Resilience

by Jessie Close

  But I hesitated when it was my turn.

  Ron stopped filming and told me to relax. We tried it again. Glenn nailed her line, and I got the first few words of mine out before going blank.

  I felt like an idiot. No, more than that: I was an idiot! I had literally hundreds of people watching me, all knowing that I was an idiot. But Ron just smiled and assured me that actors forget their lines all the time. He was wearing a baseball cap and blue jeans, and that helped. He wasn’t at all pretentious.

  We tried another take and then another, but with each one I kept getting more and more frustrated. When I did remember my line, I either wasn’t smiling or I looked terrified.

  Taking out a marker, Ron wrote my lines on a piece of cardboard that he taped directly under the camera. Now all I had to do was read while walking forward.

  Ron started filming as Glennie and I began. I heard Glenn say, “One in six Americans has a mental illness.” Looking at the sheet on the camera, I said, “And we face the stigma that can be just as painful as the disease itself.”

  I’d done it! I felt great!

  Ron asked me to do another take. He suggested I take a big breath and slow down when I spoke.

  I was confident now. We did it again. This time he suggested I accentuate the words “and can be just as painful” for emphasis.

  We did it again, and this time Ron was happy.

  For me, the difficult part was over. Now I got to see my kids. Ron shot footage of Calen standing between Mattie and Annie with his arms around them while passengers slipped past in the lobby. Calen’s shirt had the word SCHIZOPHRENIA marked on it. He’d actually been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, but we didn’t think the public would care about such a subtle distinction in a very short scene. Naturally, Mattie’s said SISTER and Annie’s said COUSIN.

  The PSA ended with Glenn putting her arm around my shoulder while giving me a loving look and saying, “Change a mind about mental illness and you can change a life.”

  In the final seconds of the PSA, the white T-shirts in the film changed colors so that each of us became just another face in the crowd. The message was clear to me: we are all people, those who have mental illnesses and those who do not. We are your mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, children, grandparents, neighborhoods. We are you.

  On launch day, the major networks began airing the PSA, and Glennie and I did a media blitz. We appeared on Good Morning America, The View, and MSNBC’s Dr. Nancy. Of course, Glennie was incredibly at ease during these interviews while I was nervous. This was all new to me. It was a long and exhausting day, but when it ended I felt incredibly grateful. Glennie had kept her promise to me. I’d told her that I would never expect another birthday or Christmas present if she did something to fight the stigma of mental illness. But she does still give me presents.

  There was only one thing that bothered me when I watched the PSA. I was disappointed when I saw myself.

  The only mirror I had inside my Mouse House was mounted at eye level and showed nothing below my face. I hadn’t realized how much weight my medication had caused me to gain. I looked huge, especially compared to Glennie.

  I’m not a vain person, but we all like to look our best, and historically I’d always been the knockout Close girl, the California beach-blond beauty. Of the three Close sisters, I had been the one who once had gotten an offer to pose nude for Penthouse magazine. But I was no longer the svelte vixen who had been able to seduce men with a smile. I decided I would begin exercising and eating more healthful foods. I was also determined to stop smoking.

  When we returned home I thought about my weight and my mental health, and I realized that my appearance was a reflection of a conscious choice I was making. I was choosing clarity of mind over vanity. I was choosing to be chubby and mentally well rather than skinny and sick.

  I put a photograph of my old self by my mirror. Yes, I had been thin when that snapshot had been taken. But I also had hollow eyes that seemed to scream in pain. The photo reminded me that there are more important things in life than your appearance, especially when your sanity is at risk.

  Because Glennie had spent years dealing with the paparazzi and media, she had been worried about what might happen once I “outed” myself. There would be no turning back, and she had been correct. My phone had started ringing almost immediately after launch day. I heard from my girlfriends, who all complimented me. I also got a call from a director of a mental health group who asked if Calen and I would give a speech at a convention in Nevada. A few days later, another mental health group in Canada invited us to speak. Glennie and I began getting invitations, too, including one in Washington, DC, on Capitol Hill.

  Pamela Harrington, our BC2M executive director, asked me if I would write a weekly blog for the Bring Change 2 Mind website.

  I decided to be gut-wrenchingly honest when I spoke and when I wrote. I was going to slit open a vein—literarily speaking. I wanted to be frank about myself, my problems, and my recovery, because honesty would be the only way I could help others.

  Sitting at my computer, I began writing about my descent into madness and found myself typing these words:

  Before I was properly diagnosed in 2004 and given the right medications, I left a flattened path of houses, cars, and husbands in my wake. I honestly don’t know how many cars I’ve traded in. Once I learned about balloon payments I was all over it. Houses were more trouble to get ready, and inevitably, once they were cleaned up and ready for the marketplace, my mood would change and I’d want to stay. Unfortunately, the real-estate agents wouldn’t see it that way. I moved Mattie and myself twelve times in eight years. Now I watch House Hunters on television.

  But husbands were the most trouble. I went through five. (It’s easier to keep count of husbands!) Three of them told me, “I just can’t take this anymore,” and two died many years after we divorced—James, a Vietnam vet, by suicide and Brad, a major druggie, by heart attack. So now that I’ve passed the husbands quota (and now that I don’t get manic or drunk anymore) I live with only my dogs. Any correlation you may make is strictly your own!

  There are some avocations you choose in life. There are some that choose you.

  I would use whatever writing and speaking skills I had to fight the stigma of mental illness. Glennie had asked me to “out” myself, and I was determined to do it in as big a way as I could.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  My new sobriety and mental stability came with feelings of guilt and regret.

  Looking back, I could see how bipolar disorder and alcoholism had caused chaos not only in my life but in my children’s and husbands’ lives as well.

  Every morning when Calen and Sander had been young, I had promised myself that I would not scream at them when they were getting ready for school. But as I remember it, I screamed every single morning. Bipolar disorder is not a buzzword for “calm.”

  Because my boys went to boarding schools during their early teenage years, they had been shielded from the worst of my alcoholism. Little Mattie hadn’t. When my boys had returned home during summer and holiday breaks, I’d set no boundaries. I smoked weed and drank with them and their friends. I’d been the cool mom, but in reality I’d been the mom who’d put my children in harm’s way.

  The only stability in their lives had come from their fathers.

  I needed to repair the damage I had done, but I wasn’t certain how. As fate would have it, an opportunity surfaced when I received a call from Gayle Johnson, an official at Sound Mental Health, a mental health services provider in Seattle, Washington. Gayle said her nonprofit group held a gala each year to showcase its treatment programs and raise money. She wanted to focus on the ways families had successfully dealt with mental illness, and she thought having my children and me onstage would draw a crowd.

  Gayle was determined to show that people with mental illness have many faces—not just those you see homeless on the streets. Many of those faces look like me and you and ou
r family members.

  I agreed to speak to my children and ask if they were willing to participate in the gala with me. I assumed Calen would, because we had done speeches together, and I thought Mattie would, because she had appeared in the public service announcement. The only question was Sander—and he agreed to join us in Seattle.

  The gala was being held in a downtown hotel ballroom, where there were seats at dinner tables for several hundred people. I trusted that whatever my children were going to say would be the truth and that I was ready for whatever would unfold—or so I told myself.

  After dessert and several awards to local advocates were distributed, the four of us stepped onto a raised platform, where four chairs were set for us at a long table covered with a blue tablecloth. We took our seats, and I clutched my dog, Snitz, in my arms as a spotlight came on and blinded our eyes.

  I had told Gayle that none of us wanted to give a long speech. Instead, I suggested that since family was the theme of the night, why not let the audience listen in on our family discussion? Each of us would speak for a few minutes, then we would question each other. It was risky because it was unscripted, but that is what we did.

  Calen described his break with reality and what it felt like to be lost in a confusing and terrifying delusional world. At one point, he addressed the audience directly, asking them to be kind and supportive to someone who finds himself or herself in the midst of a mental breakdown. He emphasized that underneath the shell is a person of worth and value.

  Sander spoke next:

  The more sensitive a person is the more susceptible that individual is to mental illness. It seems like a sick joke that our universe plays on us as children that the more it allows a person to see the world’s beauty and deep connectivity, the more difficult it becomes for that person to maintain good mental health. In our culture, we tend to treat those dealing with that trade-off with a fierce double standard. As long as they are sharing with us beautiful insights into humanity, we will love and cherish them as heroes, but if they fall into substance abuse, depression, psychosis, or any other form of mental illness, we tend to say, “It’s not our problem.” Classically, these individuals with mental illness are artists, musicians, writers, etc., but of course, they come in all sorts, unsung or not. These people tend to add value and meaning to our lives. At their best, they are the types who make us laugh and cry, to learn and to take risks and to love. They are brave, and it angers me that as a society, we abandon them when their skies darken.

  I thought I was going to cry.

  Mattie told the audience that she was five years old when she realized for the first time that her mommy was different from other mommies.

  “My mother was standing in the kitchen after dinner, crying and doing dishes. I pulled my little purple stool to the kitchen sink and asked timidly why she was so upset. My mother sighed and said, ‘I’m bipolar, little one.’ That was my first introduction to an illness that would dominate much of my life. I knew something was wrong because of Mom’s behavior, but my mother’s illness was never talked about and in many cases never looked at inside our family.”

  Not everything that was said by my children was easy for me to hear. They told the audience that I “was not a constant” in their lives. I was undependable. I was not a role model. Some days, they would feel loved, and on others they would feel that I was distant and cold. This was difficult for them to understand, and it was hurtful to them as children. At times they had felt abandoned.

  I didn’t like hearing that, but I knew it was true.

  Mattie and Sander spoke about how scary it had been when Calen had gotten sick, and Calen talked about how frightening it had been for him to feel so lost and alone.

  It was deadly silent in the cavernous room while my children were speaking. No one was glancing at a cell phone or fidgeting in a chair.

  Near the end of their comments, my children reached a unanimous conclusion. They said that the reason Calen and I had recovered was because we had gotten excellent care—and they were grateful that our family could afford it, because many can’t—but just as important, we had come together as a family. Despite our faults—especially mine—we had clung together. If I hadn’t been able to provide one of them with comfort when I was at my worst, one of their siblings had. We had walked through hell, but we’d done it together.

  I was the last to speak, and I admitted my failures. I had always felt abandoned by my own father, and in my own way, during my sickest times, I had abandoned my children. “I honestly don’t understand how it is that my three children have turned out so well,” I said. “They are strong and wonderful, and all I can say is that you can still love when you are suffering, no matter what, and love them I do.”

  My voice caught in my throat. Speaking through my tears, I continued, “I love them more than anything in this universe.”

  Perhaps it was fitting that our family had a cathartic moment during such a public forum. Like strangers who bare their souls to each other on a long airplane flight, the four of us used our appearance onstage to discuss what had been so difficult for us to share privately.

  I would be lying if I wrote that all the issues between us melted away that night. Some of the hurts are deep cuts. Those will take time. Perhaps those hurts will never fully heal. I understand, because it took me years to reconcile with my father.

  After the spotlight was turned off and everyone had gone, I went to my room, and for the first time in years I felt good about my relationship with each of my children. Not only was I becoming whole again, so was my family.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  When I heard the news, I laughed.

  Dr. Deborah Levy, the director of McLean Hospital’s Psychology Research Laboratory, called to tell me there was a mouse scampering around in a laboratory that had been designed to replicate genes found inside Calen and me.

  I am not only living in my Mouse House, I have also helped create a Close family mouse!

  The story of how my family got our own genetically engineered mouse begins when Calen first arrived at McLean Hospital in 2002 and agreed to donate blood as part of a research project. During a genetic analysis of his blood years later, doctors discovered that one of his genes had an intriguing mutation. Instead of having two copies of certain genes, which was what most people had, Calen had four copies. More important, one of the genes with four copies was not just any gene. It was one that scientists suspected could play a role in mental disorders.

  Dr. Levy had spent much of her career searching for genetic links that could help explain the origins of schizophrenia. Energetic and brilliant, she is not only a researcher but also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. She called Calen and asked whether he would undergo more tests and whether he would give her his permission to contact other members of the Close family about donating a blood sample for her research. She was especially interested in my blood because I also had been diagnosed with a mental illness.

  Everyone agreed to participate: my children, my siblings, Tom (Calen’s father), and my parents (Dad was still alive at the time). When the genetic results were analyzed, they revealed two things. First, I was definitely the daughter of Bill and Bettine Close, which automatically disqualified me from appearing on one of those awful “guess who’s the father” tabloid television shows.

  Dr. Levy and her research team also discovered that Tom and eight members of the Close family had the correct number of genes, but Calen and I did not. We had the exact same mutation, which meant that I had passed it to him.

  Dr. Levy said this discovery was important because one of the mutated genes is the gene that codes for an enzyme called glycine decarboxylase, or GLDC, which breaks down glycine. Having extra copies of this gene could cause glycine to break down faster than it does in other people’s brains. Without enough glycine, an important brain receptor known as the NMDA receptor won’t function normally. Neuroscientists believe that a malfunctioning NMDA receptor is associated
with psychosis, especially schizophrenia.

  Dr. Levy and her team assured me that our mutated gene could be a “smoking gun” when it comes to figuring out the underlying causes of our mental illnesses. This is because no one really understands the genetic underpinnings of serious mental illnesses. Doctors rely on clinical assessments of the symptoms they observe and have to decide if an individual has schizophrenia, a mood disorder such as bipolar disorder, a smattering of both—as in schizoaffective disorder—or severe depression.

  Finding an intriguing errant gene could be the first step in understanding the biology of mental illness and, many researchers hope, eventually finding a cure.

  Dr. Levy asked whether Calen and I would be willing to undergo additional tests if she could get funding for research from the National Institute of Mental Health. We said yes, and after several years and endless paperwork, Dr. Levy finally got the green light. Ten years after Calen first donated his blood at McLean, we were about to become guinea pigs.

  Mattie and I were the first to go to McLean for a full week of tests, including brain-imaging scans (MRIs)—which I hated because of my claustrophobia—various cognitive tests, brain-wave tests (EEGs), clinical interviews, and movement disorder assessments. Both of us also had a plug of skin removed from our derrieres.

  Dr. Levy sent a sample of our DNA to the laboratory of Dr. James Lupski at the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston to be “sequenced.” The skin cells from our butts were converted into neurons by Dr. Kristen Brennand, a stem cell biologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, who is an expert at developing in vitro models of schizophrenia.

  But of the many scientists working on Dr. Levy’s research project, it was Dr. Uwe Rudolph, the director of the Laboratory of Genetic Neuropharmacology at McLean, who got the best assignment. He genetically engineered a mouse with the same gene mutations that had been found in Calen and me!