October 6, 2022 • 41 mins
After Mark’s divorce, he cannot eat or sleep or function. Hesitant to pathologize these feelings, he finally acknowledges the clinical magnitude of his condition. But even after accepting that he’s suffering from depression, he keeps it under wraps; he runs a residential treatment center for homeless teens where he feels he must keep up appearances.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. I
grew up in Long Island, in Suburbia. My dad went
to college at night on the g I bill. My
mom was a housewife. They had five kids in eight years,
(00:21):
you know, and I was the oldest. And we all
went to Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school, Catholic college.
We're very involved in our parish, very involved in our church.
I played Little league baseball and I played football in college.
My dad worked in commercial real estate in Manhattan, and
(00:41):
uh for a guy you know who went to night
school and got its bachelor's degree when I was like four.
He did quite well, but I was anxious as a kid.
I know what it's called now because of the field
I work, and it's called trick at tillmania, where you
pull your hair out. I can remember doing that when
I was like four or five, and then I did
(01:02):
some grunting noise with my throat that my parents sent
me to see a doctor who said stop doing that.
And then I did something with my jaw. So there
was a lot of anxiety. Or I would be in
second grade and have to urinate like twenty times a day.
I remember the teacher yelling at me. I'm not sure
(01:23):
where the anxiety came from. That's Mark Redmond, executive director
of Spectrum Youth and Family Services, storyteller and author of
the memoir called Mark's is a story about the stigma
and shame surrounding depression and a temptation to keep silent
(01:43):
about it, and the courage and liberation that comes from
telling it. Like it is about something that affects so
many of us. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(02:06):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
I suffered from what we now call impostor syndrome. So
I would do really well in school. I mean, I
was a good student from my first grade on, but
(02:28):
I can remember, you know, fifth grade would end and
I'd be like at the top of the class, and
then all that summer, I think is sixth grade the
year when they finally find out I'm really not that smart,
you know. And of course I do really well in
sixth grade, and then the next year I'd be like
is the next year where they were? You know? So
we call that imposter syndrome now, so I definitely had
(02:50):
that going on as well, but I pretty much had
anxiety baked into my personality. I think early on, how
did your parents handle it? The various ticks, and you know,
this was not at a time where there was so
much psychological awareness of the way that kids would, you know,
go through various things. There wasn't nearly as much infrastructure
(03:13):
of help available for that. There was definitely not. I
mean they probably did what most parents then did. They
would say, hey, stop doing that, stop pulling your hair out.
You know. Tell me a little bit about your mom.
My mom grew up in Brooklyn. Her mom died when
she was three years old. Her mom died of a
heart attack. Her own dad then died I think when
(03:36):
he was like fifty five. My dad's died when he
was eight. There was a lot of early death in
our family. I think there was a lot of early
death in that generation. My mom had cousins who fought
in World War Two who never came back. I think
the Great Depression made a big impression on both of
(03:57):
my parents. I know that really scarred my dad. You know,
just that after his dad died, they really weren't the
security benefits you have now for families. I remember him
taking me to like a Brooks Brothers store and making
me trying all these suits, which I hated and I
hate now. And uh. I turned to my mom and
(04:17):
I said, why does Daddy make me put on all
these outfits? And she said, because when he was your age,
he got all of his close second hand from the church.
So he wants you to have what he couldn't have then.
So they knew what it was like to want, you know,
and I think they would determine to give us, including
(04:39):
a college education. It's one of my dad's proudest things
to this day that he sent all five of his
kids to private colleges without one dime of debt. When
it comes time for Mark to go to college, he's
still struggling with the same impostor syndrome he's experienced since
grade school. He applies to a bunch of Ivy League
(05:00):
universities but doesn't get in, so he decides to go
to Villanova, a good school and familiar to him because
his cousin goes there. But as he enters college, Mark
is uncertain about his path. I remember the end of
my senior high school you had to fill out some
form and you had to pick a major. You couldn't
go in undeclared back then. So there were four boxes.
(05:22):
One was nursing, one was Arts and Sciences, one was engineering,
and one was business. So I turned to my dad
and said, Hey, which box should I check? So he said, well,
what do you want to do with your life? And
I said, I don't know. I'm seventeen. I don't have
a clue. He said, well, put down business because that's
what he was. It made sense. He was a businessman
(05:43):
and had provided him of the very good life. So
I said, okay, I'll be a business major. So that's
what I did, and I went through four years. I
didn't really enjoy it. I didn't like it, I wasn't
interested in it, but I was good at it. I
never really questions until my senior year of high school
(06:05):
what I was gonna do. I really felt like I'm
destined to, you know, probably work on Wall Street. But
I read a cover story this Philadelphia native, a young
guy who had been working in Guatemala after a terrible
earthquake there, and he was now walking from Guatemala to
(06:25):
his home city of Philadelphia to raise money to go
back and help the people in Guatemala. And I read
that and thought, wow, that's like amazing. So a couple
of weeks later, I played in the rugby team in
Villanova and our big rival was Georgetown, and we're down
there in d C. We would all need in the
in front of the statue of Georgetown. And I'm sitting
(06:47):
there waiting for my teammates and I see this band
there and it's got all these balloons and it's all
these little kids and it's like a fun run or
a fun walk. And then I see this young guy
in his twenties. He's tan, and for some reason he
comes over and he starts talking to us and he
asks us who we are. We say, we're going over rugby,
(07:10):
and he goes, oh, I went to Georgetown. I played rugby,
And all of a sudden, I'm like, oh my gosh,
this is the guy. This is the guy I read
about a couple of months ago. I guess he's made
it to d C. So anyway, a couple of weeks later,
I always went to church on Sunday. Of Villanova. The
most popular mass was the six pm Mass, and the
(07:31):
priest gets to give the Homily and says, the guest
Homilist today is a young man named Edward Fisher who
has walked from Guatemala all the way here to Philadelphia.
I'm like, oh my god, this is the same guy.
So he gets up there and he shows slides of
the devastation in Guatemala and what he's doing and how
(07:52):
they're trying to rebuild, and he talks about his walk
and how he says, I look out at you kids,
and I see myself a couple of years ago when
I was in college at Georgetown, and you know, I
had money, and I had a car, and I had
a career, and now I have nothing, and I'm as
happy as I could be, and I can't wait to
(08:13):
go back to Guatemala and help the people there. Well,
at the end of that mass, I just stood there.
I was like the last person staying there in the
in the chapel, and I was just so moved by
what he said. You know, in fact, I felt like
screaming out to all the other students, where are you
all going? How can you all just now go and
(08:36):
leave and study and you know, whatever you're studying after
what we just heard. Funny, I go back to Villanova
every five years to my reunion. I know exactly where
I was sated in that chapel that day, and I
go back and I look there and I think that's
where all this started. That was the first inkling I
ever had that maybe I wasn't going to end up
(08:57):
on Wall Street, maybe my career wasn't going to be
in business. Emboldened by his encounter with Edward Fisher, after
Mark graduates, he immediately joins the Peace Corps and he
sent to Guatemala coincidence. Mark wants so badly to help
to adapt to the landscape, not to feel like an impostor,
(09:20):
but he struggles. I think I wasn't really realistic, and
it just like hit me when I got down there.
I just suddenly felt like what am I doing here?
And they were like, you know, you'll start the first
three months here with the other forty volunteers, but then
we're all going to send you to different parts of
(09:40):
the country alone, and you know, maybe you'll see another
volunteer once every few months, because you know, the roads
are really bad and they wash out and it's no transportation.
I thought this was for me, This is not for me,
and I was not the first one to go. There
are a bunch of people who never made it to Guatemala.
We had to go to Miami for an orientation first,
(10:02):
and about four four people jumped out of that, and
then I think out of the forty two of us,
a good fourteen or fifteen would eventually leave. But I
was one of the first ones. I was literally home
in ten days, and I was embarrassed as heck. You know,
I had told everybody, Oh, I'm going down to Guatemal.
I turned down all these corporate jobs on Wall Street.
(10:23):
You know, I'm doing this great thing. And I was
just humiliated. I just wanted to tide in my basement
for two years and then crawl out and say, hey,
I'm back. Of course, Mark cannot stay hiding forever. He
needs to buckle down and get a job. Still disappointed
(10:43):
in himself for leaving the Peace Corps, he explores other opportunities,
other paths. Altogether, he ends up with a great job,
a management training program at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. It's
nineteen seventy nine and Mark heads into this new career.
He's finally putting those Brooks Brothers suits to us. Their
(11:04):
office was in one Madison Square, and I showed up
and I met the other nine, you know, trainees. Most
of them had graduated from IVY League schools, some of
them had their m b A. I was one of
the few with just a bachelor's degree from a non
IVY It was supposed to be a three year training
program and we were gonna do different rotations throughout the company.
(11:26):
You know, I t sales marketing, and then we were
going to be the future leaders of Metropolitan Life, and
a lot of ended up that way. First year, they
put me in an office on Long Island, so I
lived in my parents basement. And then the next year
they moved me into the city. So I got a
wonderful studio apartment on sixty two Street between Park Avenue
(11:50):
and Lexington Avenue, and I would walk down Park Avenue
every morning to my job at one Madison Avenue. At first,
I was elated. This is Gray, My life's back on track.
You know. I had my college girlfriend in Philadelphia. Well,
a lot of my Villanova friends were living in the city.
We'd all go to the same bars, and we were
(12:11):
always poor in college. You know, we have money in
our pocket. We do go to restaurants I thought, this
is it, but I hated the work. I hated the work.
It didn't take me long to realize crunching numbers, learning
about insurance policy. It just not that it was wrong
or it just wasn't me. I knew I was just
(12:34):
playing this role. It wasn't me, you know. So what
was the turning point? I had a friend she started
at ABC News after college and left. They had to
start working at Covenant House, which was a shelter for
homeless teenagers in Times Square, which is still there. She said,
we need volunteers to come here at night. And then
(12:55):
I went back to villan Nova to visit a friend
and she said, Hey, there's an event on campus. It's
about this. It's this volunteer fair. I want why don't
you come with me? And I was like, yeah, okay.
And it was different nonprofit organizations and somebody from Covenant
House was there and they showed this film about the
work that we're doing with homeless teams. So I went
(13:18):
up to this elderly woman, she looked like a suburban grandmother,
and I said, you know, I'm interested in volunteering. I'm
living in New York City. I just moved in there
and I don't know, maybe I can help out one
night a week. So she we exchanged phone numbers and
I went to visit her, and I'll never forget. She said,
(13:39):
you know, we'd love to have you volunteer here. You know,
whatever night a week you want to come. But you
know there's a group of us who are full time volunteers.
It's a one year program where you live here in
Times Square and we give you twelve dollars a week
and you work full time. But the kids, I think
you should consider that. In fact, you have to come
(13:59):
on an orientation and I've got an opening in May.
I'll put you down for it. I thought, let the
nice little lady put your name down for the week
in May. It's so easy to get out of this,
just one phone call. Just humor her. So that's what
I did. I said, okay, yeah, yeah, put me down.
And then I started going Every Tuesday night. I would
(14:21):
instead of taking the Lexington Avenue line, I would take
the R train and I'd get off the Times Square
and Rolling Stone Magazine Cold. Times Square the sleaziest block
in America. And it was, as my brother said recently, yeah,
back then you ran through Times square, So I would
kind of scurry over to Covenant House. Uh, and then
(14:45):
I would have a gym bag and I would change
into like sneakers and jeans and a T shirt and
I would play basketball. I would hand out snacks, that
kind of thing. And I would say doing that week
after week after week, like I can't read, I can't
remember one moment. It's just kind of doing to me,
like this is what I should be doing. I remember
(15:08):
going to some meeting at met Life, me and the
other nine trainees, and we met with some senior vice president.
He said, you know, we're now at eighty billion in assets.
It's the beginning of the decade, and our goal by
the end of the decade is to get to billion
in assets. And that's the goal. That's what you all
have to work towards. And I remember sitting there thinking,
(15:31):
that is not my goal. It's fine if that's somebody
else's goal. That is not what I wanted to dedicate
my life to to get in a hundred and twenty
billion in assets. I would rather be dedicating myself to
the kids a Covenant House and helping homeless kids get
off the street and find a better way to live.
That's my goal. We'll be right back. In pursuit of
(16:11):
his new goal, Mark switches gears, he leaves MetLife and
goes to work full time for Covenant House. He's there
for two and a half years, during which he's elected
to be the leader of all the full time volunteers.
He gets to travel too, back to Guatemala in fact,
as Covenant House is expanding, opening up divisions globally. Also
(16:32):
during his time at Covenant House, he falls in love
with another volunteer. They get married. He gets his degree
at n y U and ends up at another nonprofit
organization to help homeless kids called Epiphany. Epiphany, however, is
a difficult place with a difficult history. There's corruption, theft,
Some staff members are even selling drugs to the kids.
(16:54):
Sometimes there's physical harm and danger. Eventually, though, Mark helps
the organization to repair and creates a model program for
homeless youth. He's following his credo, best illustrated by a
quote from the psychologist Abraham Maslow. A musician must make music,
an artist must paint, a poet must write. If he
(17:16):
is to be ultimately at peace with himself, what a
man can be, he must be. I ended up leaving
there in April, which got me up to St. Christopher's.
I saw an ant in the New York Times and
for a director of residential treatment center for teenagers, and
(17:36):
I applied and I got that job. And where was St.
Christopher's Dobbs Ferry, New York, which is right on the
Hudson It was beautiful, right on the Hudson River, very
close right above Yonker. I mean, it was like a
twenty five minute ride to Grand Central. By this point,
Mark and his wife have a son. At first Mark
commutes to and from Dobbs Ferry, but then St. Christopher's
(18:00):
choires that Mark live on campus. If anything happens in
the middle of the night with these kids, Mark needs
to be right there on site. So they provide a
house for Mark and his family, and they moved to
Dobb's Ferry. Though Mark is advancing in his career, his
marriage is floundering. They're just mismatched. Market seeing a therapist
(18:21):
who helps him realize that he's not happy and won't
be happy unless he and his wife break ties. So
I that we got divorced at some day in July nine.
And I remember I stopped seeing the therapist like three
months earlier, April or May, and the last time I
saw him, I said, thank you. You've been great to
me of helping with his decision. You know, I'm going
(18:42):
to end therapy now. And he said, you know a
lot of men when the actual divorce goes through, they
have an emotional reaction. And I said, well, that's not
gonna happen with me. You know. I said, I am
absolutely certain of this decision. And I said, besides, even
if I did, what would you recommend And he said, well,
I'd recommend you go on medication. We shook heads, said goodbye,
(19:03):
and it's the day of the divorce. You know, my
wife and I we found we kicked the lawyers out
of the room because lawyers always want you to get
more and I was finally like, what do you need?
This is what I need. Great, we agreed on and
we signed the papers. So I left the office in
Manhattan where the lawyers were, and I stopped. I remember
I stopped at some store. I bought a book and
(19:23):
I bought one of those pre wrapped like egg salad
sandwiches because I hadn't had lunch, and I thought, I'll
leave this on the ride train ride up to Westchester,
and I took like two bites and my all of
a sudden, my stomach felt queasy, and I thought, ah,
that stomach ache again. And I had been having these
stomach issues for the last couple of years. They would
(19:45):
come and go. I went and saw a doctor once
and he said, there's nothing wrong with you. So I
that that's weird. I feel nauseous. Went home. We had
shared custody. Our sun was seven, so I got him
from school, brought him home, made him dinner, and I
went to bed and I couldn't sleep. I went through
the whole night tossing it. Could not sleep. So I
got up in the morning and I'm dragging, and I
(20:08):
go down and I took my son to the bus
stop and I couldn't eat. The next day, I was
not hungry. I had no appetite at all for breakfast.
Dragged myself through the day and I figured, well, surely
still not hungry. I said, well, surely I'll go to
sleep tonight. Right, I've been up for like I don't
know how many our straight couldn't sleep again. So then
(20:30):
the next morning, still can't eat. And now it's starting
to occur to me like this is not a stomach thing.
This is not a stomach bug. This could be anxiety.
So I called my old therapist stuff and I said, um,
remember you said that to me a few months ago,
that like, you know, some men have like an all shrewlry.
I said, someth's going on with me? Can I come
(20:52):
and see you? So he was like, yeah, sure, come
and see me tomorrow at what three o'clock? I don't
sleep another now I go want to see him the
next day. And as soon as I walk in, he says,
you look like hell. And I said, yeah, I haven't
slept in like days and I haven't eaten anything either.
So he said, well, you're depressed. I said, no, no,
(21:13):
I'm not depressed. I'm happy. You know, I'm out of
this marriage. I have this new girlfriend I really like,
and you know, I have shared custody with my son
and a job I really loved, so I'm happy. He said, no,
you're depressed. He said insomnia and lack of appetite or
like the two principal symptoms of depression. So he said,
(21:33):
I think he couldn't prescribe medication. He said, I think
you should go see the psychiatrist who I work with
he could prescribe medication, but Mark is apprehensive about medication.
He's never taken anything for depression. And further, he doesn't
believe he's depressed. Something else must be going on, he thinks,
(21:54):
But he takes down the psychiatrist's name anyway, just in case.
That night, I remember going for long walk. It's so
funny how the human mind works. I'm going for long walk,
and for some reason, I remembered that. In high school
I read a book by Elizabeth coobla Ross called On
Death and Dying, and I remember there were five stages
(22:16):
on death and dying, and I remembered there was anger, denial, bargaining,
and the last one was acceptance. But there was a
fourth one. There was one. I couldn't remember what the
fourth step was, and I knew it had the same
first letter as one of those others. So there was
either an, A, A D or D. Okay, and I'm
(22:39):
walking what is it? What is there reason? I walked
in the house and all of a sudden it popped
in my mind. The fourth step is depression. And it
was like my mind's way of telling me, no, that's
what this is. You are depressed. So another night and
not sleep, and I go the psychiatrist and I was lucky,
today would take you months to see one. I think.
(23:00):
I went in that afternoon to see him. So I
described what I'm going through, and he said, I'm gonna
prescribe three medications for you. Prozac, something calledbu spar for anxiety,
and then something called restaurant to sleep. So I was
like three medications. He was like, don't worry. I know
what I'm doing. Other people who have been on this,
(23:21):
you know. So I remember he went to hand me
the script and before he handed it to me, he
pulled it back and he said, this is not the cure.
The cure is in that therapist office. This is just
to get you functioning again. So I go into the
pharmacy and I give the scripts to the pharmacist and
(23:42):
the guy says, uh, okay, yeah, we close soon, so
these come back tomorrow. And I almost like reached across
the counter and I said to the guy, no, no, no,
you don't understand. I need that medication now. And here
I was the guy who liked twenty four hours ago,
was never gonna go on medication. So anyway, he was
like okay, So he gave me the bills. But antidepressants,
(24:08):
in these other medications, it's not magical. You know, they
don't kick in right away. It takes time, and then
you gotta find out if you're on the right one
and if you're on the right dosage. So really that
began like three or four months of a deep, deep depression,
and my weight at my heaviest I was six pounds
(24:32):
within a couple of months. I remember getting on the
scale and it said one, and I remember thinking, holy
sh it, like I have got to figure out a
way to get food into me, you know. And I
can remember holding a banana up and looking at it
and thinking, if I try really, really hard, I can
eat this banana. And then I went and bought some
(24:55):
powder at a health food store that if you mixed
it with milk, would put on wait. I was desperate
to try and get food into my body, but my
anxiety was like sky high. And you're also having panic attacks.
During this time. I would have panic attacks that felt
like a heart attack. I would have night sweats. I
(25:16):
would wake up at the morning and you could wring
my shirt out. I was a wreck. I was, I could,
but it wasn't even day by day. It was hour
by hour. Mark's therapist advises him to keep going to work,
that work is good for him, even if he has
sleepless night. After sleepless night, the work will keep him afloat.
(25:39):
And of course the irony is not lost on Mark
that he works with others who are suffering from similar
afflictions depression, anxiety, and though he might feel solace in
this common ground, he tries to hide his depression. At first,
tries to keep it a secret, but since he's so
physically altered, since he's lost so much weight, the secret
(25:59):
is to contain. Thankfully, my boss, the executive director, was
a trained clinician, mental health clinician. I confided in him.
I found out there was one staff member working there.
I was close to a year later, when I was better,
he said to me, Redmond, everybody in this place thought
you were a crack addict, because crack was the drug
(26:20):
of choice. Then taken down and he goes and people
lose weight super fast. It's because of crack. So that
was what the entire staff here thought, that you were
on crack. Can you imagine? I said, I wasn't. I
was depressed. It was depression. But I had a psychologist
on staff. I had to confide. She could see how
miserable I looked, you know, I confided in her. But
(26:43):
I tried as best as I could just get into
work and try to do my job. But it was
it was as hard as hell because even on medication,
I would still only get three or four hours of sleep.
It's hard to concentrate. I would have a conversation with somebody.
I remember talking to my brother on the phone and
he said, you know, you just told me the same
(27:04):
thing three times in a ten minute period. So it
was just trying to get because I was like, if
I lose this job, I lose my house, I might
lose shared custody of my son. You know this this
is I could lose everything. So it was just struggling.
I was going to therapy twice a week. I was.
(27:28):
I had read that exercise is key in terms of
overcoming depressions. So I would get on this bicycle and
bike for as tired as I was, I would make
myself ride this bike for like an hour or two
every night. The thing that would help more than anything
else was somebody would come up to me and whisper
(27:50):
to me. I got divorced two years ago, and this
happened to me, and I would look at them and
they would look good, and I remember thinking, like that
person looks okay, and like, maybe I'll be okay again too, someday.
So I was just hanging on the hope that the
therapy and the medication I began meditating every day, the bicycling,
(28:13):
that it would somehow pay off. We'll be back in
a moment with more family secrets. Mark's depression, he realizes,
(28:46):
is a culmination of myriad troubles, subconscious troubles that his
body has been storing trying to signal to him for
quite some time. Those lifelong stomachaches have been trying to
tell him something, the trick of tellomania too. And then
there was a dangerous and instability he'd been repeatedly exposed
to at his places of work. And there was the
(29:07):
unhappiness at the core of his marriage, largely unspoken about
until it could no longer be subdued. And while the
divorce was necessary, mutually decided upon between he and his
ex wife, it broke something open and Mark. It catalyzed
his depression, but ultimately his healing too. The divorce was
(29:27):
the absolute trigger. Even though we were a mismatch. I
really love this person, and you get so angry in
the divorce you forget you once did love. And you
know I'm Catholic. Nobody in my family ever got divorced.
You know, maybe one cousin, Like if somebody had told
me the day I'm getting married, hey, you're gonna that
was the furthest thing that was never gonna happen. We
(29:49):
weren't good for each other, but I loved there, but
we just weren't good for each other. And I don't
think either of us was happy, but I was really
in a way, I was broken hearted. In addition to
the heartbreak of the divorce, Mark also struggles with shame.
He feels as a Catholic, he shouldn't be divorced, he
(30:11):
shouldn't be depressed, he shouldn't be on medication, and as
we know, shame begets secrecy and secrecy begets shame. My
therapist he was like, listen, Redmond, you are marinated and
guilt and you know I grew up in like this
pre Vatican to Catholic church where like you were born bad,
(30:31):
you were born with original sin and God's mad at you.
And you know that was the kind of and I
bought at hook Lion sinker. You know it's I was
an aldo boy. I bored into that whole thing, and
that was in there too. I mean that all had
to through therapy, that all had to be washed out,
brought out in the wash. I'm weak. I shouldn't be,
(30:53):
especially as a man, right. I was ashamed of it.
I was shamed to be a med's I was ashamed.
I was going through this. What's wrong with me? I
should do it? And I kept what's I kept trying
to figure The more I tried to figure it out,
the more I tried to make it go away, the
more it's stuck. It's stuck like glow. And it was funny.
My I had a spiritual director, was a nun. She
(31:13):
gave me a Zen book about the pressurement by Zen Teacher,
and one of the lines in the book was that
which we accept is healed. And the more I accepted
I'm depressed, and that's just the way it is, it
would almost magically lift for a time. The book is
(31:33):
called aptly the Depression Book, and the author is Sherry Huber.
At first, Mark doesn't read it, he doesn't even open it.
It seems too whimsical to him, a silly book of
aphorisms with little drawings of people meditating. But when he
finally does open it, he realizes he's been wrong, very wrong.
This book is not silly, in fact, is life saving.
(31:59):
So what was it that was so healing about the
depression book? That whole idea of acceptance was huge to me?
She has a drawing there like hills. We want to
go from one hill to the next, you know. So
this divorce ended, now I have this new girlfriend, and wow,
she's great and I can just go to that. Everything's
great now. And her thing is like, no, in life,
(32:22):
we need to go through these hills and then these downslides,
to these valleys whatever you want to call them. And
she had this whole thing about like any time we're
saying I shouldn't feel this, I shouldn't be doing this,
any of those should that's poison. That's self hatred. That's
where you're hating yourself. And I realized, like, I shouldn't
(32:44):
be feeling this way, I shouldn't be going through this.
What's wrong with me? And that was all self hatred
and all that had to come out to all the
pressure I had always put on myself from childhood, but
the imposter syndrome. I quit the Peace Corps. There's something
wrong with the all the times, all the pressure I
had always put up myself. It was so good. I
(33:04):
went through the depression, as horrible as it was, because
like all that came out through therapy and it changed
me as a person. I remember reading a book because
I started studying up on all that. I read start Williams.
Styron's book on depression and they call like sort too.
Was like you think you start to feel better and
you're like, great, it's over, and then bam, your back
(33:25):
down again, and they're like what. And it's funny. I
remember some woman came to me to work, she was leaving,
and she said, you look like it again. I was like,
I know, and last week I felt so good. I
don't get it. I feel terrible again. And I remember
she grabbed me by the lapels and she yelled at
me and she said, my father died in his fifties
and my mother was heartbroken and she went through this
(33:49):
and she was in the depression, and you just have
to go through it. And I remember it. I was like,
She's right. It was about acceptance and learn learning and
learning about myself. It's not a linear path. Maybe it
is for some people, but most of the literature will
tell you it's a zig zag pattern. In fact, the
guy who'd been through it at work, he said, mand
(34:11):
this too, divorced and you feel shitty, then you feel good,
then you feel shitty. I said, what finally happens? He
goes one day, you feel good, and you just keep
feeling good, and you're out of it. And I said,
how did you feel then? And he said, you feel
like the luckiest man on the face of the planet,
which is true. It's really true. Though Mark's mental health
(34:39):
has improved, things after all, are not linear. His work
is intense and challenging. One winter night at St. Christopher's,
some girls break loose in the freezing cold, and he
goes to find them. He's worried for their lives. He
ends up pushing his way through a chain link fence
to get to them, and though he doesn't realize it
in the moment, he's cut. His face is really badly.
(35:01):
He's gushing blood and ends up needing plastic surgery. So St.
Christopher's it was seventy two kids. Many of them had
been abused, neglected. Some of them were former drug dealers,
former gang members, They have been in prison, they were
in fifteen or sixteen, and almost every girl there, it's said,
had been sexually abused at some point, you know. So
(35:23):
there was tremendous trauma among these kids. And I had
to live on the grounds. I live right there. That
was the idea, and I think for four years I
was fine, and I was very proud. It just warmed
me down to the point where that was finally having
my nose almost sliced off my face was the final
Like that was like the final straw, like I can't
(35:47):
do this anymore. I just can't do this. I can't.
You know. I love working with these kids. I going
through the depression made me much more compassionate towards them
because I finally learned what it felt like to feel
like crap, and they feel like crap most of the
time their whole life. Mark wants to continue working with kids,
(36:12):
but he knows he needs to be in another environment.
He resigns and starts the first charter school for low
income children in a new town in a new state,
and in starting a new he can keep the truth
of his depression under wraps. No one will know him
or what he's been through. He takes this opportunity to
keep quiet, start fresh, as if all that had never happened.
(36:37):
Nobody needed to know that I went through this, you know,
when I started working in Connecticut, all the new coworkers
there and friends. Eventually I started dating somebody a couple
of years later, and we got serious, and I told
her because I could tell we were heading towards engagement,
and I said, I need to tell you this. I
(36:57):
went through this whole episode. So we ended up getting married.
She accepted that. But then when I moved to Vermont,
when they interviewed me for the job here in Vermont,
which was five years after Connecticut, I remember the final interview,
the board said to me, so, is there anything about
you we should know? And another board member said, yeah,
do you have any secrets you're not telling us? And
I remember thinking, Yeah, I got a secret I'm not
(37:19):
telling you, and I'm not telling you. I'm thinking because
I really want to get this job, so all the
people I know appear, all the dozens and hundreds of people.
Now I've been working in nineteen years and Vermont as
director of this program for homeless kids. Nobody knows about this.
Even my son, my son who was seven when I
(37:39):
went through this, he's thirty five. He's a psychiatric nurse.
He doesn't know I went through this. My new son,
who's nineteen now, he doesn't know about any of this.
So this has been the thing that I've kept locked
in a box since nineteen The story of his depression
is not when he shares. Mark does begin to tell stories.
(38:03):
In fact, he begins to tell stories publicly. He leaves
a two minute pitch on the Moths Storytelling Number. Next
thing he knows, he's on stage in Burlington, in Montreal,
in Boston telling stories. But for the most part, these
are other stories. They are not stories about. Soon after
(38:25):
these performances, he decides to chronicle his life in writing too.
He decides to write a memoir. He's writing it chronologically,
and eventually, inevitably, he gets to the nineteen nineties. When
I got to the nineteen nineties, I was like, Okay,
do I put this in the book? Okay? Do I
(38:46):
put this whole episode of depression and what I went
through and going on that? Do I put that in
the book, because so many people have no idea about this,
my relatives, you know. And I decided I was gonna
put it in. I was just sided. I'm not like
Frederick Douglas, who wrote three memoirs. I'm going to write
one memoir. I get one bite at this apple, and
(39:07):
I'm going to write that story, and I'm gonna put
that in. So that was a key decision. And I
remember I gave an early draft of the book to
my wife, my present wife, and I said, what did
you think about that chapter about depression? And she said
one word harrowing, And I think that's a good adjective
(39:30):
to use for that chapter. Sometimes the very act of
writing gives you permission to tell the whole story. That's
what happened here. Mark's secret about his depression was like
a pilot blight within him, always there, always burning. And
when he eventually does tell his whole story, including the
(39:53):
most shameful parts, he realizes so many people are also
struggling with aim, with depression, with resistance to getting help,
resistance to even giving it a name. Mark realizes that
the divulging of his secret is not only helpful to him,
but it can also help liberate others, which is ultimately
(40:16):
the most meaningful thing of all. The truth helps make
us whole. There was a piece of me that wanted
to get this out. I decided pretty early if I'm
writing a memoir, this was a key, key piece of
my life. Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio.
(40:51):
Molly's Acre is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is
the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your
story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
one eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And
(41:14):
if you'd like to know more about the story that
inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more
(41:43):
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. I
grew up in Long Island, in Suburbia. My dad went
to college at night on the g I bill. My
mom was a housewife. They had five kids in eight years,
(00:21):
you know, and I was the oldest. And we all
went to Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school, Catholic college.
We're very involved in our parish, very involved in our church.
I played Little league baseball and I played football in college.
My dad worked in commercial real estate in Manhattan, and
(00:41):
uh for a guy you know who went to night
school and got its bachelor's degree when I was like four.
He did quite well, but I was anxious as a kid.
I know what it's called now because of the field
I work, and it's called trick at tillmania, where you
pull your hair out. I can remember doing that when
I was like four or five, and then I did
(01:02):
some grunting noise with my throat that my parents sent
me to see a doctor who said stop doing that.
And then I did something with my jaw. So there
was a lot of anxiety. Or I would be in
second grade and have to urinate like twenty times a day.
I remember the teacher yelling at me. I'm not sure
(01:23):
where the anxiety came from. That's Mark Redmond, executive director
of Spectrum Youth and Family Services, storyteller and author of
the memoir called Mark's is a story about the stigma
and shame surrounding depression and a temptation to keep silent
(01:43):
about it, and the courage and liberation that comes from
telling it. Like it is about something that affects so
many of us. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(02:06):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
I suffered from what we now call impostor syndrome. So
I would do really well in school. I mean, I
was a good student from my first grade on, but
(02:28):
I can remember, you know, fifth grade would end and
I'd be like at the top of the class, and
then all that summer, I think is sixth grade the
year when they finally find out I'm really not that smart,
you know. And of course I do really well in
sixth grade, and then the next year I'd be like
is the next year where they were? You know? So
we call that imposter syndrome now, so I definitely had
(02:50):
that going on as well, but I pretty much had
anxiety baked into my personality. I think early on, how
did your parents handle it? The various ticks, and you know,
this was not at a time where there was so
much psychological awareness of the way that kids would, you know,
go through various things. There wasn't nearly as much infrastructure
(03:13):
of help available for that. There was definitely not. I
mean they probably did what most parents then did. They
would say, hey, stop doing that, stop pulling your hair out.
You know. Tell me a little bit about your mom.
My mom grew up in Brooklyn. Her mom died when
she was three years old. Her mom died of a
heart attack. Her own dad then died I think when
(03:36):
he was like fifty five. My dad's died when he
was eight. There was a lot of early death in
our family. I think there was a lot of early
death in that generation. My mom had cousins who fought
in World War Two who never came back. I think
the Great Depression made a big impression on both of
(03:57):
my parents. I know that really scarred my dad. You know,
just that after his dad died, they really weren't the
security benefits you have now for families. I remember him
taking me to like a Brooks Brothers store and making
me trying all these suits, which I hated and I
hate now. And uh. I turned to my mom and
(04:17):
I said, why does Daddy make me put on all
these outfits? And she said, because when he was your age,
he got all of his close second hand from the church.
So he wants you to have what he couldn't have then.
So they knew what it was like to want, you know,
and I think they would determine to give us, including
(04:39):
a college education. It's one of my dad's proudest things
to this day that he sent all five of his
kids to private colleges without one dime of debt. When
it comes time for Mark to go to college, he's
still struggling with the same impostor syndrome he's experienced since
grade school. He applies to a bunch of Ivy League
(05:00):
universities but doesn't get in, so he decides to go
to Villanova, a good school and familiar to him because
his cousin goes there. But as he enters college, Mark
is uncertain about his path. I remember the end of
my senior high school you had to fill out some
form and you had to pick a major. You couldn't
go in undeclared back then. So there were four boxes.
(05:22):
One was nursing, one was Arts and Sciences, one was engineering,
and one was business. So I turned to my dad
and said, Hey, which box should I check? So he said, well,
what do you want to do with your life? And
I said, I don't know. I'm seventeen. I don't have
a clue. He said, well, put down business because that's
what he was. It made sense. He was a businessman
(05:43):
and had provided him of the very good life. So
I said, okay, I'll be a business major. So that's
what I did, and I went through four years. I
didn't really enjoy it. I didn't like it, I wasn't
interested in it, but I was good at it. I
never really questions until my senior year of high school
(06:05):
what I was gonna do. I really felt like I'm
destined to, you know, probably work on Wall Street. But
I read a cover story this Philadelphia native, a young
guy who had been working in Guatemala after a terrible
earthquake there, and he was now walking from Guatemala to
(06:25):
his home city of Philadelphia to raise money to go
back and help the people in Guatemala. And I read
that and thought, wow, that's like amazing. So a couple
of weeks later, I played in the rugby team in
Villanova and our big rival was Georgetown, and we're down
there in d C. We would all need in the
in front of the statue of Georgetown. And I'm sitting
(06:47):
there waiting for my teammates and I see this band
there and it's got all these balloons and it's all
these little kids and it's like a fun run or
a fun walk. And then I see this young guy
in his twenties. He's tan, and for some reason he
comes over and he starts talking to us and he
asks us who we are. We say, we're going over rugby,
(07:10):
and he goes, oh, I went to Georgetown. I played rugby,
And all of a sudden, I'm like, oh my gosh,
this is the guy. This is the guy I read
about a couple of months ago. I guess he's made
it to d C. So anyway, a couple of weeks later,
I always went to church on Sunday. Of Villanova. The
most popular mass was the six pm Mass, and the
(07:31):
priest gets to give the Homily and says, the guest
Homilist today is a young man named Edward Fisher who
has walked from Guatemala all the way here to Philadelphia.
I'm like, oh my god, this is the same guy.
So he gets up there and he shows slides of
the devastation in Guatemala and what he's doing and how
(07:52):
they're trying to rebuild, and he talks about his walk
and how he says, I look out at you kids,
and I see myself a couple of years ago when
I was in college at Georgetown, and you know, I
had money, and I had a car, and I had
a career, and now I have nothing, and I'm as
happy as I could be, and I can't wait to
(08:13):
go back to Guatemala and help the people there. Well,
at the end of that mass, I just stood there.
I was like the last person staying there in the
in the chapel, and I was just so moved by
what he said. You know, in fact, I felt like
screaming out to all the other students, where are you
all going? How can you all just now go and
(08:36):
leave and study and you know, whatever you're studying after
what we just heard. Funny, I go back to Villanova
every five years to my reunion. I know exactly where
I was sated in that chapel that day, and I
go back and I look there and I think that's
where all this started. That was the first inkling I
ever had that maybe I wasn't going to end up
(08:57):
on Wall Street, maybe my career wasn't going to be
in business. Emboldened by his encounter with Edward Fisher, after
Mark graduates, he immediately joins the Peace Corps and he
sent to Guatemala coincidence. Mark wants so badly to help
to adapt to the landscape, not to feel like an impostor,
(09:20):
but he struggles. I think I wasn't really realistic, and
it just like hit me when I got down there.
I just suddenly felt like what am I doing here?
And they were like, you know, you'll start the first
three months here with the other forty volunteers, but then
we're all going to send you to different parts of
(09:40):
the country alone, and you know, maybe you'll see another
volunteer once every few months, because you know, the roads
are really bad and they wash out and it's no transportation.
I thought this was for me, This is not for me,
and I was not the first one to go. There
are a bunch of people who never made it to Guatemala.
We had to go to Miami for an orientation first,
(10:02):
and about four four people jumped out of that, and
then I think out of the forty two of us,
a good fourteen or fifteen would eventually leave. But I
was one of the first ones. I was literally home
in ten days, and I was embarrassed as heck. You know,
I had told everybody, Oh, I'm going down to Guatemal.
I turned down all these corporate jobs on Wall Street.
(10:23):
You know, I'm doing this great thing. And I was
just humiliated. I just wanted to tide in my basement
for two years and then crawl out and say, hey,
I'm back. Of course, Mark cannot stay hiding forever. He
needs to buckle down and get a job. Still disappointed
(10:43):
in himself for leaving the Peace Corps, he explores other opportunities,
other paths. Altogether, he ends up with a great job,
a management training program at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. It's
nineteen seventy nine and Mark heads into this new career.
He's finally putting those Brooks Brothers suits to us. Their
(11:04):
office was in one Madison Square, and I showed up
and I met the other nine, you know, trainees. Most
of them had graduated from IVY League schools, some of
them had their m b A. I was one of
the few with just a bachelor's degree from a non
IVY It was supposed to be a three year training
program and we were gonna do different rotations throughout the company.
(11:26):
You know, I t sales marketing, and then we were
going to be the future leaders of Metropolitan Life, and
a lot of ended up that way. First year, they
put me in an office on Long Island, so I
lived in my parents basement. And then the next year
they moved me into the city. So I got a
wonderful studio apartment on sixty two Street between Park Avenue
(11:50):
and Lexington Avenue, and I would walk down Park Avenue
every morning to my job at one Madison Avenue. At first,
I was elated. This is Gray, My life's back on track.
You know. I had my college girlfriend in Philadelphia. Well,
a lot of my Villanova friends were living in the city.
We'd all go to the same bars, and we were
(12:11):
always poor in college. You know, we have money in
our pocket. We do go to restaurants I thought, this
is it, but I hated the work. I hated the work.
It didn't take me long to realize crunching numbers, learning
about insurance policy. It just not that it was wrong
or it just wasn't me. I knew I was just
(12:34):
playing this role. It wasn't me, you know. So what
was the turning point? I had a friend she started
at ABC News after college and left. They had to
start working at Covenant House, which was a shelter for
homeless teenagers in Times Square, which is still there. She said,
we need volunteers to come here at night. And then
(12:55):
I went back to villan Nova to visit a friend
and she said, Hey, there's an event on campus. It's
about this. It's this volunteer fair. I want why don't
you come with me? And I was like, yeah, okay.
And it was different nonprofit organizations and somebody from Covenant
House was there and they showed this film about the
work that we're doing with homeless teams. So I went
(13:18):
up to this elderly woman, she looked like a suburban grandmother,
and I said, you know, I'm interested in volunteering. I'm
living in New York City. I just moved in there
and I don't know, maybe I can help out one
night a week. So she we exchanged phone numbers and
I went to visit her, and I'll never forget. She said,
(13:39):
you know, we'd love to have you volunteer here. You know,
whatever night a week you want to come. But you
know there's a group of us who are full time volunteers.
It's a one year program where you live here in
Times Square and we give you twelve dollars a week
and you work full time. But the kids, I think
you should consider that. In fact, you have to come
(13:59):
on an orientation and I've got an opening in May.
I'll put you down for it. I thought, let the
nice little lady put your name down for the week
in May. It's so easy to get out of this,
just one phone call. Just humor her. So that's what
I did. I said, okay, yeah, yeah, put me down.
And then I started going Every Tuesday night. I would
(14:21):
instead of taking the Lexington Avenue line, I would take
the R train and I'd get off the Times Square
and Rolling Stone Magazine Cold. Times Square the sleaziest block
in America. And it was, as my brother said recently, yeah,
back then you ran through Times square, So I would
kind of scurry over to Covenant House. Uh, and then
(14:45):
I would have a gym bag and I would change
into like sneakers and jeans and a T shirt and
I would play basketball. I would hand out snacks, that
kind of thing. And I would say doing that week
after week after week, like I can't read, I can't
remember one moment. It's just kind of doing to me,
like this is what I should be doing. I remember
(15:08):
going to some meeting at met Life, me and the
other nine trainees, and we met with some senior vice president.
He said, you know, we're now at eighty billion in assets.
It's the beginning of the decade, and our goal by
the end of the decade is to get to billion
in assets. And that's the goal. That's what you all
have to work towards. And I remember sitting there thinking,
(15:31):
that is not my goal. It's fine if that's somebody
else's goal. That is not what I wanted to dedicate
my life to to get in a hundred and twenty
billion in assets. I would rather be dedicating myself to
the kids a Covenant House and helping homeless kids get
off the street and find a better way to live.
That's my goal. We'll be right back. In pursuit of
(16:11):
his new goal, Mark switches gears, he leaves MetLife and
goes to work full time for Covenant House. He's there
for two and a half years, during which he's elected
to be the leader of all the full time volunteers.
He gets to travel too, back to Guatemala in fact,
as Covenant House is expanding, opening up divisions globally. Also
(16:32):
during his time at Covenant House, he falls in love
with another volunteer. They get married. He gets his degree
at n y U and ends up at another nonprofit
organization to help homeless kids called Epiphany. Epiphany, however, is
a difficult place with a difficult history. There's corruption, theft,
Some staff members are even selling drugs to the kids.
(16:54):
Sometimes there's physical harm and danger. Eventually, though, Mark helps
the organization to repair and creates a model program for
homeless youth. He's following his credo, best illustrated by a
quote from the psychologist Abraham Maslow. A musician must make music,
an artist must paint, a poet must write. If he
(17:16):
is to be ultimately at peace with himself, what a
man can be, he must be. I ended up leaving
there in April, which got me up to St. Christopher's.
I saw an ant in the New York Times and
for a director of residential treatment center for teenagers, and
(17:36):
I applied and I got that job. And where was St.
Christopher's Dobbs Ferry, New York, which is right on the
Hudson It was beautiful, right on the Hudson River, very
close right above Yonker. I mean, it was like a
twenty five minute ride to Grand Central. By this point,
Mark and his wife have a son. At first Mark
commutes to and from Dobbs Ferry, but then St. Christopher's
(18:00):
choires that Mark live on campus. If anything happens in
the middle of the night with these kids, Mark needs
to be right there on site. So they provide a
house for Mark and his family, and they moved to
Dobb's Ferry. Though Mark is advancing in his career, his
marriage is floundering. They're just mismatched. Market seeing a therapist
(18:21):
who helps him realize that he's not happy and won't
be happy unless he and his wife break ties. So
I that we got divorced at some day in July nine.
And I remember I stopped seeing the therapist like three
months earlier, April or May, and the last time I
saw him, I said, thank you. You've been great to
me of helping with his decision. You know, I'm going
(18:42):
to end therapy now. And he said, you know a
lot of men when the actual divorce goes through, they
have an emotional reaction. And I said, well, that's not
gonna happen with me. You know. I said, I am
absolutely certain of this decision. And I said, besides, even
if I did, what would you recommend And he said, well,
I'd recommend you go on medication. We shook heads, said goodbye,
(19:03):
and it's the day of the divorce. You know, my
wife and I we found we kicked the lawyers out
of the room because lawyers always want you to get
more and I was finally like, what do you need?
This is what I need. Great, we agreed on and
we signed the papers. So I left the office in
Manhattan where the lawyers were, and I stopped. I remember
I stopped at some store. I bought a book and
(19:23):
I bought one of those pre wrapped like egg salad
sandwiches because I hadn't had lunch, and I thought, I'll
leave this on the ride train ride up to Westchester,
and I took like two bites and my all of
a sudden, my stomach felt queasy, and I thought, ah,
that stomach ache again. And I had been having these
stomach issues for the last couple of years. They would
(19:45):
come and go. I went and saw a doctor once
and he said, there's nothing wrong with you. So I
that that's weird. I feel nauseous. Went home. We had
shared custody. Our sun was seven, so I got him
from school, brought him home, made him dinner, and I
went to bed and I couldn't sleep. I went through
the whole night tossing it. Could not sleep. So I
got up in the morning and I'm dragging, and I
(20:08):
go down and I took my son to the bus
stop and I couldn't eat. The next day, I was
not hungry. I had no appetite at all for breakfast.
Dragged myself through the day and I figured, well, surely
still not hungry. I said, well, surely I'll go to
sleep tonight. Right, I've been up for like I don't
know how many our straight couldn't sleep again. So then
(20:30):
the next morning, still can't eat. And now it's starting
to occur to me like this is not a stomach thing.
This is not a stomach bug. This could be anxiety.
So I called my old therapist stuff and I said, um,
remember you said that to me a few months ago,
that like, you know, some men have like an all shrewlry.
I said, someth's going on with me? Can I come
(20:52):
and see you? So he was like, yeah, sure, come
and see me tomorrow at what three o'clock? I don't
sleep another now I go want to see him the
next day. And as soon as I walk in, he says,
you look like hell. And I said, yeah, I haven't
slept in like days and I haven't eaten anything either.
So he said, well, you're depressed. I said, no, no,
(21:13):
I'm not depressed. I'm happy. You know, I'm out of
this marriage. I have this new girlfriend I really like,
and you know, I have shared custody with my son
and a job I really loved, so I'm happy. He said, no,
you're depressed. He said insomnia and lack of appetite or
like the two principal symptoms of depression. So he said,
(21:33):
I think he couldn't prescribe medication. He said, I think
you should go see the psychiatrist who I work with
he could prescribe medication, but Mark is apprehensive about medication.
He's never taken anything for depression. And further, he doesn't
believe he's depressed. Something else must be going on, he thinks,
(21:54):
But he takes down the psychiatrist's name anyway, just in case.
That night, I remember going for long walk. It's so
funny how the human mind works. I'm going for long walk,
and for some reason, I remembered that. In high school
I read a book by Elizabeth coobla Ross called On
Death and Dying, and I remember there were five stages
(22:16):
on death and dying, and I remembered there was anger, denial, bargaining,
and the last one was acceptance. But there was a
fourth one. There was one. I couldn't remember what the
fourth step was, and I knew it had the same
first letter as one of those others. So there was
either an, A, A D or D. Okay, and I'm
(22:39):
walking what is it? What is there reason? I walked
in the house and all of a sudden it popped
in my mind. The fourth step is depression. And it
was like my mind's way of telling me, no, that's
what this is. You are depressed. So another night and
not sleep, and I go the psychiatrist and I was lucky,
today would take you months to see one. I think.
(23:00):
I went in that afternoon to see him. So I
described what I'm going through, and he said, I'm gonna
prescribe three medications for you. Prozac, something calledbu spar for anxiety,
and then something called restaurant to sleep. So I was
like three medications. He was like, don't worry. I know
what I'm doing. Other people who have been on this,
(23:21):
you know. So I remember he went to hand me
the script and before he handed it to me, he
pulled it back and he said, this is not the cure.
The cure is in that therapist office. This is just
to get you functioning again. So I go into the
pharmacy and I give the scripts to the pharmacist and
(23:42):
the guy says, uh, okay, yeah, we close soon, so
these come back tomorrow. And I almost like reached across
the counter and I said to the guy, no, no, no,
you don't understand. I need that medication now. And here
I was the guy who liked twenty four hours ago,
was never gonna go on medication. So anyway, he was
like okay, So he gave me the bills. But antidepressants,
(24:08):
in these other medications, it's not magical. You know, they
don't kick in right away. It takes time, and then
you gotta find out if you're on the right one
and if you're on the right dosage. So really that
began like three or four months of a deep, deep depression,
and my weight at my heaviest I was six pounds
(24:32):
within a couple of months. I remember getting on the
scale and it said one, and I remember thinking, holy
sh it, like I have got to figure out a
way to get food into me, you know. And I
can remember holding a banana up and looking at it
and thinking, if I try really, really hard, I can
eat this banana. And then I went and bought some
(24:55):
powder at a health food store that if you mixed
it with milk, would put on wait. I was desperate
to try and get food into my body, but my
anxiety was like sky high. And you're also having panic attacks.
During this time. I would have panic attacks that felt
like a heart attack. I would have night sweats. I
(25:16):
would wake up at the morning and you could wring
my shirt out. I was a wreck. I was, I could,
but it wasn't even day by day. It was hour
by hour. Mark's therapist advises him to keep going to work,
that work is good for him, even if he has
sleepless night. After sleepless night, the work will keep him afloat.
(25:39):
And of course the irony is not lost on Mark
that he works with others who are suffering from similar
afflictions depression, anxiety, and though he might feel solace in
this common ground, he tries to hide his depression. At first,
tries to keep it a secret, but since he's so
physically altered, since he's lost so much weight, the secret
(25:59):
is to contain. Thankfully, my boss, the executive director, was
a trained clinician, mental health clinician. I confided in him.
I found out there was one staff member working there.
I was close to a year later, when I was better,
he said to me, Redmond, everybody in this place thought
you were a crack addict, because crack was the drug
(26:20):
of choice. Then taken down and he goes and people
lose weight super fast. It's because of crack. So that
was what the entire staff here thought, that you were
on crack. Can you imagine? I said, I wasn't. I
was depressed. It was depression. But I had a psychologist
on staff. I had to confide. She could see how
miserable I looked, you know, I confided in her. But
(26:43):
I tried as best as I could just get into
work and try to do my job. But it was
it was as hard as hell because even on medication,
I would still only get three or four hours of sleep.
It's hard to concentrate. I would have a conversation with somebody.
I remember talking to my brother on the phone and
he said, you know, you just told me the same
(27:04):
thing three times in a ten minute period. So it
was just trying to get because I was like, if
I lose this job, I lose my house, I might
lose shared custody of my son. You know this this
is I could lose everything. So it was just struggling.
I was going to therapy twice a week. I was.
(27:28):
I had read that exercise is key in terms of
overcoming depressions. So I would get on this bicycle and
bike for as tired as I was, I would make
myself ride this bike for like an hour or two
every night. The thing that would help more than anything
else was somebody would come up to me and whisper
(27:50):
to me. I got divorced two years ago, and this
happened to me, and I would look at them and
they would look good, and I remember thinking, like that
person looks okay, and like, maybe I'll be okay again too, someday.
So I was just hanging on the hope that the
therapy and the medication I began meditating every day, the bicycling,
(28:13):
that it would somehow pay off. We'll be back in
a moment with more family secrets. Mark's depression, he realizes,
(28:46):
is a culmination of myriad troubles, subconscious troubles that his
body has been storing trying to signal to him for
quite some time. Those lifelong stomachaches have been trying to
tell him something, the trick of tellomania too. And then
there was a dangerous and instability he'd been repeatedly exposed
to at his places of work. And there was the
(29:07):
unhappiness at the core of his marriage, largely unspoken about
until it could no longer be subdued. And while the
divorce was necessary, mutually decided upon between he and his
ex wife, it broke something open and Mark. It catalyzed
his depression, but ultimately his healing too. The divorce was
(29:27):
the absolute trigger. Even though we were a mismatch. I
really love this person, and you get so angry in
the divorce you forget you once did love. And you
know I'm Catholic. Nobody in my family ever got divorced.
You know, maybe one cousin, Like if somebody had told
me the day I'm getting married, hey, you're gonna that
was the furthest thing that was never gonna happen. We
(29:49):
weren't good for each other, but I loved there, but
we just weren't good for each other. And I don't
think either of us was happy, but I was really
in a way, I was broken hearted. In addition to
the heartbreak of the divorce, Mark also struggles with shame.
He feels as a Catholic, he shouldn't be divorced, he
(30:11):
shouldn't be depressed, he shouldn't be on medication, and as
we know, shame begets secrecy and secrecy begets shame. My
therapist he was like, listen, Redmond, you are marinated and
guilt and you know I grew up in like this
pre Vatican to Catholic church where like you were born bad,
(30:31):
you were born with original sin and God's mad at you.
And you know that was the kind of and I
bought at hook Lion sinker. You know it's I was
an aldo boy. I bored into that whole thing, and
that was in there too. I mean that all had
to through therapy, that all had to be washed out,
brought out in the wash. I'm weak. I shouldn't be,
(30:53):
especially as a man, right. I was ashamed of it.
I was shamed to be a med's I was ashamed.
I was going through this. What's wrong with me? I
should do it? And I kept what's I kept trying
to figure The more I tried to figure it out,
the more I tried to make it go away, the
more it's stuck. It's stuck like glow. And it was funny.
My I had a spiritual director, was a nun. She
(31:13):
gave me a Zen book about the pressurement by Zen Teacher,
and one of the lines in the book was that
which we accept is healed. And the more I accepted
I'm depressed, and that's just the way it is, it
would almost magically lift for a time. The book is
(31:33):
called aptly the Depression Book, and the author is Sherry Huber.
At first, Mark doesn't read it, he doesn't even open it.
It seems too whimsical to him, a silly book of
aphorisms with little drawings of people meditating. But when he
finally does open it, he realizes he's been wrong, very wrong.
This book is not silly, in fact, is life saving.
(31:59):
So what was it that was so healing about the
depression book? That whole idea of acceptance was huge to me?
She has a drawing there like hills. We want to
go from one hill to the next, you know. So
this divorce ended, now I have this new girlfriend, and wow,
she's great and I can just go to that. Everything's
great now. And her thing is like, no, in life,
(32:22):
we need to go through these hills and then these downslides,
to these valleys whatever you want to call them. And
she had this whole thing about like any time we're
saying I shouldn't feel this, I shouldn't be doing this,
any of those should that's poison. That's self hatred. That's
where you're hating yourself. And I realized, like, I shouldn't
(32:44):
be feeling this way, I shouldn't be going through this.
What's wrong with me? And that was all self hatred
and all that had to come out to all the
pressure I had always put on myself from childhood, but
the imposter syndrome. I quit the Peace Corps. There's something
wrong with the all the times, all the pressure I
had always put up myself. It was so good. I
(33:04):
went through the depression, as horrible as it was, because
like all that came out through therapy and it changed
me as a person. I remember reading a book because
I started studying up on all that. I read start Williams.
Styron's book on depression and they call like sort too.
Was like you think you start to feel better and
you're like, great, it's over, and then bam, your back
(33:25):
down again, and they're like what. And it's funny. I
remember some woman came to me to work, she was leaving,
and she said, you look like it again. I was like,
I know, and last week I felt so good. I
don't get it. I feel terrible again. And I remember
she grabbed me by the lapels and she yelled at
me and she said, my father died in his fifties
and my mother was heartbroken and she went through this
(33:49):
and she was in the depression, and you just have
to go through it. And I remember it. I was like,
She's right. It was about acceptance and learn learning and
learning about myself. It's not a linear path. Maybe it
is for some people, but most of the literature will
tell you it's a zig zag pattern. In fact, the
guy who'd been through it at work, he said, mand
(34:11):
this too, divorced and you feel shitty, then you feel good,
then you feel shitty. I said, what finally happens? He
goes one day, you feel good, and you just keep
feeling good, and you're out of it. And I said,
how did you feel then? And he said, you feel
like the luckiest man on the face of the planet,
which is true. It's really true. Though Mark's mental health
(34:39):
has improved, things after all, are not linear. His work
is intense and challenging. One winter night at St. Christopher's,
some girls break loose in the freezing cold, and he
goes to find them. He's worried for their lives. He
ends up pushing his way through a chain link fence
to get to them, and though he doesn't realize it
in the moment, he's cut. His face is really badly.
(35:01):
He's gushing blood and ends up needing plastic surgery. So St.
Christopher's it was seventy two kids. Many of them had
been abused, neglected. Some of them were former drug dealers,
former gang members, They have been in prison, they were
in fifteen or sixteen, and almost every girl there, it's said,
had been sexually abused at some point, you know. So
(35:23):
there was tremendous trauma among these kids. And I had
to live on the grounds. I live right there. That
was the idea, and I think for four years I
was fine, and I was very proud. It just warmed
me down to the point where that was finally having
my nose almost sliced off my face was the final
Like that was like the final straw, like I can't
(35:47):
do this anymore. I just can't do this. I can't.
You know. I love working with these kids. I going
through the depression made me much more compassionate towards them
because I finally learned what it felt like to feel
like crap, and they feel like crap most of the
time their whole life. Mark wants to continue working with kids,
(36:12):
but he knows he needs to be in another environment.
He resigns and starts the first charter school for low
income children in a new town in a new state,
and in starting a new he can keep the truth
of his depression under wraps. No one will know him
or what he's been through. He takes this opportunity to
keep quiet, start fresh, as if all that had never happened.
(36:37):
Nobody needed to know that I went through this, you know,
when I started working in Connecticut, all the new coworkers
there and friends. Eventually I started dating somebody a couple
of years later, and we got serious, and I told
her because I could tell we were heading towards engagement,
and I said, I need to tell you this. I
(36:57):
went through this whole episode. So we ended up getting married.
She accepted that. But then when I moved to Vermont,
when they interviewed me for the job here in Vermont,
which was five years after Connecticut, I remember the final interview,
the board said to me, so, is there anything about
you we should know? And another board member said, yeah,
do you have any secrets you're not telling us? And
I remember thinking, Yeah, I got a secret I'm not
(37:19):
telling you, and I'm not telling you. I'm thinking because
I really want to get this job, so all the
people I know appear, all the dozens and hundreds of people.
Now I've been working in nineteen years and Vermont as
director of this program for homeless kids. Nobody knows about this.
Even my son, my son who was seven when I
(37:39):
went through this, he's thirty five. He's a psychiatric nurse.
He doesn't know I went through this. My new son,
who's nineteen now, he doesn't know about any of this.
So this has been the thing that I've kept locked
in a box since nineteen The story of his depression
is not when he shares. Mark does begin to tell stories.
(38:03):
In fact, he begins to tell stories publicly. He leaves
a two minute pitch on the Moths Storytelling Number. Next
thing he knows, he's on stage in Burlington, in Montreal,
in Boston telling stories. But for the most part, these
are other stories. They are not stories about. Soon after
(38:25):
these performances, he decides to chronicle his life in writing too.
He decides to write a memoir. He's writing it chronologically,
and eventually, inevitably, he gets to the nineteen nineties. When
I got to the nineteen nineties, I was like, Okay,
do I put this in the book? Okay? Do I
(38:46):
put this whole episode of depression and what I went
through and going on that? Do I put that in
the book, because so many people have no idea about this,
my relatives, you know. And I decided I was gonna
put it in. I was just sided. I'm not like
Frederick Douglas, who wrote three memoirs. I'm going to write
one memoir. I get one bite at this apple, and
(39:07):
I'm going to write that story, and I'm gonna put
that in. So that was a key decision. And I
remember I gave an early draft of the book to
my wife, my present wife, and I said, what did
you think about that chapter about depression? And she said
one word harrowing, And I think that's a good adjective
(39:30):
to use for that chapter. Sometimes the very act of
writing gives you permission to tell the whole story. That's
what happened here. Mark's secret about his depression was like
a pilot blight within him, always there, always burning. And
when he eventually does tell his whole story, including the
(39:53):
most shameful parts, he realizes so many people are also
struggling with aim, with depression, with resistance to getting help,
resistance to even giving it a name. Mark realizes that
the divulging of his secret is not only helpful to him,
but it can also help liberate others, which is ultimately
(40:16):
the most meaningful thing of all. The truth helps make
us whole. There was a piece of me that wanted
to get this out. I decided pretty early if I'm
writing a memoir, this was a key, key piece of
my life. Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio.
(40:51):
Molly's Acre is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is
the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your
story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
one eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And
(41:14):
if you'd like to know more about the story that
inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more
(41:43):
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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