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 “...there's nothing, repeat, nothing to be ashamed of when you're going through a depression. If you get help, the chances of your licking it are really good. But, you have to get yourself onto a safe path.”
- Mike Wallace, Co-Editor of 60 Minutes in an interview with CBS Cares on his personal journey through depression
As our newly produced public service announcements convey, serious depression is a medical disease that requires treatment. It affects millions of Americans as well as millions more family members and friends. There may be life events that are catalysts to depression, but experts reiterate that it is largely a physical disease, affected by brain chemistry and function, and it is a medical disease as much as diabetes or a heart condition.
Our first interview in this section is with CBS' Mike Wallace, Co-Editor of 60 Minutes. We feel that Mike Wallace's own courageous battle and recovery from severe depression, as he relayed in our interview, conveys a very important message: Mike Wallace is one of the last people one would expect to suffer from depression. He is a tough, hard-hitting news correspondent with great character strengths. He had overcome childhood and adolescent challenges and the devastating death of a young son in Greece, which influenced his decision to dedicate his career exclusively to news. As a news correspondent, he had for years exposed corruption and fraud, confronting the perpetrators directly.
Yet, in 1984, even Mike Wallace was unexpectedly struck by a depression that overwhelmed him and sent his life into an uncontrollable spiral. The trigger-point to that depression was a $120 million libel lawsuit against CBS by General Westmoreland, the commander of US forces in Vietnam, over a Mike Wallace report in 1982. That report indicated that General Westmoreland had helped mislead the American public by misrepresenting enemy troop strength in Vietnam.
In our interview, Mike Wallace explains exactly what he went through, how his depression was initially misdiagnosed and how he lost complete control over his life. He explains how, with the support of his wife, finding the right psychiatrist and receiving treatment, he was able to finally overcome the deep depressive episodes and reclaim his life. The interview also reveals how depression affected a trip that Mike undertook to Lebanon to interview the head of Hezbollah, Sheikh Fadlallah, who was suspected of masterminding the bombing that killed hundreds of US Marines in Beirut... a trip that the CIA had urged him to cancel because of the significant dangers to him personally.
Following our interview with Mike Wallace, CBS Cares has answers from leading psychiatrists to numerous questions on the causes, diagnosis and treatment of depression. Due to the variety of questions and sub-specialties of psychiatry involved, we felt that we needed the expertise of different psychiatrists if we were to maximize the value of this project for those who might benefit. So, we proposed an unusual partnership to Dr. Herbert Pardes, the highly regarded CEO of New York Presbyterian Hospital, who is also a leading figure in psychiatry and former head of the National Institute of Mental Health: We suggested that New York Presbyterian and CBS Cares partner on this project and that the individual experts within that hospital and affiliated medical schools (Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and Weill Medical College of Cornell University) might answer the relevant questions for which they are especially qualified.
For questions on two issues, CBS Cares went outside the New York-Presbyterian system. For questions pertaining to the relationship between depression and creativity, we interviewed a uniquely qualified expert: Dr. Nancy Andreasen of the University of Iowa who is an internationally renowned psychiatrist and neuroscientist who also has a PhD in English. Consistent with the view that Dr. Andreasen expressed during that interview, the links between depression and brilliance/creativity should not serve to glamorize depression. Depression is a dangerous and debilitating disease, which, unless effectively treated, can cause considerable suffering and even tragic loss of lives. But the fact that brilliance and creativity have been linked to depressive disorders is fascinating. And the fact that chronically depressed people are in the company of others such as Einstein, Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill provides an important perspective and, perhaps, an additional reason to ask why some people do stigmatize depression.
For answers to our questions about electro convulsive therapy (ECT), colloquially known as "shock treatment," we were urged by certain psychiatrists to interview Dr. Max Fink, Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology Emeritus at SUNY at Stonybrook, who is an internationally recognized leader in the field. ECT will never be devoid of some controversy and debate, but Dr. Fink's answers and those in a related interview with Dr. Glass of The Journal of the American Medical Association were very interesting and confirmed what other psychiatrists had told us: that ECT can be a highly effective treatment for severe depression, when other therapies have failed. And, through the use of mild anesthetics and muscle relaxants, ECT today has evolved from the draconian and punitive depiction years ago in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
We hope that the following interviews will be of interest and, most importantly, of help to CBS viewers and readers of the CBS Cares website.
Interview with Mike Wallace. | |  |
