“Brilliant Madness” : Battle With Manic Depression Caused Prep Tennis Star to Take Her Own Life

Lora Cooley sits at the kitchen table in her home, a few miles from Victor Valley High, her hands folded in front of her, resting on a worn paperback.

“Brilliant Madness” is the story of Patty Duke’s struggle with manic depression.

“That’s what it was, exactly,” Lora says. “It was brilliant madness.”

Cooley is referring to the days before and after July 5, the day Cooley’s daughter, Julie Banks, took her own life in her bedroom in their Victorville home. Cooley bought the book in May, shortly after her daughter was discovered to be a manic depressive. She says it was to be her guide as she traveled with Julie through the pain to recovery.

“We were just learning how to help her,” she says. “It just came too soon. She didn’t give us enough time.”

Along with friends and family, Cooley believes the 17-year-old girl, who had also attempted suicide in May, was not the same girl who had been an honor student at Victor Valley and one of the best age-group tennis players in Southern California. That girl had a permanent smile, was a little slow to pick up the punch line of jokes and had accepted a full athletic scholarship to Boston University.

Manic depression, a genetic chemical imbalance in the brain, affects more than 2 million Americans. The disease, as her older brother Jack says, “made her unable to look past the present.”

And in the present was pain.

“There is a saying that we don’t live from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope,” Jack, 23, said. “Well, Julie couldn’t see the hope. She couldn’t see that things would get better, just that she couldn’t be the person she wanted to be right now.”

Before the first suicide attempt, Banks was a mother’s dream and an opponent’s nightmare. She graduated with a 4.3 grade-point average and every Citrus Belt League tennis award sat in her trophy case at home.

In 1992, the Southern California Tennis Assn. named her its most improved player and honored her with its sportsmanship award the next year. She was also ranked as high as 12th in her age group in the Southland.

“I have never seen anyone who worked as hard,” said tennis instructor Jeff Bliss, who worked with Banks throughout her career. “She never lost her concentration. She was the most focused player I have ever seen.”

She was also very close to her mother. With Banks’ two brothers away at college, and her father, Randy Banks, remarried and living in Coeur d’Alene, Ida., it was only the two of them.

“She could tell her mom anything,” Banks’ friend Sonia Cahill said. “They were unbelievably close. I have never seen anybody who was that close to her mom.”

Said Shawna Platter, who played with Banks on the Victor Valley tennis team: “I remember a bunch of friends got together before Julie died and we were, you know, making fun of people, and we started talking about Julie, but nobody had a bad thing to say about her.

“Everybody liked Julie because she always cared about what you were doing. She would always get into long, deep talks with people. She would ask questions like ‘Why [do] you believe in this,’ or ‘Why [do] you like doing that?’ She was really curious, and that made her someone you wanted to talk to.”

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In the spring, others noticed Banks change.

She was withdrawn and had severe headaches. She had trouble sleeping and had to make an effort simply to smile or laugh with friends.

“She talked about the headaches, and I knew she wasn’t sleeping well, but I never knew how bad at first,” Cooley said. “And Julie was just somebody who never got sick.”

On May 9, Banks attempted suicide by swallowing a handful of sleeping pills. Her mother found her on her bedroom floor shortly after she had taken the pills and called paramedics, who rushed her to the hospital. After she was revived, she was examined and found to be manic depressive. She began counseling and was prescribed Lithium, an antidepressant.

After the suicide attempt, she told her family she wanted to get better, that she was going to win the battle, now that she knew what she was fighting. She appeared eager to listen to those, such as her mother, who were reaching out to her.

She was also determined not to let her illness show on the tennis court.

In June, the week of her graduation, she competed in a Southern California sectional tournament.

“She would be sick before her match, in the locker room barely able to stand,” her brother Jack said. “But she would still go out there and play. And she played like a wizard, like a champion, and then after the match she would revert back to the sickness. She wasn’t going to let anyone know that something was wrong.”

Banks’ closest friends, who were not told about her condition, say in retrospect they remember small changes. They noticed the slight gain in weight and that she was wearing more makeup to hide the effects the Lithium had on her skin, but none believed anything was seriously wrong.

“I remember we would tease her about wearing more makeup,” said Tami Calvillo, 18, a friend. “We would all say that she was growing up.”

Banks had talked about suicide with some friends, particularly in the aftermath of the Feb. 21 double suicide of two 14-year-old freshman girls in a ravine near Victor Valley High.

“We talked about those girls once, and Julie was saying how it was a waste what those girls did,” Calvillo said. “And we even joked about it. She was saying, ‘Hey, we should do something like that,’ but I knew she was just kidding. But now I look back on it and I don’t know.”

She had also talked about suicide in the fall with friend Rocio Camarena, but said at the time that she could never do anything like that.

But sometime after that, Banks changed. She started associating with people she felt could understand her better.

In December, she began spending more time with another girl named Julie whom she had known since junior high, but with whom she had never been close.

“We were both weird and loud,” her new friend, 17, said.

But the two had more in common than they knew at the time. In June, Banks told her new best friend about her attempted suicide. And her friend told Banks of her own attempt, also with sleeping pills, in the summer of 1993.

“I couldn’t believe when she told me because she was always the stronger of the two of us,” the friend said. “After that, we kind of had an agreement. It was like if you won’t, I won’t.

“She had told me that she thought about [suicide] every day. But I would try and boost her up. We were in it together.”

Banks spent much of the final week of her life in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on a senior trip.

“It seemed like she was having fun at night, but during the days she was tired and didn’t feel well,” Calvillo said.

She left Mexico a day early, leaving a note saying she had gone but not why. When Calvillo first saw the note she thought it had been left by Landeros, but then she noticed the heart above the ‘i’ on the signature--a Julie Banks trademark.

“She seemed fine in Mexico, but I know she wasn’t taking her pills,” Landeros said. “She was supposed to take them right before she went to bed; that is why we all believed they were sleeping pills. But we would get home so late or just fall asleep in other friends’ rooms so she really didn’t get the chance to take them.”

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Cooley said her daughter appeared happy the morning of July 5, the day after she returned from Mexico. She went to her grandmother’s house to swim and returned in the afternoon. She and her mother were to go to an appointment with Julie’s psychiatrist at 6 p.m. Because of graduation and the trip to Mexico, she had not seen her therapist in a month.

“When I got home from work at 4:30, Julie was lying on the couch and she started in, saying she didn’t feel like she belonged here.

“I kept telling her that it just took time, that she would get better, but she was saying ‘What do you what me to do, take pills all my life? I don’t want to be here if I have to take pills.’

“Then she said she was going to go for a walk, and I said I would go with her. And then she went into her room and closed the door and I said, ‘Julie please don’t close the door.’ I went in there and she started again saying how she didn’t feel like she belonged.

“I said ‘Julie please, you’re not thinking about trying something again,’ and she said ‘No, I would never try that again.’ ”

Cooley told her daughter to get ready for the appointment and left the room.

Banks took a handgun she had sneaked out of her grandparents’ house. Cooley heard the shot from the kitchen.

The morning after her daughter’s death, Cooley went to the high school and spoke to 75 of Banks’ friends.

“I wanted to tell them that they were not to blame,” Cooley said. “They couldn’t figure out what went wrong. I wanted them to know that she was on medication and under treatment. I wanted them to know that it was a serious, serious disease. That it wasn’t a reactive suicide, that she wasn’t mad at anybody. It was the disease.”

Cooley is slowly understanding what happened to her daughter. She rereads Duke’s book, trying to learn how she lived with the disease. She says people call her now, asking about the disease, revealing to her that they too are being treated for manic depression. She knows she will live with it forever.

“Brilliant madness,” Cooley says. “That’s what it was with Julie. That’s what happened to Julie. She was just brilliant. But there was nothing she could do.”