Depression at Work

A TV anchorwoman tells her story of depression.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on December 01, 2003 - last reviewed on June 30, 2005

After three years of my asking, they finally went across the street and hired my former boss to build a new team. He brought a lot of my old friends with him, and built the new station into a powerhouse. Within a month or so of his arriving, he took me out to lunch and said, “We’ve done some focus groups, and we can’ t keep you.” So, they fired me, or, they didn’t renew my contract. That was devastating, especially because I had become my job. I thought other people got fired, not me. During that three years, I kept winning awards, I was doing really good work, it’s just that no one wanted to watch, and that’s kind of important!

I was remarried to a lovely man. The depression just kept getting worse. Fortunately, I had saved enough money to take a year off. I went back to the psychiatrist and from August 1986 through 1987, nothing worked.

No one in Phoenix would hire me, so I started my own video production company. In 1989, I landed a wonderful job with the city of Phoenix, running their television station. Again, I lied on my employee form, when they asked, “Have you been treated for mental illness?”

I got to do a documentary on Mother Teresa, which led to the adoption of my daughter, Molly. There came a period when I was adopting a child, getting a new job and then getting a divorce, and entering into a new relationship. A lot was going on. I was performing like you wouldn’t believe, but going home and dying. I had many lost weekends that I just slept through when Molly was with her grandparents, aunts or Dad.

In 1992, the man in my life left. I dropped 30 pounds. Here I am running a TV station and I’m walking the streets because I can’t sit at my desk. A colleague at work would cover for me at meetings. Finally I went to my boss and said, “I have an illness. I lied about it. I had shock treatment in ’81. Will you help me?” He was wonderful.

I couldn’t fake it anymore. It wasn’t fair to my staff, to my daughter, to me, to anybody. A friend said, “I want you to drive to the University of Arizona in Tucson. I want you to go to the top psychiatrist there, because I went to him. He’s $300 an hour, insurance won’t pay for it, but you’ve got to go.”

I went for one session and he wanted me to go on Prozac. I said I had tried Prozac and it didn’t work, it made me crazy. He taught me how to take it, putting a little bit of the powder in cranberry juice, over a month building up the amount to one pill. The lights came on, and I became the girl I was as a senior in high school. The relaxation came back, the humor. It was like taking off dark sunglasses. Prozac gave me my life back. After seven years it stopped working. A new doctor gave me Effexor. It’s given me even more wellness than Prozac, maybe because it was developed later and there are fewer side effects.

Forty percent of working women with depressive symptoms remain undiagnosed.

While the experiences in the workplace were very stressful, my illness started a lot earlier, during my freshman year at college. I didn’t know what it was called, I just knew that there was something going on in my brain, a great sadness that I accepted as the way I have to live. I didn’t realize it was truly a brain disorder.

I was at Florida State University. I was active socially and academically and involved in community projects. I was a music major, performing in college shows. And one summer I was paralyzed. I would go to bed at 7 in the evening, stay in bed the next day, and barely make it to a 4 p.m. class. I was so ashamed. Those of us with this illness don’t want people to think that we’re lazy. But you feel like you’re paralyzed when these chemicals shut down.

Women see depression as the number one barrier to success in the workplace—an impediment greater than sexism, child- and elder-care responsibilities, pregnancy, the glass ceiling, sexual harassment.

There was always a darkness and a sadness inside me, but I’m truly a professional actress with a Protestant work ethic—you carry on. We can be functional and achieve. On one hand, I was an overachiever with tremendous drive, but on the other hand, I had a darkness. I got really good at lying. Being with people is work for me when I’m ill. I would lie about why I couldn’t come to a party, or come to class. I was afraid if I told people that I wanted was stay in bed, they would accuse me of being lazy. And I knew it wasn’t about that.

While I was in school, I won the Miss Atlanta pageant, and was runner up in the Miss Georgia contest, which I believe is tied in with the depression. I also had an eating disorder. After a while, everything is related. My father died an alcoholic homeless person at the height of my career in Phoenix; nothing could save him. It’s a horrible sadness in my life. He was crossing a street and was hit by a car. He had been thrown out of the family years earlier, because of the drinking. He would call me from a phone booth in 10-degree weather asking me to wire him money.

I was always out there, whether it was the Miss Atlanta contest, or trying to get scholarship money, or wanting to get into network TV. One psychiatrist told me, if you want the depression to go away, you’ve got to change your profession—but it was my life.