The Expert First-Hand Account

So I knew the personal care home would be my best bet in finding someone who would share their experiences with mental illness. With 6 residents, I figured at least one of them had to be that perfect story to shape my reporting around.

My first interviewee was the home’s biggest success story. Since coming to the home, she had lost nearly 100 pounds and was no longer scooter-bound, as she had been when she had arrived. An abusive husband, time spent living in a tent, bouts of depression, a stay in a psychiatric hospital were scattered throughout her life story. She could even remember her dates so precisely, which made my reporter’s timeline that much easier to create. But it just didn’t fit. It wasn’t what I was looking for. One down, five to go.

The second interview. Oh, the second interview. I was already drained by the first. Eliciting questions. Keeping up with the twists and turns of a woman who had experienced so much of what there was to experience in this life, attempting to sculpt a story in my head that was refusing to take shape. My second interviewee was born with Cerebral Palsy, and at age 50 had already lived longer than the doctors said she would. Abusive adoptive parents. Revealing stories on what it was like to be a special education student when the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Act/ IDEIA) was passed in 1975, and for the first time children with disabilities were integrated into mainstream classrooms. But the coherence was missing. It was a struggle to understand her, the CP and the onset of exhaustion were not helping. 2 down, 4 to go.

My third interviewee. If this doesn’t work, that will be over 50% of my potential “characters” I thought. She wasn’t one of the suggestions from the owner, who I had discussed my story idea with multiple times, but was self-appointed volunteer. I was hesitant, but emotionally drained. Stories of misery, even if only 2, will do that to you, no matter how many times you hear them. And I’m pretty broken in, having worked with children with emotional and behavioral disorders since I was 16 (I’m 24 now). And I should have brought a snack. But fortunately, my multimedia partner hooked me up with a couple of tic-tacs.

I should have seen her offering herself up after my first interview, saying that if I wanted country, she could give me some country, as a green light (but I hadn’t had my tic-tacs yet). After sitting through only my first interview, she had so clearly grasped from my questions, my follow-up questions, and the follow-ups to my follow-up questions, what I was looking for, the story I was trying to shape; that I was exploring the barriers to accessing mental health services in rural counties. But her eagerness, my fatigue, and the fact that at that moment, the other residents had disappeared into various corners of the house, having lost interest in the novelty of the UGA students with the cool recorders and mics, delivered her as my third interview.

Okay, than let’s go Ms. Amanda, I said.

My next green light was that Amanda was born and raised in Georgia. I had been struggling and stressing about localizing my story, with my first two interviewees hopping from state to state throughout their lives. Though she was not from the Athens area, she grew up in a rural county in Ga. and was living in Madison County now. Ok good.

By now I had learned that the best screening process was to give them free reign for the first few minutes, by prompting them to tell me “a little about their story.” That way, I could quickly judge for coherence and relevance. I knew I was depressed since I was 8 years old, Amanda began.

What? 8? You’re not serious, I said. But of course, the question only echoed against the walls of my head. She continued.

My first medication was Ritalin. But it didn’t help with my depression, only my concentration.

Correct, I think. Ritalin is typically prescribed for children with ADHD to help with concentration and impulsivity.

This didn’t help my depression, but they didn’t prescribe me other medications because so few of them have been approved for use in children, she said.

Okay, I thought. She knows her research. Even now, few psychotropic medications have been validated in clinical trials that include children. And then there’s that nasty finding in the ones that do, that some of them lead to increased suicide ideation/ suicide attempts in participants under the age 18.

Of course, the pre-journalism career special educator in me, trained to identify the “exceptional” child, smiled and asked her “You were in the gifted programs, weren’t you?”

“Yes”, she breezed over my question. (Nearly an hour and half later when I asked her about how she felt about the stigma surrounding mental illness, she passionately told me how angry it made her that people make the assumption that because you have mental illness you’re not smart. In this emotional state, she let it slip that she had an IQ of 130. She could have told me when I asked her if she was in the gifted program, but she didn’t. I believe her.)

She dropped words like hopelessness, episodes, bipolar I versus bipolar II, antipsychotics. A vocabulary as good as any mental health worker.

I settled into my seat, tic tac sugar absorbed into my blood, feeling relieved. Two strikes racked up, I knocked the third into the outfield. I have found an expert first-hand account.

The bases are loaded. Let’s see if I can bring it on home.