Depression Can Sometimes Hide

The Boston Globe

Kathy May lives in a split ranch in Scituate, has a husband and three sons, one in college, one in high school, and one in middle school.

There's an SUV in her driveway bearing her children's names on decals, a glittering shamrock hanging on her front door, and a medium-sized dog looking out the picture window the day I meet her.

It's picture-perfect. Except that the pretty woman who greets me and says, with a smile, "Come in," has eyes that are red from crying.

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May worked as a flight attendant for 21 years. Last October she was fired. She lost her income, her pension, all her benefits, and her ability to pretend she was fine when she wasn't.

"I was always able to separate my illness from my job," she says sitting on a chair in a house that was in mid-renovation when her paychecks stopped. Walls are torn down, beams are exposed, half a ceiling is missing. "I was good, pleasant, always professional. I didn't have one enemy."

May says — and this is difficult for her — her voice cracks, she shudders: "I have never been happy." She says that unhappy is her constant, that unhappy is where she has started her day every day for her whole life. "I can't explain the feeling," she says. She cries. She takes a deep breath. She whispers, "It's hard. It's just so hard."

For her whole life, she has hurt. For a few years, she, her husband, and kids lived in Florida. "I kept running. But you take it with you. The unhappiness is always there."

She puts on a happy face the way she puts on a coat and boots, deliberately, consciously. She has always had to mask her unhappiness. She started taking antidepressants after her first child was born. She saw a therapist while in Florida and talks to her sometimes on the phone. She works hard to fake it.

But after her father died in 2012, faking it got harder. Depression pulled her down, her coat weighing like lead, her boots cement. She still went through the motions, but they were harder to get through. She pretended to be OK, but she wasn't.

"I would go into work with migraines. I would go into work after not sleeping all night. I had panic attacks. I was a walking zombie. I don't know how I did it. Then it got really bad." She called in sick a lot. Then one day, she just didn't show up.

After she was fired, she saw her doctor, who recommended she see a local therapist. But she hasn't. She's incapable of making the phone call. Her unhappiness and depression incapacitate her.

"I've unraveled," she tells me, "and it's affected this family."

"A large proportion of people believe depression is just something that we all feel," Nelson Freimer, a psychiatric geneticist at the University of California Los Angeles, told Nature, the international journal of science, last November. "They think you should pull your socks up and get back to work."

Kathy May would love to pull up her socks and go back to work. But she's held hostage by a disease that society is just beginning to understand. A disease that still carries a stigma.

A man with a broken leg in a cast, struggling to walk with crutches, is helped, not told to snap out of it. A person who is blind walks with a white cane.

My granddaughter has Down syndrome. People see that she struggles.

May has struggled every day of her life. But for years, people didn't see. In the 21 years she flew, not a single passenger filed a complaint, she tells me. "I always projected positive and outgoing, but I was hurting inside."

That's how depression is. You don't always see it. And sometimes when you do, you don't recognize it and call it something else: Lazy. Unreliable. Difficult.

"I have always been a lost soul," May says. A lost soul who doesn't have a badge that says "Lost soul." No crutch, no cane, just a sadness in her eyes that, until now, she has hidden so well.