“In school, teachers would get annoyed by Zeke because he’d finish the work in half the time and then start entertaining himself,” Andrea would recall. “The more experienced teachers realized they had to keep feeding him extra work. In first grade, his teacher once let him go off by himself and read all day. Zeke loved it.”
By eighth grade, Zeke was establishing himself as a formidable distance swimmer, and Ashling wasn’t far behind. They bumped up from the Y to a national-level team at the University of Delaware, which meant tougher practices and a one-hour drive each way from the Southern End. “That was pretty savage,” Zeke would say. “It got to the point where we did two five hundreds, two one thousands, and two miles”—nearly four miles of swimming, in other words, for a kid who was still in middle school. The new schedule meant they were doing homework in the car and not getting home till ten at night, and the intensity of the workouts left them constantly achy and run-down.
One year later, they were done. After devoting their entire adolescence to thrashing out laps, Ashling and Zeke told their parents they’d had enough. They quit swimming, and suddenly their lives became astonishingly…normal. Ashling, now a junior, finally had time to hang with her friends and stay out late for Friday-night football games. Zeke could play his first team sport, and promptly joined his high school wrestling team. Zeke knew nothing about wrestling and spent most practices getting slammed around on the mats, but compared to blowing bubbles two hours a day with his head underwater, wrestling was pretty fun. Ashling and Zeke loved their new life on dry land. Their grades were dynamite, they were making new friends, Ashling was National Honor Society vice president—
And then things fell apart.
* * *
—
Ashling was never a talker, but a few months after she and Zeke stopped swimming, she became quieter than usual. Except for going to school, she seemed barely to leave the house anymore. When Andrea asked if anything was wrong, Ashling just grunted to be left alone. Andrea had been a rebellious teen herself, so she recognized a defiant phase when she saw one. We’ll just have to wait it out, she told Andy—until, during her senior year, Ashling said she wanted to kill herself. Andrea was stunned. How could she, a trained nurse who dealt with depressed students all the time, miss months of warning signs at her own kitchen table? She threw herself into getting Ashling help, and found a psychologist who had a knack for coaxing her to open up.
Too much stress, they all agreed. Now that she didn’t have swimming to blame for missing homework, Ashling was feeling the heat to follow in the footsteps of her mom, who graduated second in her high school class and was accepted at Penn State main campus. But unlike her mom, who loved to study, or Zeke, who could goof off and still coast to straight A’s, Ashling wasn’t a naturally gifted student. She really had to grind for her grades. It was obvious that academic pressure was the cause of Ashling’s depression—until the same thing happened to Zeke.
One year after Ashling’s episode, Zeke was in the middle of a stellar junior year. He had perfect grades in five AP courses, and was still hanging tough on a wrestling team that was becoming a regional powerhouse. But he just felt so…tired. “I don’t really know what happened,” he later recalled. “You’re fine, and then you’re not fine.” This time, Andrea sprang into action. Zeke met with Ashling’s therapist, who believed that wrestling was squeezing Zeke with a level of stress and self-doubt that he’d never felt before. Zeke began medication and quit wrestling, and before long, he was back to annoying teachers at full strength again.
Zeke graduated second in his high school class, just like his mom, but he made her even happier by following his sister to Penn State. Zeke and Ashling were out of the woods at last, Andrea believed. Now that they’d identified the problem and found a strategy to defuse it, college was going to be a blast. Penn State was already their second home, so the only trouble they might run into was having too much fun. Still, it was good to know that Ashling and Zeke had each other to rely on. Just in case.
* * *
—
Luckily, Zeke got to Ashling while she was still alive. In November of her junior year, just two months after her brother arrived on campus as a freshman, Ashling swallowed a deadly amount of her depression medication. Before passing out, she thought one last time about never waking up again. She called Zeke, who raced to her dorm and rushed her to the hospital. Ashling spent the next three days vomiting and lapsing in and out of delirium, muttering nonsensically about someone stealing her Nobel Prize and suffering a seizure so severe that she was jolted out of bed and smashed her face on the floor, requiring a CT scan to check for cranial damage. When the pharmaceuticals were finally out of her system, she was remanded to the mental health ward for a week of intensive therapy.
Surviving an ordeal like that would leave anyone in need of a long rest. Not Ashling. She was released from the hospital in time for Thanksgiving at home, then went right back to school and knocked out her exams. “She was determined,” Andrea would say. “I’m amazed at the way she went barreling through her junior year. She did really well.” One of the doctors on campus was particularly devoted to Ashling’s care, and that gave Andrea and Andy some peace of mind. As an added little safeguard, they got Ashling a cat named Finnegan and arranged for an emotional support permit so she could keep it with her on campus as a 24/7 stress-relief companion.
But most of all, Andrea wanted her kids to relax and not push themselves so hard. They didn’t have to be such focused, disciplined, athletic overachievers—in other words, her. “Stress seems to make things tough for her,” Andrea concluded, so from that moment on, Andrea was going to dial down the pressure and let her kids find their own way. Even when Zeke didn’t bother to put his name in the housing lottery and missed out on a dorm for sophomore year, Andrea just took a deep breath and let it go. That was okay. They would find him an apartment. He’d like having a place to himself. No need to get stressed about it.
* * *
—
Zeke lay there, watching the clock tick over to 9:00 a.m….10:00 a.m….
He was sick of lying in bed. He couldn’t get comfortable, and he knew his parents were waiting for him at the tailgate. Just a few more minutes and he’d get up.
11:00 a.m….Noon….
Andrea’s fingers were itching; the temptation to text Zeke was unbearable, but she didn’t want to be That Mom. She’d already learned to back off after that time she’d visited Zeke’s apartment and found he’d scrawled math equations all over the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. “Oh my god!” Andrea freaked. “He’s turning into A Beautiful Mind.”
“C’mon, Mom,” Zeke reassured her; it was just easier to study when he could see the formulas instead of having to look them up. After that, Andrea held herself back. Every single evening, she’d text all three kids to say good night. Ashling and Kelly always replied. Zeke never did. He’s a young man, I get it, she told herself. I’ll give him his space. She’d already seen that if her kids needed help, they would come to her. So she turned her attention back to her friends at the tailgate, and when they asked if Zeke was coming, Andrea shrugged and told them how crazy in love he was—with physics.
Outside Zeke’s apartment, the rest of campus was raging. No matter how vicious the weather, no matter how early in the morning, when Penn State has a home football game you can count on two things: everyone is drinking, and they’ve already started. For the past decade or so, Penn State has consistently ranked as one of the hardest partying schools in the nation, even taking the No. 1 spot in 2009, and you only have to wander through on a Saturday night to understand why. Even Ira Glass, the gentle ironist who’s heard every imaginable sin and psychosis during his twenty years hosting This American Life, was dumbstruck by what he found in Happy Valley:
IRA GLASS: So what’s the wildest thing you’ve seen at a party at this school?
MALE STUDENT
: Wildest thing? At a party? Somebody stripping completely naked and pretending to throw monkey feces as they were doing it. And—that was me.
IRA GLASS: That was you?
MALE STUDENT: That was me.
————————
PENN STATE NEIGHBOR: One of the things you learn here in your yard is if you see a tampon, you have to get a stick and find the condom.
IRA GLASS: That is so gross.
Naturally, Penn State would rather be known for its fine legacy of scholarship than its new fame as a four-year baccalaureate booze cruise, but true to its academic mission, the school has been scientifically tracking just how much shot-slamming is really going on. What the administration itself found is that each Friday and Saturday, three out of every four undergraduates are busy pounding drinks. So if you’re one of the lone Nittany Lions who’s not such a fan of football, Fireball, and feces-flinging, every weekend can make you feel like a castaway who washed ashore on an island overrun by rampaging marauders.
Because of Zeke’s goof with the student housing lottery, he spent his sophomore year in a studio apartment next to “Beaver Canyon,” the notorious downtown scream tunnel on East Beaver Avenue where students throng by the thousands after football games (if you saw footage of the Penn State riot after coach Joe Paterno was fired in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal, Beaver Canyon is where students tipped over a TV news van and tore down lampposts). All Zeke had to do to join the fun was step outside his apartment, and he’d immediately be swept up in a sea of micro-dresses and beer bongs. His apartment pulsed with the shrieks and music echoing below his window—while he lay there, wondering why he felt too tired to get up but too tense to sleep.
Zeke couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Freshman year had been amazing. He’d hit it off with his roommate, an astrophysics major who was happy to kick back with him in their room and geek out about science, and he did so well in his classes that he soon advanced from coursework to hands-on lab research. Penn State’s biomedical research facilities are so well known that even the superhero universe held them in high esteem; Zeke could point out that of all the colleges in the world, Dr. Bruce Banner* chose Penn State for his pre-Hulk education. Zeke was especially fascinated by the motor proteins, the neurological superstructures that convert cellular energy into mechanical force, and soon he was hanging out with scientists whose work might someday stop Alzheimer’s and cancer in their tracks.
“My self-esteem was at an all-time high,” he’d say. “First year at Penn State, I was knocking it out of the park.” Zeke felt so sharp, so clicked-in and on his game, that he decided the only thing slowing him down was those damn antidepressants. How can you hook up with girls when your body is puffy, or impress professors when your concentration drifts? His solution was to quit taking the meds. Before long, his six-pack was popping again and his brain was a laser. Depression was just a phase, he decided, and that phase was behind him.
“Then—I don’t know what happened,” he would recall. “It came bubbling up.”
It felt like a backpack full of stones, a weight he could barely lift and couldn’t shuck off. It came out of nowhere, paralyzing him as he lay in bed. And the only thing that would make it go away for good, Zeke decided, was that metal rod over the bathroom door….
* * *
—
After Zeke was rushed to the psych ward, Andrea was so preoccupied with the fight to bring him home that she could barely think of anything else. “All the professionals said he needed to be in the hospital,” she would later say. “But when we saw him, we realized it was making him more depressed.” Only after she had Zeke back in his own bed could she find the mental energy to finally confront the question that had been nagging at the back of her mind: Was she to blame?
It wasn’t guilt she wrestled with. It was science. “I look back and have to wonder,” Andrea says: Why did depression attack two of her children so aggressively, while the third was unaffected? Kelly, her youngest, was only two years younger than Zeke. She grew up in the same household, went to the same high school and college, hung around with similar friends. Kelly and Ashling even had identical tattoos, an outline of the family vacation spot at Lake George. But at one crossroads, their lives veered apart: during those mornings when Zeke and Ashling were in the pool, Kelly mostly slept in. “Ashling and Zeke were both swimmers, so they were used to these endorphins. This high,” Andrea recalls. “And then suddenly, it stops.”
So what, now swimming is bad for you? How was that possible? Exercise, as Andrea had been told a million times in nursing school, is the Great Healer, an all-purpose wonder drug that can improve everything from digestion to depression. Exercise was medicine before we had medicine, and because it’s so vital for keeping our internal machinery humming, our brains evolved to give us an attaboy! whenever we break a sweat by rewarding us with, basically, a squirt of Grade A pharmaceuticals. When you work out, the pleasure centers in your brain are flooded with endorphins and dopamine, the “happy hormones” that make you feel the way Dwayne Johnson always looks: relaxed, strong, confident, intelligent. Brain opioids are so powerful that if you exercise, you can lower your “mental health burden” by nearly 25 percent and enjoy a much higher ratio of positive mental health days—a whopping 43 percent—than non-exercisers experience. Let that sink in for a second: just by goofing around a little on your bike, you can nearly double your happiness. For free. If you put results like that in a pill, it would outsell ice cream.
No wonder pretty much everyone who walks out of SoulCycle seems like they summited the Himalayas and got chest-bumped by a bodhisattva. They’re not just relieved that the hour is over; they’re floating on a cloud of their own naturally produced party drugs. Brain opioids are so potent that they even make lab rats eager to work: after rats become used to exercise, they’ll perform a monotonous job, like pushing a lever over and over, for a chance to get back on the running wheel and be rewarded with a fresh surge of dopamine.
But any drug with that much firepower, Andrea knew, even a drug produced by your own body, has just as much capacity to lay you out. As a school nurse, she eyeballed hundreds of kids every day for hints of drug use. She was also a dedicated athlete herself, so when she combined her knowledge of narcotics and her own experience with exercise, she had to wonder: If you spend half your life getting a daily superdose of dopamine, what happens when you suddenly quit? Do you go through withdrawal, like anyone else kicking a chemical habit? Judging by Ashling’s and Zeke’s symptoms—insomnia, anxiety, mood and weight swings, acute depression—it certainly seemed a lot like they’d gone cold turkey. That hypothesis could explain why competitive athletes, who work out more than anybody else, may be nearly twice as vulnerable to depression as non-athletes. Did they pass some dangerous, invisible cutoff at which the cure became an affliction?
That’s exactly the question that researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany set out to answer in 2008. Until then, the only way to peer into the workings of brain hormone levels was to subject volunteers to the torture of a spinal tap. But thanks to neuroimaging breakthroughs, the Bonn team was able to sidestep the giant needles and, instead, inject ten volunteers with a tiny radioactive tracer that could be tracked by a scanner. Previous experiments had shown only minor dopamine reaction after thirty minutes of running, so this time, the volunteers were asked to hammer the treadmill for a solid two hours. When they finished, their brain opioids were calculated. Not only had all of the runners’ opioid levels increased significantly, but the Bonn researchers made another surprising discovery: the better each runner felt, the more dopamine was found in the spinal fluid. Rather than an on/off switch, the hormone was acting like an intoxicant: the higher the volume, the happier you feel.
And the farther you fall. No wonder athletes have a hard time adjusting to life off the court and out of the pool. When researchers dig into the mental health
histories of athletes, that’s exactly what they discover: the most perilous moment is when athletes face “injuries, career termination, decline in performance, or a catastrophic performance.” There’s always been a dim awareness of a post-glory-days slump, but it was written off as nothing more than an ego bruise, an overdue dose of humble pie for sports heroes now facing life as mere mortals. Instead, it could be something far deadlier: a dangerous chemical imbalance caused by a sudden drop in dopamine. And the most at-risk population? “Solo athletes,” reports Professor Jürgen Beckmann, chair of sports psychology at Germany’s Technical University of Munich and lead author of a depression comparison study. “We have very high prevalence rates in swimming, for example.”
Michael Phelps isn’t surprised. “The world knows me as a twenty-eight-time medalist. But for me, sometimes my greatest accomplishment was getting out of bed,” Phelps has said. “When depression hits, it can become debilitating and feel like nothing really matters.” Sometimes he just lay in the dark, longing to die. “For me, getting to an all-time low where I didn’t want to be alive anymore, that’s scary as hell,” Phelps said. “I remember sitting in my room for four or five days not wanting to be alive, not talking to anybody.”
Phelps never knew that one of his closest friends, eight-time Olympic medalist Allison Schmitt, was struggling with the same despair. Like Phelps, she suffered in secret until tragedy struck: in 2015, Schmitt’s cousin, high school basketball standout April Bocian, killed herself one week after her seventeenth birthday. Schmitt was tormented by the thought that if she had spoken up and gone public with her own depression, her cousin might have reached out to her for help. “She was in such a dark place and so isolated and felt so alone inside,” Schmitt has said. Since then, Phelps and Schmitt have become advocates for mental health awareness and such a tight mutual support team that Schmitt now lives with Phelps and his wife and son in their home in Arizona.
Running with Sherman Page 18