All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [28]
When my family went away for New Year’s, I stayed home alone. I had been running a low-grade fever for weeks, which for me was a telltale physical symptom of depression, and I was not in any mood to celebrate the holidays. I lay in bed or outside under trees by the creek for days, ruminating about ways to ease the pain I felt with every heartbeat. Mom and Pop have always interpreted the Second Amendment in a particular way, and they kept a lot of guns in this house, just as they did in the Hell Hole. One night, after another crappy day of feeling lousy, when I was rummaging for yet another late-night snack, I opened a drawer and found a loaded shotgun. I thought, These people have absolutely no idea the kind of distress I’m in; they are unable to see me as I am right now. It was a long, shaky, cannot-stop-crying, fetal-position kind of night.
Later, I learned that many depressed people are so inert before starting medication that they can’t even kill themselves—but once the meds kick in, they can begin to muster just enough energy to take action. Self-harm was an idea that lived rent-free in my head during my worst depressions, that in the absence of healthy tools gave me essential emotional relief. Next morning, I phoned the therapist I knew as soon as her office opened. She told me to come in, and I lay listlessly on her sofa while she and my general practitioner figured out what to do with me. My GP told me the obvious choice: The Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital in Nashville was an option, but she warned in hushed tones that it would go on “my record.” Influenced by his own stigmatized view of depression, I chose simply to check into the county hospital under the guise of some vague ailment. (My GP is a great guy, but he still whispers in his office when he asks me how my recovery from depression is going.) That day was an interesting turning point in my life. I have wondered what would have happened if I’d gone to the psychiatric hospital and received proper treatment for depression, which I clearly needed, beyond simply taking antidepressants. It might have saved me years of further grief, or it might have done further damage if I had been given the wrong kind of treatment. Ultimately, God had something very special in mind for me, but that would be ten years down the road.
In the short term, my brief stay in the hospital was a salve. As soon as an IV was in my arm, my fever came down and I started feeling better—although I think my relief was related more to being out of what was for me a toxic environment and having my mental illness acknowledged without judgment. The nurturing care the nurses gave me was profoundly moving. They weren’t treating me as if I were crazy; they were just doing what nurses do—running the bath, checking on me, being kind. I needed that. But I did continue to have spells while in the hospital: emotional meltdowns and impulses to self-harm. I kept them secret from the nurses, because I wasn’t in the habit of identifying and talking about these things with anyone yet, and I was scared they would reject me if I seemed too crazy for them. I was afraid of being in trouble for having an emotional problem.
During all this, I was still hoping to attend President Clinton’s second inauguration in January 1997, to which I was invited because I had campaigned for him and introduced him when he spoke in Kentucky. I even tried on Armani gowns in the hospital while still attached to an IV pole. It was an unrealistic wish.
When I felt well enough to leave the hospital, I took the advice of the therapist friend and moved out of my mom’s house. I rented a beautiful cottage