With last week being Mental Illness Awareness Week, it seemed like the perfect time to meet with Patsy Reed, an Islander living with clinical depression, to talk about her role in Oregon writer Linda Phillips’s new young adult novel Crazy, which is a Junior Library Guild selection. Phillips, who will be giving a reading at Eagle Harbor Books on October 26th, took her own experience growing up in the 1960s with a bipolar mother in Klamath Falls and fictionalized it, in verse no less. Reed (not her real name) was one of Phillips’s best friends, and she appears as a composite character in the novel.
Reed commented on the irony that Phillips was always worried that, like her mother, she would develop bipolar disorder. Instead, her pal Reed, who at the time didn’t know about her own father’s long-term depression, was the one who ended up experiencing mental illness.
Reed said her father had been emotionally and physically abused as a child. As a young man, he served in Vietnam where he was tasked with gathering up dead bodies. Reed said he returned home with deep anger and depression. He was constantly putting down her mother, criticizing and occasionally beating his four children, and threatening to leave.
She survived the tension at home by turning to her long-term friendships with several girls in Klamath Falls, much like the main character in Crazy does. Five of those friends still keep in touch.
It wasn’t until she was in her forties, Reed said, that she realized she had a serious problem herself. Her awareness came after she started working in a prominent civilian position in a regional law enforcement agency that Reed prefers we not name. At that agency, Reed said, she was bullied by her colleagues, threatened within an hour of starting on her first day. She believes most of the bullying was because she was one of only a few women working there.
Reed said that in her previous job in the other Washington she had never experienced any type of sexism and, in fact, her first boss drafted the Equal Rights Amendment. Reed said, “I’d never heard the word misogynist before.” But she went from being supported and promoted to being frequently criticized and harassed in the law enforcement agency. She said that her boss would ask her to do something and then, when things got difficult politically, not back her up. She said, “Everything that was wrong . . . it was my fault. I was internalizing all the work stuff when, in fact, they were behaving badly.”
Reed continued working at her law enforcement agency job for 24 years. When asked why she didn’t leave sooner, she explained that she couldn’t. Once colleagues became aware of her struggle with depression, she said, she never would have been able to secure another job at the same level.
She started having suicidal thoughts but, she explained, at the time she thought everyone had suicidal thoughts. Eventually she went to a doctor and was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression. She began long-term treatment, consisting of therapy and medication. But even while on treatment, she tried to commit suicide. She said sometimes the medication worked and sometimes it didn’t, and at one point she committed herself to Overlake Hospital.
She believes she was born with a genetic predisposition to depression that got triggered by working in what she called “a paramilitary organization.” She pointed out that “law enforcement tends not to avail itself of mental services. It discourages the tendency to get help and encourages the need to get help.”
She said her boss ordered her not to talk about her mental health issues. But talking is the way she has survived. She said that a friend once told her that “every family has something they don’t want to talk about. But if you do talk about it, you can get through it. That’s what therapy is. If you have suicidal thoughts, say something.”
She said, “All my friends have been supportive. The medical field has been supportive. There are outstanding professionals on Bainbridge.”
Reed recommends that “young people participate in athletics or some other activity to keep them focused on something other than themselves.” In Klamath Falls, which has a similar-sized population to Bainbridge, she and her friends went to the library to study together several evenings a week. They also hiked, took rifle training, were in Campfire Girls, and played sports together: “We had coaches and teachers who helped us.” When Phillips’s mother was in a mental hospital, “she didn’t have anyone to mother her. So a friend’s mother showed her how to sew so she could meet her eighth grade Home-Ec requirement.”
“It’s the same here on Bainbridge,” she said. “It’s a small town with people to help you. There are problems too but there are lots of resources here.”
She said, “The Bainbridge Island School District and the Parks District have so many people willing to help young people. They can spot people with issues. I can’t say enough about the positive work of the school system and parks programs.” She said that she even knows of local coaches communicating with kids’ college coaches to ensure they continue to get support and care, and she knows of specific instances when children with mentally ill parents have been helped by teachers at local schools.
But, she added, all of that kind of help requires that people be willing “to extend themselves” and ask for it.
The same applies to adults, Reed said. “If you’re lonely, volunteer.” She said it’s a way to “meet so many tremendous people.” She herself volunteers by helping kids with their college applications at no charge. She worked with one recent college applicant every Sunday for six months. She said she especially likes to help “the kids who don’t have the resources other kids have.”
Phillips’s reading starts at 3:00 on Sunday, October 26, at Eagle Harbor Books. Here’s a preview of the book and a message from the publisher, Wm. B. Eerdmans, about Mental Illness Awareness Week:
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