Shedding Light on the Dark Forces of Suicidal Depression

They met at a sidewalk cafe on Lido Isle. On that day last November, they followed their normal routine of having breakfast and then letting time get away from them. When they were ready to leave three or four hours later, the waitress jokingly asked if they wanted to permanently reserve the table or simply memorialize it with a plaque.

Such was the friendship between Carol Pollack Gerachis and Barbara Beringer. Two longtime friends getting together every few months and leaving nothing undiscussed.

Or so Beringer thought.

Not long after that November confab, on New Year’s Eve, Carol Gerachis stepped onto railroad tracks in Irvine and let a train put her out of the mental misery she had hidden from everyone. A longtime math instructor, Gerachis chaired the math and science department at Rancho Santiago College. She was 49.

Her friend’s suicide stirred powerful thoughts in Beringer. No, Gerachis hadn’t told her she was in a suicidal depression. How could she not share something like that? Was she really that good a friend?

Instinctively, though, Beringer understood. For although she considered Carol her good friend, neither had she ever confided that she too had been so severely depressed that two years earlier she had considered standing on railroad tracks herself.

The irony wasn’t lost on Beringer. Over the lunch hour Thursday, Beringer, an Orange County Superior Court clerk, talked in an empty courtroom about depression’s insidious nature, how unreceptive friends and family often are when they see it in those close to them and, most poignantly, how hard sufferers try to disguise it.

“It’s like being in a fog,” she said. “A real dense fog. You can’t see or feel anything else. The lights have gone out. You don’t know what the hell is going on. Most of the time, it’s disorienting, and you just see no reason to go on living.”

Beringer’s bout with depression peaked in 1993. In spring of that year, she went to a psychiatrist. By September, her depression had deepened to the point that she gave her keys to her apartment manager and decided to kill herself.

Deep into that fog in 1993, Beringer, now 47, saw just enough light to realize that suicide would devastate her three grown children. For that reason alone, she says, she checked herself into a hospital, where she stayed for two weeks in the psychiatric ward. By the end of 1993, she says, she felt the illness lessening its grip on her. She stayed on antidepressants until about six months ago. She considers herself over the illness now.

Early on, she did some personal browbeating when reflecting on Carol Gerachis. She wondered if it would have made a difference if she hadn’t been embarrassed to tell Gerachis about her own mental illness. If she had, Beringer says, her friend might have realized that depression, like other illnesses, can be treated and overcome.

Statistics I got this week from the National Institute of Mental Health indicate that 17.5 million Americans over 18 have depressive disorders. That accounts for nearly 10% of the adult population, the institute says.

Beringer, however, didn’t dwell on might-have-beens. Instead, she wrote an article for the Rancho Santiago College newspaper in which she tackled head-on the fears that many of us have about mental disorders. She revealed her own medical history and urged people who believe they are depressed to call their doctor. She urged others who believe their friends might be depressed to “intrude” in their lives and encourage them to get help.

She wrote: “And at this moment I am extremely grateful that I am here to tell Carol’s family that for those of us who experience suicidal depression, the inner pain is excruciating and the desire to terminate the pain is irresistible.”

The illness, she wrote, is a “most cunning, insidious sickness that tricks its victims into believing that the only way to end the pain is to end one’s life. . . .”

Bob Gerachis, Carol’s husband of 14 years, says he had “zero” indication she was suicidal. “It came on toward the end,” he told me this week. “She called it anxiety about a couple changes that were going on in our lives, but they were minor changes.” Since her death, he says, he’s learned much about mental illness.

“You have to keep after this thing every day, or it will overwhelm you,” he says of the depression his wife suffered. “My wife kept it secret for years. . . . They hide it well. What an actress. We as human beings are not ready for this; we’re not that bright to understand it. Her many friends who are more familiar with this than I am say they never saw anything, nothing, which is the great problem. So if they don’t tell you what the problem is, how are we to know?”

The answer to that question is why Barbara Beringer revealed her own story to friends and others. It was time, she felt, to quit being ashamed of having been sick and to let others know there’s no shame in depression.

She did it for herself, she told me, but also for her friend Carol.

“I want to make sure she didn’t die in vain,” she says. “If we can save one person, she won’t have.”

Dana Parsons’ columns appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.