By Dale Bass, Kamloops This Week
I was at a workshop earlier this year addressing mental health and how reporters can — and should — cover it.
The session was put on to promote MindSet: Reporting on Mental Health, a wonderful 42-page booklet created through a partnership between the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma, CBC News and the Mental Health Commission of Canada.
During the session, some of the panelists referred to people who suffer from mental illness, phrasing we see used regularly in the media.
No doubt there are plenty of stories we could find now that talk about how comedian/actor Robin Williams suffered from depression.
It came time for questions and mine shot up immediately — but was beaten by another journalist who stood up and listed his health issues, which included addiction, alcoholism and depression. They are all under control, he told the group, and he doesn’t consider himself suffering from them.
As with any illness, he has managed with medical help to get them under control, put them into remission, tackle them into submission — whatever terminology one might use to describe someone who was once very sick and is now healthy and has learned to live with the illnesses inside.
That’s what depression is, a horrible illness that can spread through one’s mind the way a bacteria can take over a person’s lungs, creating pneumonia, or an aberrant cell can wreak havoc to a person’s blood or organs.
They each come with their own symptoms, create their own fears and, in some cases, bring their own blackness.
That’s a difficult abyss to get out of when it surrounds you, as it can with depression. It’s easy to get lost in the black, to see no light beckoning you, hear no voice calling you, see nothing that might be just the medicine you need to start the fight against the disease.
It doesn’t have to be a blazing light — it could be the sound of your baby crying or a loved one calling to us.
For a while last week, it felt like the only news happening on the planet was a result of Williams’ death. It led the CBC News the night he was found dead in his California home.
I think almost every one of my social media friends posted a photo, a story, a clip from their favourite Williams film, their own unbelieving shock that someone so funny could succumb to depression. We would have been shocked had he died of some other disease — like the sudden heart failure that killed John Ritter, the cancer that killed Andy Kaufman, the pneumonia that led to the death of Bernie Mac — but it wouldn’t have hurt so much.
The disconnect comes from trying to rationalize phenomenally funny and full of life with massively depressed and, ultimately, unable to recover from it.
The way to understand it and perhaps the one good that can come from the outpouring of media coverage for one person when thousands others die from the disease every year is the discussion on mental illness has taken over the news cycle for a while.
We’re hearing the statistics, we’re learning about the symptoms, we’re discovering anyone could become ill from it.
Hopefully, we’re learning mental illness is just that — a sickness. Some of us learn to live with it. Some of us do our best to live with it but sometimes ignore doctors’ advice and think we’re cured. We stop taking the medicine.
Some of us do everything we’re told, take every medicine we’re prescribed, follow every doctor’s directions to the letter but the illness still wins in the end. We end up staring into that blackness.
If we’re lucky, there’s someone nearby who can shine a light, call out, kick in a bathroom door, do what’s needed to battle the illness back down again to help us in our fight.
And sometimes that illness is simply terminal. We can fight and fight but, in the end, it’s simply too strong.
