It is the first time I have ever written a story that is so personal. This is the story of my secret battle with depression. We have read about famous people who were apparently battling depression--Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade. As I read those stories in the past and on the morning word of Anthony Bourdain's suicide broke, I never thought I would be so close to a similar situation had I not received the proper treatment.
In late October 2018, my mother Janeanne Marie Maisonville passed away. She was nun for the first three years of her adult life from 1958-1961 as Sister James Regina, then married for 50-years to my father Charles Edward Maisonville.
Yes, my father proposed to a nun.
Now, with both my parents gone, I kept on working and ignoring what was happening to me.
A return
It was a depression that had hit me three other times in my life--1993 when I came to Houston to anchor at KNWS-TV 51, 1998 while working at Florida's News Channel and 2004 when I was in Charlotte, North Carolina. There were no triggers--life was good, my financial situations were solid, some of the episodes were in the summer or winter and the only commonality linking each episode was me.
I know my father suffered from depression--I always figured it was his work in Alaska on the pipeline and the lack of sunlight. This was genetic. I knew it. Mine was about to hit me like a Category 5 hurricane. My weight would drop from 205 lbs. to 173 lbs. in a matter of weeks.
We live in Houston and know a great deal about hurricanes. We can board up, stock up and pray, but the hurricane will eventually make landfall. We cannot stop it. My Category 5 depression was going to make landfall--nothing was going to stop it, not medication or meditation. I have to educate doctors about my form of depression, "It's going to hit me no matter what. Please listen to me," I would tell them, "My father had this." Doctors sit and listen to a man in his 50s already suffering from a fear of falling asleep, a man who makes it a practice not to go to funerals because he is uncomfortable with finality (I never went to either of my parents funerals and my father never went to funerals either), a man who about to experience near fatal depression.
