He seems markedly better than he was ten days ago and we are confident that he will continue to improve in the coming days—although we are mindful that there are no “quick fixes.” As you know, medication for the treatment of depression takes time to work its way through the system, and his physician is experimenting with what works best for Will. He will continue treatment on an outpatient basis.
All of us—Will, his doctor and family—agree that he needs to resume a normal schedule as quickly as possible. His doctor recommends that he return to school this Friday, get re-oriented, and meet with all of you to determine how best to make up the work he has missed.
Meanwhile, his father, his stepfather and I want to thank you for your expressions of compassion and concern. We look forward to working with you to get Will back on track academically.
Please do not hesitate to contact me, if a need arises.
Sincerely,
Gail Griffith
Throughout the fall and winter, the teachers at Will’s school were flexible and understanding. Bill Wilson, Will’s guidance counselor, confided that he too had battled clinical depression as a young adult. He understood what Will was going through and intervened with Will’s teachers, asking them to permit Will to complete his coursework by whatever means he could muster. Bill Wilson and I continued to correspond long after Will left Gonzaga. A few years after Will’s illness, when I was deep into “researching” the variables in Will’s situation, I asked him to recount what he remembered of Will’s time at Gonzaga. In November 2003, Bill Wilson wrote:
I remember meeting [Will] early in the school year because I make a point to see transfer students within the first week of school. He seemed very happy to be back in the DC area. I do remember talking with Will about Holy Trinity School and the fact that he knew some of our Gonzaga students because they had gone to Trinity together. I think this provided a bit of comfort to him as he moved into a new school in the junior year. I remember Will as soft spoken, intelligent, articulate, and maybe a little shy. I got the sense that he was confident that he would make the academic transition here smoothly and, in fact, he did. He was an honor roll student after his first quarter here and “things” seemed to be going very well.
I have to admit that I was surprised when we met during the fall semester and you and Will told me about his depression and his efforts to get help and how it was affecting his life in and out of school. When you later communicated that Will would go into treatment I understood that he was probably very frustrated and scared but was glad that he was going to get the attention and care he needed with the challenges he faced.
In my experience as a counselor I have had other students who have gone for inpatient treatment and have successfully made the transition back to school. When Will came back to school, we touched base and again I believed that he was feeling surer that he had begun to get a handle on his depression.
In February, following his first hospitalization, Will attempted to pick up where he left off, but with little success. It just wasn’t working. He couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork and he began disengaging altogether from his studies, school activities, and friends. The one passion I thought he would hold on to was basketball.
He had a hand in organizing his friends into a CYO team in the fall. It was a motley bunch of players, whose only real strength was that they loved the game. Will started the season strong and became one of the lead scorers in the first couple of games. But after Christmas break, his game was shaken. He showed up for practice and played the games, but two or three times each half, he excused himself from the sidelines, made his way to the gymnasium boys’ room, and vomited. He returned to the court pallid and trembling. This was really upsetting to him—and to us.
Something to do with the medication, we concluded. When he wasn’t playing basketball he was lethargic and exhausted; on the court he complained of feeling dizzy and nauseous. His basketball game faltered. Will’s coach wondered what had come over him and one time let loose an exasperated “Hey, Will, what do you think you’re doing walking off the court like that?”
“I’m sorry…I’ve got to barf.” Will ran out of the gym, hand over his mouth.
Bob came to town for Presidents’ Day weekend. He wanted to get a reading on Will’s health and state of mind, but Bob returned to California only somewhat reassured. And Monday evening, before Will was to return to school after the long holiday weekend, we were thrown for a loop.
Around eight o’clock, I went upstairs to see how Will was coming along with his school assignments. A short English paper was due on Tuesday; a chemistry test was scheduled for Wednesday. Will was at the computer, but he heard my footsteps and swiveled in his chair to face me.
“So how’s the paper goin’, Woo?”
Will absentmindedly ran his hand back and forth, back and forth, messing up his hair. After a slight hesitation, borne no doubt out of reticence, he smiled up at me and said matter-of-factly, “I’m not going back to school, Mom.”
I froze. “What?!”
“I can’t. I’m not going back.”
I slumped onto the hardwood floor and sat cross-legged with my head in my hands. “You can’t do that, Will.”
“I’m not going back.”
I started to cry.
“It’s okay, Mom. I’ve got a plan. It’s gonna be okay. You’ll see.”
“Come on downstairs. We’ll talk about this with Jack.”
Legally, I couldn’t prevent him from dropping out of school; he was over sixteen. We argued for hours. He was calm, dispassionate even. I sat in the kitchen, stunned, defeated as a dog kicked one too many times. Will unveiled his argument for both of us. I was too weary to focus. Weary of each new shift his life was taking. Each course correction registered seismically and this one was an eight on my Richter scale.
He had a plan: he would work full-time, earn his GED, and look into an apprenticeship with the electrical workers union. He was “at peace” with this decision—there was no talking him out of it—although over the next couple of days Bob, Dr. Salerian, and Will’s therapist, Dr. Ainsworth, weighed in, all arguing against his decision to quit school.
But Will remained adamant and the finality of his decision gradually began to sink in. He was going a different route than any of us envisioned for him. I tried to put a positive spin on it: Will wanted to take charge of his life; maybe the drastic change would rescue him from his depression. My mother reassured me:
“He’s a great kid, Gail. They all get there by different means. Let him work it out.” Maybe. Maybe she was right. But I didn’t think so then; and now I know for certain. Findings in the 2004 President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health suggest that fifty percent of teenagers who drop out of high school are suffering from a psychiatric condition when they leave school. I don’t doubt it. But I was blinded by the living, breathing child in front of me and he certainly didn’t seem like a sick kid anymore, not to me; not to anyone.
February 27, 2001
Mr. Michael S. Pakenham
Headmaster
Gonzaga College High School
Dear Mr. Pakenham:
I am writing to inform you that my son, William XXXX, a junior, will be withdrawing from Gonzaga College High School. He has missed a good portion of this second semester due to illness and recently has found school to be more than he can handle, given his state of health.
We are grateful to Gonzaga for the compassion and guidance shown as we have struggled to come to terms with Will’s depression over the past few months. We would like to thank all of his teachers and staff who have been of invaluable assistance. In particular, I thank Will’s counselor, Bill Wilson, who has proven to be one of the most caring individuals we have met throughout Will’s schooling.
Although we are terribly disappointed that Will’s life has taken this course, we have confidence that in time he will regain his strength and peace of mind.
Sincerely,
Gail Griff
ith
Gonzaga High School counselor Bill Wilson’s reflections, November 2003:
I was saddened by the news that in mid-February Will had withdrawn from Gonzaga. I think it began to really sink in how tenacious Will’s depression really was. It was sometime later that Will visited me after he left Gonzaga and filled me in about his job, his educational plans and about how he was doing. I was delighted that he took time to come by for a visit and was encouraged by the progress he seemed to be making. It came as a real shock when I heard that not too long after his visit he tried to take his own life.
Meanwhile, Megan’s depression steadily worsened. I am convinced that Will’s first hospitalization in mid-January 2001 threw her into a panic, exacerbating her illness. During the week that Will spent at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, the two of them communicated furtively, via the unit’s public pay phone. Were they feeding each other’s pathological torment—or were they too far gone for it to matter?
By eerie coincidence, the two of them accidentally came face-to-face after Megan cut herself so horrifically that she was admitted to the adolescent unit of PIW overnight, while Will was housed just a floor below on the Mood Disorders Unit. This time her habitual cutting had careened out of control and both she and her family were forced to recognize the seriousness of her illness.
Megan writes:
Once Will was hospitalized I suddenly realized the severity of my own situation. Suicidal ideations, severe depression and a general need for more help were what made Will’s hospitalization necessary. But those same things haunted me. Hospitalization was never considered in my case, in part because the hidden cutting offered no trace to the hopeless undercurrent of my daily existence.
With Will in the hospital I continued my downward spiral. He was no longer available to offer the brief periods of relief that had broken my fall. I became completely solitary, not knowing how to reach out to people without screaming for help. In therapy I was sullen, slouching down in my chair, my knees clasped to my chest. I didn’t bother trying to explain my feelings anymore; it took too much energy to talk it out. And besides, my efforts elicited nothing more than the therapist’s head nods and constant scribblings. One day I said nothing except “I feel like shit” I think she started to get it. She offered another session later that week, but I refused. I couldn’t deal with any more therapeutic disappointments.
A few days later I sat in school the entire day frantically thinking of ways to get out of my cage of melancholy. In Algebra II hopeless tears started pouring down my face, I felt completely trapped by my illness, with no hope of relief. Something had to change. I decided that suicide was my only option.
When I got home my mom was on her way out. I told her that I wasn’t feeling well, mentally. She suggested that I take a bath and rushed out the door. My efforts at signaling for help were too little too late, and did not provide the warning signs I hoped for.
I retreated to my room and dug out my prized knife. I knew that in order to effectively kill yourself the cuts had to open the vein vertically, so I started carefully tracing the blue lines of my vein with the blade. The first cuts weren’t very deep, only just enough to draw blood. I was flirting with my own mortality rather than diving right in. I moved to the top of my left forearm and brought the blade down hard, once, twice, three times. On the fourth go the impact resulted in a thick gash with the skin parted to reveal red gelatinous blood underneath. Blood started pouring out in such amounts that it soaked through my clean-up sock. I was a little scared now, there was so much blood.
Just then Will called from the hospital. I must have been very cryptic. I played with the streams of blood that rolled down my arms while I cradled the phone with my shoulder. I wouldn’t tell him exactly what I was doing, but he knew immediately that something was very wrong. There wasn’t much he could do from where he was, but he told me I had ten minutes to call my therapist or else he would call my parents.
I called the therapist; what follows became a blur, but the therapist called my parents and my prescribing psychiatrist. My mother and stepfather were slow to believe what was happening. At first they proposed placing me on twenty-four-hour suicide watch at home. But the vacant look in my eyes and the vast amounts of blood soaking through my shirt convinced my parents they needed to act urgently. At the recommendation of my psychiatrist, I was loaded into the car, headed for Children’s Hospital. I remember feeling some apprehension, but I was so exhausted and in need of change that I didn’t care anymore.
We drove to Children’s Hospital, a good twenty-minute drive into the heart of town. My dad met us in the emergency room waiting room. It was surprisingly quiet. At triage the nurse calmly looked at my wounds and classified me as a suicide attempt. I was embarrassed, because aside from the gashes on the upper side of my forearm, the cuts weren’t impressively life-threatening. I thought, “I could have done better.”
The hospital staff took us to a little room with a round table and chairs to wait for a psychiatric evaluation. The light was fluorescent and irritating. All of my movements seemed mechanical and surreal. With so much charged emotion, a room that small was a disastrous place for all the pieces of my disjointed family. My dad pointedly suggested that my depression might be a result of fetal alcohol syndrome. My mother, horrified by the ridiculous charge, heatedly fought back.
The subject of Will and our relationship came up. The three parents decided I was not to see him as much anymore. This pronouncement quickly brought me out of my sedated state and I started screaming. The scene escalated to the point where someone removed me from the room and seated me in front of the television. We waited some more. I was offered a Cinnamon Poptart—an odd coincidence because Poptarts were one of Will’s favorite foods. These connections came back like disjointed sections of a fever dream.
The psychiatrist, a small Indian man with silver, wire-framed glasses, finally came in. He talked to me for a few minutes, asking me why I did what I did and whether I wanted to continue this type of behavior. I hated his questions and thought he seemed fairly incompetent. Question after question. I appeared articulate and responsive and he seemed frustrated with the contradiction between my ridiculously maladaptive self-destruction and my rational and calm explanations.
When the doctor suggested hospitalization, I panicked. The psychiatrist assumed I understood that was where I was headed, and after a few minutes I agreed. But when the subject eventually came around to Will, the doctor demanded to know if my cutting was an effort get into the hospital to see my boyfriend. I wanted to laugh in his face, but instead I calmly explained that it was never my intention.
Children’s Hospital’s psychiatric ward was full and I could not be admitted. My parents decided to place me at the Psychiatric Institution of Washington, which happened to be where Will was, although he was in the adult unit while I was to be admitted to the adolescent unit.
Hospital policy required that patients transferring to PIW from hospitals had to arrive by ambulance. While waiting to be transported, it was as if someone finally remembered why I needed to be taken to the hospital in the first place, and I was moved to a curtained off room to have my wounds treated.
Again, an extended period of waiting before a nurse arrived. He hovered over me, his dark skin held a golden cross around his neck. He examined my wounds and asked what happened. Any number of medical doctors had overlooked the scars and markings for almost a year as they gave me shots or took my blood pressure; most would just sigh and carry on. The nurse caught me off-guard by showing interest and I answered with some confident, smart-ass response about how they were self-inflicted.
As he cleaned the wounds he asked, “How could you do that to yourself?” and he told me I was a wonderful person. My mom stood off to the side and cried quietly while I cringed from the pain of the cleaning solutions in the wide, gelatinous gash. I bit my tongue so as to keep from telling him that he actually didn’t have a fucking clue what I was like. Instead, I promis
ed him I wouldn’t do it anymore. The nurse seemed so genuinely disturbed by what he saw I almost felt bad.
He followed me out to the ambulance and told me, “Remember what I said.” I really did appreciate the touch of humanism in this sterile and frightening environment. I refused a stretcher and instead sat on one of the benches in the back of the ambulance. My mom sat up front with the driver and the other emergency medical technician sat in the back with me. I was afraid I would get carsick, so I kept my eyes glued to the road by watching the windshield at the front of the cab. My mother carried on a cordial conversation with the driver. No one asked questions about my condition, but the EMT watching me offered me food. I declined; I wasn’t hungry. She told me she had a couple of kids and was going to community college, which surprised me, considering she was at work in the middle of the night. I suggested that she go to sparknotes.com, the book summaries would really save her a lot of time. She wrote the info about the website on her hand.
We pulled up to PIW and the EMTs wished me luck as they helped me out of the back of the ambulance. An attendant met us at the door and we began another lengthy admissions process. I answered a lot of questions, none of which I remember and an admissions person took my picture. I was relatively calm, and utterly exhausted. It had been almost 24 hours since I had slept.
At long last, I was taken upstairs to the adolescent unit—and another check-in procedure, which mostly entailed going over rules of the floor. My eyes were totally glassy as I looked around at my new surroundings. The place was an awkward mix of orphanage and hospital. There were pictures everywhere and kids asleep on the floor. In the middle of the floor was a desk with a large white board and a nurse manning the desk. The whole scene looked to be straight out of ER.
As the door locked behind me I started to lose it. I broke into sobs and begged my parents not to leave me there. Something wasn’t right. They insisted they had to go and left, looking very unsure themselves, and they promised to come back in twenty-four hours.
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