PHILADELPHIA -- When U.S. Sen. John Fetterman checked into a hospital for clinical depression last month, critics questioned whether he would be able to serve his six-year term.
Mental illness is often portrayed as an inescapable condition.
Everyone's experience is different, and people who've had an episode of mental illness are at greater risk for experiencing mental health challenges in the future. But for most people, depression and other mental health disorders don't last forever, said David Mandell, the director of the Penn Center for Mental Health.
"With good treatment, people can then go for years and years without experiencing the major symptoms of depression," Mandell said.
The Inquirer spoke to four Philadelphians about their experience with depression, what treatments worked for them, and how they continue to take care of their mental health.
'A different lens'
The first person who broke Taj Murdock's heart was his absent father.
"You don't have that father figure telling you that he's proud of you," the 48-year-old from North Philly said. "You also start blaming yourself. Did I do something wrong?"
Murdock became a successful barber, with a bench of professional athlete clients. But without a male role model in his early years, he found that his goals were misguided, he said. He drank too much, used drugs, and was striving for "the pillars of false manhood," he says now. "Have a car, clothes, pocket full of money, and a handful of women."
By 2008, his self-destructive behavior caught up with him.
After a few run-ins with the law, a DUI violation landed him in prison for two years. There, for the first time, someone talked to him about his behavior in the context of trauma and depression.
It had never occurred to him to think about his experience in terms of mental health.
"Honestly, it gave me some solid ground ... a different lens," he said.
In prison he started praying, meditating, and journaling — practices he continues to this day. He also tried medication but stopped because he didn't like the way it made him feel.
After being released, he returned to being a barber and founded a mentorship program for young men, called Men of Courage.
About 2016, he started therapy with Black Men Heal, a nonprofit mental health organization providing free services to Black men. He has been in therapy ever since. It hasn't always been easy.
Last year, Murdock struggled with his depression. But he had the tools to keep going, and knows the value of investing time in himself.
"I make sure that I tap into those things that give me joy," he said. "The more time I spend with self, the better self will be."
Colors popped again
Kerrie Sendall, 44, moved from Georgia to New Jersey to take a job as an assistant biology professor at Rider University in September 2019. She had few friends when the pandemic hit and the Lawrence Township university closed, then went virtual.
She was dating someone, but they broke up. That's when she slid into depression. She put off exercise, slept more, and lay in bed for hours watching reruns of the NBC-TV drama ER while binging Doritos. The orange cheese coated her fingers and bed sheets.
"I just felt stuck," she said.
She moved to Philadelphia's East Kensington neighborhood, hoping that city life would rejuvenate her.
But the change of scenery didn't help. She went from "monotone" to "freaking out over nothing," such as a dustup with another professor over a classroom scheduling issue.
A friend urged her to contact a psychiatrist, but everyone she tried was booked.
"That's one of the failings of our health care system," she said. "When you need help the most, you can't get it."
Eventually, she found a virtual mental health service called Hers. A doctor prescribed medication to treat depression and generalized anxiety disorder. She later got an appointment with a psychiatrist but had to pay $150 out-of-pocket, a cost that prevented her from making routine appointments.
She also joined an Orangetheory Fitness gym, where she does a circuit on the treadmill, rowing, and weightlifting machines.
With each day, she grew physically and emotionally stronger, and the weight of depression began to feel lighter.
One day last summer, Sendall was with biology peers in a salt marsh field in Maryland, studying the impact of sea-level rise. The sun was out. The temperature was perfect. The reedy green grasses against the blue sky popped. Her mind felt sharp for the first time in a while.
"All of a sudden, I looked around and I'm like, 'I feel so good right now,'" Sendall said.
'Didn't know how to express it'
At 15, Rose Khan felt as if she were sinking to the bottom of a lake, aware that she was drowning in despair but too numb to care.
"It wasn't that I wanted to die," she recalled. "I just wanted everything to stop."
One day, while her mother was at work, she swallowed an entire bottle of aspirin or Ibuprofen. Eleven years later, she doesn't remember which — she's blocked a lot of the details.
Her brother called 911, and Khan was hospitalized in a pediatric unit for nearly a week in 2012.
At the time, she was a sophomore at a mostly white, conservative high school on Long Island. Growing up Muslim in post-9/11 New York, she said, her peers made her feel like an outcast. Her parents immigrated to America from Guyana, one of the poorest countries in South America. Their experience was about survival, making a better life for themselves and, later, for their kids. Khan didn't know how to talk to them about how low she felt.
"I needed help and didn't know how to express it," Khan, now 26, recalled.
After leaving the hospital, Khan said, she was required to go to therapy, but the therapist she was assigned wasn't a good fit. She pushed through her pain by focusing on finishing high school and getting into college. She clung to the hope that life would get better once she graduated.
But in 2016, while attending New York University, she grew increasingly anxious and depressed. She again felt herself drifting to the bottom.
"Anxiety feels like the inability to quiet the noise in your head, and depression feels like the absence of internal noise," Khan reflected.
She started seeing a new therapist whom she clicked with and still sees regularly. Khan said finding the right therapist has been key.
She also takes a low dose of sertraline, the generic version of the commonly prescribed antidepressant Zoloft.
Now a graduate student studying social work and policy at the University of Pennsylvania, Khan still experiences ups and downs. But those dips are manageable. She recognizes that "healing is a very nonlinear process," she said.
Each night, she tries to write down three things she did well that day. It can be something small, such as submitting her homework on time. She takes time to do things she enjoys, such as browsing shelves in a bookstore, organizing her Center City apartment, or watching Abbott Elementary. She and her friends talk about their feelings.
She's learned to ask for help.
'He listened'
Matthew Anticoli lived alone for the first time in the fall of 2020. Now 25 years old, the Abington native was fresh out of college and moved to Bloomington, Ind., to start a doctorate degree in American studies. Businesses were closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, as were the few LGBTQ spaces in which he could be part of a community.
While other people in a similar situation might have felt lonely, Anticoli said, his brain made him believe that he was "actually alone." He felt a deep sense of isolation.
He recognized that he was struggling and talked with professors about reducing his course load to give himself space to get better. But before he could take a leave, things got worse.
One night, Anticoli called a university counselor after experiencing suicidal thoughts for a couple days. He was hoping to get a therapy session; instead, a police car arrived at his house to take him to a psych ward at a nearby hospital, where he was put on suicide watch.
He didn't believe that he could get better until his first therapy session.
"He listened to me," Anticoli said of the therapist he talked to.
That affirmation made him agree to try group therapy, mindfulness training, different medication, and other programs offered at the hospital.
Anticoli was released from the hospital after about a week. He decided to go back home, first to his parents' house in Abington and then to a place of his own in Philadelphia. He felt well enough to take on a part-time job with UPS.
Last spring, he felt ready to take on more. He got a job with Mental Health Partnerships, a nonprofit behavioral health services provider in Philadelphia, where he trains people in how to respond to a mental health crisis. He says that the work has been healing for him.
Anticoli knows that he could suffer another depressive or anxious episode. But his experience makes him hopeful that he could get better.
"I will be able to get through it again," he said.
