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Book on depression is cry of help for black women NEW YORK (June 8, 1998 12:08 p.m. EDT http://www.nando.net) - The secret depression of some "strong" black women, often burdened with the responsibility for family survival and undervalued by society, may lead them to abuse alcohol and drugs, author Meri Nana-Ama Danquah says. But a religious culture that stigmatizes depression as a turning away from God and alcoholism as a sin discourages many of these women from seeking medical help. Recent statistics show that less than 10 percent of the tens of thousands of African American women suffering from depressive disorders seek professional help, compared to some 60 percent of whites. Danquah's new book, "Willow Weep for Me" (W.W. Norton & Co.), is a very personal story of her own experience with depression, written with the intention of jolting her readers into facing possibly self-destroying problems. It is a harrowing story, clearly and elegantly told. Danquah, now 30, moved with her parents from her native Ghana to Washington at the age of six. She witnessed her parents' hostility toward one another grow and her divorced mother later descend into bitterness and negativism. At age 13 Danquah was raped by a young neighbor. When she confided her child's pain and fear to her mother's African American lover, Jonathan, he responded by raping her again. At the same time, like a constant refrain, came the traumatizing racism of white acquaintances, like the boy who told her at a high school mixer, "I don't dance with niggers." By the time she was 22 she had a "strange and terrifying space of sadness and then ... a cobweb of fatigue," along with unpredictable push-pull emotional relationships with the people closest to her that were early indicators of depression. Sometimes the illness was "as flimsy as a feather, barely penetrating the surface of my life, hovering like a slight halo of pessimism. Other times it (came) on gradually like a common cold or a storm, each day presenting new signals and symptoms until I (was) drowning in it." When she was confronted by friends who recognized her depression and the excessive drinking with which she tried to disguise it, she was reluctant to acknowledge her problem. Working as a writer in California, she delayed seeking psychotherapy, lost a husband, missed editorial deadlines and was fired from jobs. All the while she worried about her ability to give her daughter, Korama, a happy childhood. "I have noticed that the mental illness that affects white men is often characterized, if not glamorized, as a sign of genius, a burden of cerebral superiority, artistic eccentricity -- as if their depression is somehow heroic," she writes. Depressed white women are depicted as idle, spoiled, or hysterical, while black men are demonized and pathologized. But the main stereotype of black women, she said, is that they are the ever- nurturing "mammies" of the nation. The upshot is that "when a black woman suffers from a mental disorder, the overwhelming opinion is that she is weak. And weakness in a black woman is intolerable." It was difficult for Danquah to be a strong and responsible single mother, however, when at every turn she could point to someone who had abandoned or betrayed her. Even Ghana, where an extended family might have provided happy childhood memories, seems to have failed her; she apparently got none of the emotional sustenance from her birthplace that has given many successful migrants added endurance. Ghanaian culture has "rigid mores," she writes, and she could not understand the language of West Africa's Akan people, Twi, when her mother, father and husband conversed in it. Cut adrift in the United States, she formed relationships, sometimes brittle, with anyone who appeared able or willing to offer her support when the bouts of depression set in. "Usually I don't care much for the company of others, but when I was depressed, I used to hate being alone because I felt as though I stopped existing when I was by myself," she wrote. Official estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics suggest black women have the lowest rate of suicide in the United States -- if unexplained "accidents" are excluded -- but the highest rate of depression. But because of cultural factors, only 7 percent of black women seek professional help, according to the book "What the Blues Is All About" by Angela Mitchell and Kennise Herring released in December. After Danquah got over her opposition to therapy, she started biochemical treatment with Zoloft pills -- and came in for more than her share of side- effects, she writes. "I had always thought that opposite of depression was happiness, that once you stopped feeling bad you automatically started feeling good. That's not what happened to me. Once I started taking Zoloft, there was no good or bad; I just stopped feeling." Danquah, who writes for two major American newspapers and several magazines, found herself unable to produce work in such a flat and untextured emotional landscape. "Whereas before I had been drinking to shield myself from the pain, now I was drinking to access the pain. ... Never in my life had I drunk so much. It went from a modest desire into a craving and progressed until it was a flesh and blood jones (addiction)," she writes in her book. But for her all is well that ends well. Through talking to therapists and to journalist Eugene Bledsoe, a very good friend whose depressive but highly accomplished mother figures in the memoir, Danquah came to see that she could exert influence over her treatment. She changed her medication and rearranged her life to avoid the circumstances that triggered her illness. She chose an inspirational song to accompany her morning meditation. She exercised regularly and improved her diet. And once a week she set aside time to enjoy an activity with Korama alone. "One after the other, I kept bringing plants into my home until at last I learned how to tend to them. It probably sounds ridiculous but I saw my plants as an extension of myself. If they thrived, I thrived, my daughter thrived," she wrote. "With the help of my present therapist, I am learning to find a balance, to distinguish between moods and passions that are healthy and beneficial and those that lead me into self-destructive situations," she said in an upbeat final chapter. Handling social situations was more of a challenge than devising personal schedules for someone "with an uncanny ability to shred compliments into insults; and then ... use these perceived insults to tear apart my self- esteem." But she added, "These days I am doing this less and less." By Joy Elliott, Reuters Copyright 1998 Nando.net Copyright 1998 Reuters News Service janet paterson aka calendar control supervisor 51/10 - sinemet/selegiline/prozac - [log in to unmask] quotations: http://newww.com/cgi-bin/do_cal?c:newvoice pwp event calendar: http://newww.com/cgi-bin/do_cal?c:pwpc