maslow. A musician must make music,

an artist must paint, a poet must write. If he is to be ultimately at peace with himself, what a man can be, he must be. I ended up leaving there in April, which got me up to St. Christopher's. I saw an ant in the New York Times and for a director of residential treatment center for teenagers, and I applied and I got that job. And where was St. Christopher's Dobbs Ferry, New York, which is right on the Hudson It was beautiful, right on the Hudson River, very

close right above Yonker. I mean, it was like a twenty five minute ride to Grand Central. By this point, Mark and his wife have a son. At first Mark commutes to and from Dobbs Ferry, but then St. Christopher's choires that Mark live on campus. If anything happens in the middle of the night with these kids, Mark needs to be right there on site. So they provide a house for Mark and his family, and they moved to Dobb's Ferry. Though Mark is advancing in his career, his

marriage is floundering. They're just mismatched. Market seeing a therapist who helps him realize that he's not happy and won't be happy unless he and his wife break ties. So I that we got divorced at some day in July nine. And I remember I stopped seeing the therapist like three months earlier, April or May, and the last time I saw him, I said, thank you. You've been great to me of helping with his decision. You know, I'm going

to end therapy now. And he said, you know a lot of men when the actual divorce goes through, they have an emotional reaction. And I said, well, that's not gonna happen with me. You know. I said, I am absolutely certain of this decision. And I said, besides, even if I did, what would you recommend And he said, well, I'd recommend you go on medication. We shook heads, said goodbye,

and it's the day of the divorce. You know, my wife and I we found we kicked the lawyers out of the room because lawyers always want you to get more and I was finally like, what do you need? This is what I need. Great, we agreed on and we signed the papers. So I left the office in Manhattan where the lawyers were, and I stopped. I remember

I stopped at some store. I bought a book and I bought one of those pre wrapped like egg salad sandwiches because I hadn't had lunch, and I thought, I'll leave this on the ride train ride up to Westchester, and I took like two bites and my all of a sudden, my stomach felt queasy, and I thought, ah, that stomach ache again. And I had been having these stomach issues for the last couple of years. They would come and go. I went and saw a doctor once and he said, there's nothing wrong with you. So I

that that's weird. I feel nauseous. Went home. We had shared custody. Our sun was seven, so I got him from school, brought him home, made him dinner, and I went to bed and I couldn't sleep. I went through the whole night tossing it. Could not sleep. So I got up in the morning and I'm dragging, and I go down and I took my son to the bus stop and I couldn't eat. The next day, I was not hungry. I had no appetite at all for breakfast. Dragged myself through the day and I figured, well, surely

still not hungry. I said, well, surely I'll go to sleep tonight. Right, I've been up for like I don't know how many our straight couldn't sleep again. So then the next morning, still can't eat. And now it's starting to occur to me like this is not a stomach thing. This is not a stomach bug. This could be anxiety. So I called my old therapist stuff and I said, um, remember you said that to me a few months ago, that like, you know, some men have like an all shrewlry.

I said, someth's going on with me? Can I come and see you? So he was like, yeah, sure, come and see me tomorrow at what three o'clock? I don't sleep another now I go want to see him the next day. And as soon as I walk in, he says, you look like hell. And I said, yeah, I haven't slept in like days and I haven't eaten anything either. So he said, well, you're depressed. I said, no, no, I'm not depressed. I'm happy. You know, I'm out of

this marriage. I have this new girlfriend I really like, and you know, I have shared custody with my son and a job I really loved, so I'm happy. He said, no, you're depressed. He said insomnia and lack of appetite or like the two principal symptoms of depression. So he said, I think he couldn't prescribe medication. He said, I think you should go see the psychiatrist who I work with he could prescribe medication, but Mark is apprehensive about medication.

He's never taken anything for depression. And further, he doesn't believe he's depressed. Something else must be going on, he thinks, But he takes down the psychiatrist's name anyway, just in case. That night, I remember going for long walk. It's so funny how the human mind works. I'm going for long walk,

and for some reason, I remembered that. In high school I read a book by Elizabeth coobla Ross called On Death and Dying, and I remember there were five stages on death and dying, and I remembered there was anger, denial, bargaining, and the last one was acceptance. But there was a fourth one. There was one. I couldn't remember what the fourth step was, and I knew it had the same first letter as one of those others. So there was either an, A, A D or D. Okay, and I'm

walking what is it? What is there reason? I walked in the house and all of a sudden it popped in my mind. The fourth step is depression. And it was like my mind's way of telling me, no, that's what this is. You are depressed. So another night and not sleep, and I go the psychiatrist and I was lucky, today would take you months to see one. I think. I went in that afternoon to see him. So I described what I'm going through, and he said, I'm gonna

prescribe three medications for you. Prozac, something calledbu spar for anxiety, and then something called restaurant to sleep. So I was like three medications. He was like, don't worry. I know what I'm doing. Other people who have been on this, you know. So I remember he went to hand me the script and before he handed it to me, he pulled it back and he said, this is not the cure. The cure is in that therapist office. This is just

to get you functioning again. So I go into the pharmacy and I give the scripts to the pharmacist and the guy says, uh, okay, yeah, we close soon, so these come back tomorrow. And I almost like reached across the counter and I said to the guy, no, no, no, you don't understand. I need that medication now. And here I was the guy who liked twenty four hours ago, was never gonna go on medication. So anyway, he was like okay, So he gave me the bills. But antidepressants,

in these other medications, it's not magical. You know, they don't kick in right away. It takes time, and then you gotta find out if you're on the right one and if you're on the right dosage. So really that began like three or four months of a deep, deep depression, and my weight at my heaviest I was six pounds within a couple of months. I remember getting on the scale and it said one, and I remember thinking, holy sh it, like I have got to figure out a

way to get food into me, you know. And I can remember holding a banana up and looking at it and thinking, if I try really, really hard, I can eat this banana. And then I went and bought some powder at a health food store that if you mixed it with milk, would put on wait. I was desperate to try and get food into my body, but my anxiety was like sky high. And you're also having panic attacks. During this time. I would have panic attacks that felt

like a heart attack. I would have night sweats. I would wake up at the morning and you could wring my shirt out. I was a wreck. I was, I could, but it wasn't even day by day. It was hour by hour. Mark's therapist advises him to keep going to work, that work is good for him, even if he has sleepless night. After sleepless night, the work will keep him afloat.

And of course the irony is not lost on Mark that he works with others who are suffering from similar afflictions depression, anxiety, and though he might feel solace in this common ground, he tries to hide his depression. At first, tries to keep it a secret, but since he's so physically altered, since he's lost so much weight, the secret is to contain. Thankfully, my boss, the executive director, was a trained clinician, mental health clinician. I confided in him.

I found out there was one staff member working there. I was close to a year later, when I was better, he said to me, Redmond, everybody in this place thought you were a crack addict, because crack was the drug of choice. Then taken down and he goes and people lose weight super fast. It's because of crack. So that was what the entire staff here thought, that you were on crack. Can you imagine? I said, I wasn't. I was depressed. It was depression. But I had a psychologist

on staff. I had to confide. She could see how miserable I looked, you know, I confided in her. But I tried as best as I could just get into work and try to do my job. But it was it was as hard as hell because even on medication, I would still only get three or four hours of sleep. It's hard to concentrate. I would have a conversation with somebody. I remember talking to my brother on the phone and he said, you know, you just told me the same

thing three times in a ten minute period. So it was just trying to get because I was like, if I lose this job, I lose my house, I might lose shared custody of my son. You know this this is I could lose everything. So it was just struggling. I was going to therapy twice a week. I was. I had read that exercise is key in terms of overcoming depressions. So I would get on this bicycle and bike for as tired as I was, I would make myself ride this bike for like an hour or two

every night. The thing that would help more than anything else was somebody would come up to me and whisper to me. I got divorced two years ago, and this happened to me, and I would look at them and they would look good, and I remember thinking, like that person looks okay, and like, maybe I'll be okay again too, someday. So I was just hanging on the hope that the therapy and the medication I began meditating every day, the bicycling, that it would somehow pay off. We'll be back in

a moment with more family secrets. Mark's depression, he realizes, is a culmination of myriad troubles, subconscious troubles that his body has been storing trying to signal to him for quite some time. Those lifelong stomachaches have been trying to tell him something, the trick of tellomania too. And then there was a dangerous and instability he'd been repeatedly exposed to at his places of work. And there was the unhappiness at the core of his marriage, largely unspoken about

until it could no longer be subdued. And while the divorce was necessary, mutually decided upon between he and his ex wife, it broke something open and Mark. It catalyzed his depression, but ultimately his healing too. The divorce was the absolute trigger. Even though we were a mismatch. I really love this person, and you get so angry in the divorce you forget you once did love. And you know I'm Catholic. Nobody in my family ever got divorced.

You know, maybe one cousin, Like if somebody had told me the day I'm getting married, hey, you're gonna that was the furthest thing that was never gonna happen. We weren't good for each other, but I loved there, but we just weren't good for each other. And I don't think either of us was happy, but I was really in a way, I was broken hearted. In addition to the heartbreak of the divorce, Mark also struggles with shame.

He feels as a Catholic, he shouldn't be divorced, he shouldn't be depressed, he shouldn't be on medication, and as we know, shame begets secrecy and secrecy begets shame. My therapist he was like, listen, Redmond, you are marinated and guilt and you know I grew up in like this pre Vatican to Catholic church where like you were born bad, you were born with original sin and God's mad at you. And you know that was the kind of and I bought at hook Lion sinker. You know it's I was

an aldo boy. I bored into that whole thing, and that was in there too. I mean that all had to through therapy, that all had to be washed out, brought out in the wash. I'm weak. I shouldn't be, especially as a man, right. I was ashamed of it. I was shamed to be a med's I was ashamed. I was going through this. What's wrong with me? I should do it? And I kept what's I kept trying to figure The more I tried to figure it out, the more I tried to make it go away, the

more it's stuck. It's stuck like glow. And it was funny. My I had a spiritual director, was a nun. She gave me a Zen book about the pressurement by Zen Teacher, and one of the lines in the book was that which we accept is healed. And the more I accepted I'm depressed, and that's just the way it is, it would almost magically lift for a time. The book is called aptly the Depression Book, and the author is Sherry Huber. At first, Mark doesn't read it, he doesn't even open it.

It seems too whimsical to him, a silly book of aphorisms with little drawings of people meditating. But when he finally does open it, he realizes he's been wrong, very wrong. This book is not silly, in fact, is life saving. So what was it that was so healing about the depression book? That whole idea of acceptance was huge to me? She has a drawing there like hills. We want to go from one hill to the next, you know. So this divorce ended, now I have this new girlfriend, and wow,

she's great and I can just go to that. Everything's great now. And her thing is like, no, in life, we need to go through these hills and then these downslides, to these valleys whatever you want to call them. And she had this whole thing about like any time we're saying I shouldn't feel this, I shouldn't be doing this, any of those should that's poison. That's self hatred. That's

where you're hating yourself. And I realized, like, I shouldn't be feeling this way, I shouldn't be going through this. What's wrong with me? And that was all self hatred and all that had to come out to all the pressure I had always put on myself from childhood, but the imposter syndrome. I quit the Peace Corps. There's something wrong with the all the times, all the pressure I

had always put up myself. It was so good. I went through the depression, as horrible as it was, because like all that came out through therapy and it changed me as a person. I remember reading a book because I started studying up on all that. I read start Williams. Styron's book on depression and they call like sort too. Was like you think you start to feel better and you're like, great, it's over, and then bam, your back

down again, and they're like what. And it's funny. I remember some woman came to me to work, she was leaving, and she said, you look like it again. I was like, I know, and last week I felt so good. I don't get it. I feel terrible again. And I remember she grabbed me by the lapels and she yelled at me and she said, my father died in his fifties and my mother was heartbroken and she went through this and she was in the depression, and you just have to go through it. And I remember it. I was like,

She's right. It was about acceptance and learn learning and learning about myself. It's not a linear path. Maybe it is for some people, but most of the literature will tell you it's a zig zag pattern. In fact, the guy who'd been through it at work, he said, mand this too, divorced and you feel shitty, then you feel good, then you feel shitty. I said, what finally happens? He goes one day, you feel good, and you just keep feeling good, and you're out of it. And I said,

how did you feel then? And he said, you feel like the luckiest man on the face of the planet, which is true. It's really true. Though Mark's mental health has improved, things after all, are not linear. His work is intense and challenging. One winter night at St. Christopher's, some girls break loose in the freezing cold, and he goes to find them. He's worried for their lives. He ends up pushing his way through a chain link fence to get to them, and though he doesn't realize it

in the moment, he's cut. His face is really badly. He's gushing blood and ends up needing plastic surgery. So St. Christopher's it was seventy two kids. Many of them had been abused, neglected. Some of them were former drug dealers, former gang members, They have been in prison, they were in fifteen or sixteen, and almost every girl there, it's said, had been sexually abused at some point, you know. So there was tremendous trauma among these kids. And I had

to live on the grounds. I live right there. That was the idea, and I think for four years I was fine, and I was very proud. It just warmed me down to the point where that was finally having my nose almost sliced off my face was the final Like that was like the final straw, like I can't do this anymore. I just can't do this. I can't.

You know. I love working with these kids. I going through the depression made me much more compassionate towards them because I finally learned what it felt like to feel like crap, and they feel like crap most of the time their whole life. Mark wants to continue working with kids, but he knows he needs to be in another environment. He resigns and starts the first charter school for low income children in a new town in a new state, and in starting a new he can keep the truth

of his depression under wraps. No one will know him or what he's been through. He takes this opportunity to keep quiet, start fresh, as if all that had never happened. Nobody needed to know that I went through this, you know, when I started working in Connecticut, all the new coworkers there and friends. Eventually I started dating somebody a couple of years later, and we got serious, and I told her because I could tell we were heading towards engagement, and I said, I need to tell you this. I

went through this whole episode. So we ended up getting married. She accepted that. But then when I moved to Vermont, when they interviewed me for the job here in Vermont, which was five years after Connecticut, I remember the final interview, the board said to me, so, is there anything about you we should know? And another board member said, yeah, do you have any secrets you're not telling us? And I remember thinking, Yeah, I got a secret I'm not

telling you, and I'm not telling you. I'm thinking because I really want to get this job, so all the people I know appear, all the dozens and hundreds of people. Now I've been working in nineteen years and Vermont as director of this program for homeless kids. Nobody knows about this. Even my son, my son who was seven when I went through this, he's thirty five. He's a psychiatric nurse. He doesn't know I went through this. My new son, who's nineteen now, he doesn't know about any of this.

So this has been the thing that I've kept locked in a box since nineteen The story of his depression is not when he shares. Mark does begin to tell stories. In fact, he begins to tell stories publicly. He leaves a two minute pitch on the Moths Storytelling Number. Next thing he knows, he's on stage in Burlington, in Montreal, in Boston telling stories. But for the most part, these

are other stories. They are not stories about. Soon after these performances, he decides to chronicle his life in writing too. He decides to write a memoir. He's writing it chronologically, and eventually, inevitably, he gets to the nineteen nineties. When I got to the nineteen nineties, I was like, Okay, do I put this in the book? Okay? Do I put this whole episode of depression and what I went through and going on that? Do I put that in the book, because so many people have no idea about this,

my relatives, you know. And I decided I was gonna put it in. I was just sided. I'm not like Frederick Douglas, who wrote three memoirs. I'm going to write one memoir. I get one bite at this apple, and I'm going to write that story, and I'm gonna put that in. So that was a key decision. And I remember I gave an early draft of the book to my wife, my present wife, and I said, what did

you think about that chapter about depression? And she said one word harrowing, And I think that's a good adjective to use for that chapter. Sometimes the very act of writing gives you permission to tell the whole story. That's what happened here. Mark's secret about his depression was like

a pilot blight within him, always there, always burning. And when he eventually does tell his whole story, including the most shameful parts, he realizes so many people are also struggling with aim, with depression, with resistance to getting help, resistance to even giving it a name. Mark realizes that the divulging of his secret is not only helpful to him, but it can also help liberate others, which is ultimately the most meaningful thing of all. The truth helps make

us whole. There was a piece of me that wanted to get this out. I decided pretty early if I'm writing a memoir, this was a key, key piece of my life. Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly's Acre is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You

can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.