Nowhere but Up by Pattie Mallette, with A. J. Gregory Page B

friendly, and polite. Just like me. But if you paid enough attention to her beautiful face, you could make out a glaze over her distant eyes. I guess it’s easy to recognize the look when you see it every day in the mirror.
    I didn’t think I was any different from the other patients—the depressed ones, the schizophrenics, the suicidal, the delusional. We had a bond; we were all troubled, just to different degrees and in different ways. Each of us was there to ultimately try to make sense out of our individual circumstances. Whether it was finding a reason to live or figuring out why we hated ourselves so much. Or trying to stop the voices in our head from controlling our thoughts. Or, like me, trying to get to the bottom of unmanageable and debilitating depression.
    Why did I throw myself in front of a truck? Why did I keep returning to a volatile relationship that only dug me deeper into an emotional grave? Why did I think ending my life was better than living it? I had a slew of questions—some obvious, others unknown—that needed to be investigated. A big part of me was ready to dredge up the mess, to talk about my past and expose it to the light of day. But I didn’t get to do that in the hospital.
    My meeting with the admitting psychiatrist was unpleasant. He seemed cold and indifferent, flying through my mental health assessment as quickly as possible. Maybe he’d had a bad day and wanted to rush home in his fancy car so he could sit in front of a warm fireplace and nurse a glass of cognac.
    He fired off each question in a machine-gun succession without taking any time to unpack each one.
    “In the past two weeks, how often have you felt down, depressed, or hopeless?”
    “How long have you had these feelings?”
    “When did these feelings begin?”
    I didn’t expect the doctor to be my best friend and sit there for an hour patting my head and telling me everything was going to be okay. But I was put off that he didn’t express even an iota of genuine interest. At least pretend! Look up from your notes more than for a fleeting glance. Give me a chance to answer the questions without being interrupted. Hey, I’m sure working in a psych ward isn’t as fun as spending the day on a beach in the Caribbean. But still, a little effort goes a long way.
    After an hour of asking questions, scribbling in his leather notebook, and constantly nodding like a life-size bobblehead doll, the doctor gave me some meds and left. I saw him maybe one or two more times before I was discharged.
    I met with another therapist during my stay. Our meetings were pretty much more of the same. I was dying to talk about the sexual abuse in detail, not just as a passing thought when describing the symptoms of my depression. I didn’t have much luck.
    It would be like that for years. In the course of my search for healing, I visited with a number of counselors and tried different forms of therapy. I think each counselor assumed I had addressed my sexual abuse with the previous therapist, so the topic would never be broached in detail. The reality was, I had never combed through that part of my past. In a way, I felt I fell through the cracks, though I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.
    One therapist in particular, a sexual abuse specialist, was adamant that talking was futile. “You don’t need to talk so much, Pattie,” she told me. “Many people mistakenly believe that you have to talk about things to get better. That’s just not true.” Instead, she focused on a psychotherapy technique called EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) that is used for people with PTSD. I had to think of a traumatic memory and focus on it while I followed her finger’s movements and answered a few questions. I’m sure this therapy has helped others, but it didn’t seem like it did a whole lot for me.
    It wasn’t until a few years ago that I finally had the opportunity to bring about lasting healing by dealing with the abuse. But