Front Burner - Depression in the first person

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

Anna Mehler Paperny first tried to kill herself when she was 24 years old, just as she was finding success as a journalist. In her new memoir, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person, she talks unflinchingly about her experience with depression and tries to better understand the illness.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Okay. Thank you. I have a seat right here.

I just sit here? Yeah. Welcome to our studio. Thank you. I'm just going to slip by you. Nice studio. This is like our closet. No, I love it. Anna Maylor-Paperney, welcome to Front Burner.

Thank you. So we actually know each other. We're both journalists. And I know that we've been at lots of events and parties together. After reading your book, I have to say I had no idea what you had been going through. That was kind of by design. At the time, I was not prepared to talk about it with people. I wasn't sure how it would be received. This is a tremendous book that I know that we're going to dig into today. It's called Hello, I Want to Die, Please Fix Me. You talk about

depression in a really unflinching way. It feels like you have taken all the skills that you have and brought them to bear to try and educate people on this really important subject too. This felt like something that kind of demanded that degree of digging. Thank you for being here today. Let's get to the conversation. I'm Jamie Poisson. Today on FrontBurner, Anna's story and what we get wrong when we talk about depression. A warning, there is some difficult details in this conversation, including details of and a discussion around suicide. Anna, do you mind, can I ask you, when was the first time that you tried to kill yourself?

The first time, I was 24 years old. I was working at the Globe and Mail. I looked like I was doing fine. I looked like I was excelling in my chosen career. But I was eaten up inside. I was overcome by feelings of failure. I was convinced that I was a failure, that I was an idiot, that I didn't deserve to be alive. I took sleeping pills and antifreeze and I wound up in the ICU. Could you tell me more about that? Yeah. It was a rough weekend. I had just finished this big political feature that I'd been working on. So I got back home that Friday evening and I just felt spent.

And I felt like I couldn't keep going. Like it was just too much. And I messaged somebody sort of saying as much, saying that I think was thinking of killing myself. And he took me at my word. He called a friend who called me. I hadn't tried to kill myself that night. I had just fallen asleep. But they panicked and they couldn't reach me. They called the cops who came to my apartment and took me to hospital. And they took me to the psych emergency ward where I spent the night. I, of course, was miserable and angry at myself for talking about it,

angry at them for trying to get me help, because I felt like I was beyond helping. I didn't quite tell the truth to the psychiatrist who was assessing me the next morning. I told her I didn't really want therapy, I just wanted some sleeping pills. And she let me go with a prescription that I then used to try to kill myself the following evening. When I woke up, my parents were there, my siblings were there. And I just felt horrible.

I felt like I had done this horrible thing to people that I loved. You write in the book, what scares me the most is what I don't remember. Can you talk to me a bit more about that? Yeah, I mean, I think any journalist or any person who has sort of like, is driven by the imperative to know and find out things, having parts of your own experience occluded or erased is really terrifying, especially when it's such an important part of your life. In this case, I can't remember what happened after I took the sleeping pills. I kind of assume I took antifreeze because they

came over and they found a half-empty, you know, jug of antifreeze in my apartment, but I don't remember taking it. I don't remember what happened. Apparently, while I was sort of half-blacked out, I talked on the phone to a colleague and offered to cover this feud over gas plants that was happening. And we were covering the Ontario election at the time. You essentially tried to take an assignment. I tried to take an assignment while I was blacked out on sleeping pills. Yeah. I don't recommend doing that. Why do you think you did that?

I think I was sort of, I didn't realize how out to lunch I was. And I think I was still driven by this idea that I need to be on and I need to take on stories because if I'm not doing journalism, if I'm not working, then I'm nobody. And that's been something that for the past several years, I've had to sort of interrogate because I've discovered it's not healthy. But as you probably know, it's a lot harder to shake that feeling than it sounds. The feeling of constantly needing to be in the mix. Exactly. Exactly. That you're only sort of as good as your last story. Yeah. And if I'm not available for a story, then I'm nothing. I know there's never one reason, but looking back on it now, these attempts to take your own life, do you understand a bit more what was going on with you? A little bit in that there are things that I've learned I need to keep an eye out for. So things like the feeling of being a fraud and being a failure. Those are bad signs. Those are signs that like the inclination to end my own life, the feeling that my life is not worth living. Those are sort of creeping up. I need to watch for that. It's incredible to hear you say this because I've always thought of you as like so incredibly talented. So the idea that you would consider yourself a fraud is, it's really hard for me to hear you say that. That's comforting to hear. Thank you. It's hard to explain it because when

I say it out loud, it sounds illogical. Like when I say, well, this is what I was doing and this is what I was working on, but at the same time, I felt like I didn't deserve to live. That sounds illogical to say out loud, but in my head it makes perfect sense. And that's where the danger lies, I think. You hold these deep-seated convictions that are so emotionally powerful, they kind of override any logic or lack of logic. I wonder, can you tell me what it was like to tell your family and your friends about all of this? It's funny. I didn't have to tell my family that I tried to kill

myself because they all sort of, they found out the hard way. The first time I said I tried to kill myself was actually talking to my employer's insurer who called me when I was still in the psych ward. This is the first time I tried to kill myself and wanted to know why I was missing work because she wanted to figure out whether this was something they would cover, or whether I was just faking it. And so she said, Hi, Anna, I just wanted to know why you're missing work. And I said, Well, I'm in hospital. I've been in hospital for a couple of weeks now. And she said, Yeah, why? And I said, Well, I tried to kill myself. And that was the first time I said those words. The first time it came out of your mouth? Yeah. And it was really, I scared myself, I think,

almost as much as I scared her because it's something that we're taught people just don't discuss openly. And I mean, I wasn't talking about it openly. I was talking about it in what was supposed to be a confidential conversation, but it was a stranger that I't talking about it openly. I was talking about it in what was supposed to be a confidential conversation. But it was a stranger that I was broaching it with. And it just felt very, almost like a dangerous thing to say. Mm-hmm.

How have subsequent conversations gone, even with people who are closer to you? They've gotten better, but they're still painful. It's painful for me to talk about this with the people closest to me and with those less so. You know, my parents asked me, this is the Thanksgiving a few weeks after I first tried to kill myself. They asked me why I didn't leave a note.

And I didn't know what to say to that. You know, nothing that I could say really made sense when trying to explain something that I did to hurt the people that I loved. I find it gets difficult the more recent it is. Like, I can talk with relative ease about suicide attempts that are, you know, almost a decade in the past. But talking about ones that are more recent, I find much more difficult. I find the people I'm talking to tend to react a little bit scared or they tend to be more taken aback by the recency of it.

Just because, again, it's like, can I trust this person? Is it okay to talk about this should I be calling someone all those things that I think we're subliminally trained to sort of reactively do I need to brave that whenever I bring this up would you be willing to tell me how many times you've tried to kill yourself probably about eight some more serious than others. There have been three that got me in hospital as an inpatient. So those are the more serious ones. And the most recent one? Was in February. Of this year? Yeah. Were you writing this book at the time? The book was in edits. In fact, my editor, once they realized I was going to be okay,

and I was in rehab, when you spend so long in ICU, your body kind of deteriorates. So I was like, I needed to relearn how to walk. So I spent a few weeks in a rehab hospital and my editor came with edits that I had to go over. And it was kind of hilarious because I was like a bit of a mess cognitively. Like I just did not have the stamina to do this. And she was like, let's spend two hours on edits. And I was kind of like, I'm not sure I can handle that. But it was good. I think it was healthy.

It reminded me that I had things that I still wanted to do, like edit this book. I'd like to read a quote from your book, if you don't mind. Each suicide attempt made me more reluctant to try again. Not because I didn't want to die, but because I couldn't stand the emotional letdown of thinking it was finally over only to realize it wasn't. Can you talk to me about that? Yeah. I still haven't been able to get rid of the desire to die, but I've become wary of trying for numerous reasons, partly because I don't want to put people I love through that. Although I know and clinicians always tell you that this isn't something you're doing to hurt people, that you shouldn't look at this as something, you know, selfish.

Partly because, you know, the risks and the health risks of surviving are very real. But partly because there's a sense of relief, this horrible sense of relief that you get when you, you know, want to die desperately and you think you've done it. And then you feel like you're punking yourself. It's intensely painful. And it's part of the reason why it's so important. And I realize this, you know, when I'm outside of that sort of hellscape of suicidality. But why it's so important to provide people with alternative sources of relief.

So the only relief isn't just death. What do you mean by that? I mean, you need to give people a sense of hope outside of their own demise. They need to have something to strive for and live for that isn't just death. So when you were doing edits on this book, for example. Exactly. Yeah, that's an example. Maybe your family or loved ones or people around you.

Yeah. Can we talk about your path to getting help and how that's been for you? Obviously, this is an ongoing journey for you. Yes. journey for you. Yes. It was hard, but I was lucky in that when I, after my first suicide attempt, I came very close to being discharged without really any follow-up care. You know, just a list of phone numbers and a pat on the head. Instead, I had a psychiatrist at the hospital decide to follow me as an outpatient. And I think that saved my life and continues to save my life. Tell me more about that. So the hospital now has this,

it sort of prioritizes catching people on their way out of the hospital during the transition from inpatient to outpatient care, which is such a tricky time because they may not have support set up. They won't have sort of the intensive care that they were getting when they were living in hospital. And it can be really dangerous. So the fact that I was able to get that care, get those resources, and get those resources on an ongoing basis, I'm still seeing that psychiatrist. And honestly, I think that's one of the reasons I'm alive right now. How has this been for your family?

It's been really hard for them. They didn't want to be sitting by a hospital bed wondering if I'm going to recover, what I'm going to be like when I recover. They don't, you know, my parents now, I mean, I'm hoping they grow out of this, but they text me every day being like, how's it going? And I, well, I love hearing from them and I love talking to them. I hate to think that they're texting wondering like, did she try again? So it takes so much out of them and it affects families so, so much.

It's hard, especially because I think they're not sure how intrusive to become. The instinct is to just, like, be there constantly. But you don't want that. You want a degree of independence in your life. You want a degree of privacy in your life. Telling my parents that I love them but that I needed medical privacy for my health information was really difficult. Because they were like, how can you possibly ask for privacy when we just walked in to find you killing yourself? So that was a really difficult thing to straddle.

And I've found also just reading the testaments of others that this holds true elsewhere as well. Like parents want to know what's going on. Family members want to know what's going on. Physicians want to make sure that there's somebody looking out for their patients. But at the same time, by law, patients have, you know, health privacy. They have to navigate that complex. Exactly. It's really difficult. You have an entire chapter that deals with, you know,

how to talk about what we talk about when we talk about wanting to die. What do we get wrong about the way we talk about it now? I think the most common is that we just don't. We don't mention it, or we'll mention it kind of obliquely, and then shy away, and then expect that that's kind of covered it, and we're like, okay, done, moving on. But I think also people approach it like, you're not thinking about dying, are you?

You're not thinking about killing yourself, which is bad because if I ask you that, obviously you're going to say no. But I think people worry that if just by broaching it, just by saying, have you been thinking of killing yourself, they almost give someone permission to. And the doctors I was talking to said, no, you need to talk about that because this is,

either it's on their minds or it's not. And for them, it's almost a relief to discuss, which I have found. Like when I get to a point with my doctor, when I felt comfortable enough to discuss killing myself, I felt so much better because this was somebody I trusted, who I trusted not to take away my freedom, who would listen to me and offer advice. It's hard for parents, and it's hard for families, and for friends, I think, because the instinct is to tell someone, like, don't do that.

I remember having an aunt ask me to promise not to try again. Right. Which was, like, such an awful thing. It's hard for me to explain why that was so awful, but it was hard because here was somebody I loved asking me to basically forswear something that I was obsessing about constantly. And that maybe becomes part of the obsession? Exactly, exactly. So you feel guilty about it, so you're like,

maybe I shouldn't tell anybody ever because it's bad and I'm a bad person for thinking about this. Maybe I deserve to die because I keep thinking about dying. You have these illogical thought processes. My recommendation, and this is just based on what people have told me, is to be as compassionate and direct as possible.

So to ask if somebody has been thinking about dying, to say, you know, you can tell me and mean it, just that makes a really big difference. I noticed in the book you write quite a beautiful passage about a mutual friend of ours, Brennan Kennedy, who's a reporter at the Charmister. You thank him for saving your life over and over again. Yeah, he really did.

I mean, I would call, and again, I called him in the most awful situations, and he could have responded so much worse, but he was wonderful. He told me that he loved me, and he told me that he much worse that but he was wonderful he told me that he loved me and he told me that he was happy that I was alive and just that in itself was so important I cannot overstate how important it is to hear that now that you've written this book it's getting a lot of buzz am I allowed to mention that it's one of Heather's picks in Indigo? Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. How does it feel to have this out in the world?

It's so strange. I mean, I think I'm getting better at talking about it, although as you can tell, I'm still kind of hesitant. There are things that I can't believe I've now said out loud or said in a public way. It feels strange to talk about and strange to have out there. Does it feel good too? Yes. It feels cathartic in a public way. It feels strange to talk about and strange to have out there. Does it feel good, too? Yes.

It feels cathartic in a lot of ways, and it feels both wonderful and difficult. I've had so many people come to me and say, like, I relate to this personally, and I want to be like, I'm glad, but I'm so sorry. You know, like, I wish you didn't feel that way. But I'm glad this is something that you can grab onto. Because that's ultimately why I wrote it.

I think it is an extraordinary book. I think you are a wonderful person. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for being here today. I'm very grateful. Thank you so much for having me. It's really wonderful to be here. So I know that was a really heavy conversation. And if you are thinking about suicide or suffering from depression, please get help.

Anna's book is called Hello, I Want to Die, Please Fix Me. Other than talking about her personal story, she has a lot of research in there about depression and how to treat it. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to Frontburner.