Disability Law

On Living with Chronic Depression, and Learning to Listen

By Danielle

This is not a legal issue, but I think it’s interesting and important for all of us to read nonetheless. Over at Blurbomat, Jon wrote a post called How I Do, where he talks about what it is like to be married to, live with, raise a child with, and love his wife Heather, who suffers from chronic depression. He wrote in part:

…one of the best ways to help somebody is to shut up and listen. This is extraordinarily difficult for me as a talker. I?ve really had to stop myself and let it go. I have to tell myself that I need to LISTEN and to tell myself to SHUT UP. It?s doubly important when somebody is anxious or depressed and needs to get it out. I have only met a few men who are great listeners, and those were professionals I was paying to listen.

So. Listen.

It’s easy to get caught up in the legal issues and the fight for freedom and lose sight of the fact that there are real people out there who know what it’s like to deal with mental illness, each and every day, far better than us lawyers ever can. It’s our job to listen to them. It’s my job to listen to you.

It’s easy to denigrate mental health treatment when you’re used to seeing its abuses more than its successes. I write and think a lot about prejudice against people with mental illnesses, health care abuse, involuntary commitments, education failures, and violations of privacy and freedom. So it’s easy for me to lose sight of the fact that there are people who willingly choose medical treatment for their mental illnesses, and that mental health care can and does save people’s lives.

When you spend so much time hearing tales of forced medication and irreversible side effects of psychotropic drugs, it’s easy to forget that sometimes those medications can actually help people.

A few days before Jon wrote about living with Heather’s chronic depression, Heather wrote on her blog, Dooce, about how mental health care and medication saved her life. She ends her post by saying:

All of this is to say that I am a success story. I am a victory for the mental health profession. And if you’re even the tiniest bit on the fence about therapy or medication or herbs or acupuncture or prayer or meditation, whatever it is that you would turn to to try and pull your way out of sadness but are afraid to because of all that it would mean, here is this crazy woman in the Utah desert who admitted and accepted all of those horrible things about herself and in doing so found a better life.

It’s important to read these sorts of stories as well, just to get some perspective.

It’s our job as attorneys to learn, to fight, to counsel - but also to listen.

Full post as published by Mental Disability Law Blog on January 02, 2008 (boomark / email).