ROSIE O'DONNELL ADMITS PSYCH TROUBLE AND THAT SHE'S ON MEDICATION
Says she became obsessed with Columbine shootings, couldn't stop thinking about it. Maybe this is why she went after guns like a crazy woman. . . she_was_ crazy!
------------- copied from rosiemagazine.com ------------ ------------- http://www.rosiemagazine.com/causes/9_rosie.html ---------
I just read a book about depression, Unholy Ghost, a memoir of melancholy. Noted writers describing the indescribable darkness that haunts as many as 12 million American women.
I am one of the haunted. I think I have been depressed for years. It runs in my family, along with alcoholism and an absurd ability to deny the obvious.
My aunt was mentally ill. She tried, unsuccessfully, to end her life. No one ever told me this; I found it out my usual way. I eavesdropped on the grown-ups. Even when they thought they were alone, my parents never used the word suicide. They danced around all truths too painful to utter, but I got the gist. People I knew-people I loved-were dodging bullets daily.
My aunt floated in and out of my childhood, literally. She arrived at family parties, sluggish and slow, a side effect of lithium, the only medication available to her at the time. I watched in pain as she studied her 20-some-odd nieces and nephews, trying hard to recall their names. It scared me, this unspoken thing that had stolen her soul. I would spend each Communion or Confirmation sitting near enough to catch her eye, far enough to avoid contamination.
My aunt died of a heart attack. If she had held on a few more years, she could have tried some of the new antidepressants. They work-I know they do. Just a few multicolored pills daily, and life comes back to life.
Depression is amazingly powerful, deadly. Where does it come from? Is it a result of abuse, loss or trauma? Does depravity give birth to depression, or is depression its own entity, with a chemically regulated ETA?
It is easy to deny you have clinical depression. I did it for years. I wasn't "depressed." I was sad, yes, and moody, but not "depressed." I had reasons for my pain, and that kept me from getting treatment. Sure, I went to therapy, on and off, since I was 16. I went over and over the disturbing things that happened to me. I tried as hard as I could to learn the things I knew somewhere I knew. I never felt much better.
The gloom was becoming constant. The gray was winning. Sure, I had moments of joy, I fell in and out of love. I had happy days and career success, but the dark cloud that arrived in my childhood did not leave until I was 37 and started taking medication.
My depression slowly faded away. I have been on medication for two years now. I may be on it forever. The pills did not make me a zombie, they did not change the reality of my past, they did not take away my curiosity about the suffering of my family, relatives here and gone. What the pills did was to allow me to deal with all of those issues when and where I wish. The medication allowed me the choice-did I want to dig or not? I have found that I do not. I deserve a break. I have left the excavation site for now. My life is once again manageable. The gray has gone away, I am living in bright Technicolor.