Gathered late Thursday afternoon in the Whittenberger Auditorium, students, staff and community members listened to Kay Redfield Jamison discuss and answer questions on mood disorders and suicide.
Jamison is a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is a researcher and authority in the areas of mood disorders, depression and suicide. In addition to researching manic depression in depth, she fights her own struggle with the illness.
Discussing her own experience and decision to tell people about her diagnosis, Jamison explained talking about the illness helps bring light to the issue.
“If you can try and describe something, perhaps it takes away some of the awfulness,” she said.
Though freshman Cara Benjamin attended the session as part of her Global Health Connections class, she said she recognized the importance of talking about mood disorders and suicide.
Benjamin’s boyfriend’s father committed suicide less than a year ago, and the pair has been working through the death together.
“His dad was like a dad to me,” she said.
She said in helping a person deal with a loved one’s suicide it is important to remind them the suicide was not their fault and they should talk through their emotions.
“You need to reach out to those people that are there for you,” Benjamin said.
In addition to her boyfriend’s father, Benjamin’s stepfather’s dad also committed suicide. Though she didn’t know the man, she said her stepdad told her he did not want to talk about the death for years after it occurred but never felt closure until he did.
Jamison said, in addition to helping people work through their feelings on suicide and mood disorders, talking about mental illnesses can help de-stigmatize them.
She attributed a lot of the stigma around mood disorders to the belief that mental illnesses are untreatable and the public presentations of those who are untreated.
“It means people have no notion of how treatable these illnesses are,” she said.
Roger Morris, a sophomore studying business at IU, attended Jamison’s discussion due to his interest in depression and mood disorders. Morris said he has friends with disorders and suicidal thoughts.
“It’s hard to see people you care about suffering, and the kind of suffering you see in people with depression is a different kind of suffering,” he said.
Morris said because what he sees in his friends is mental suffering, it is often hard to know what to do. However, he stressed the fact that people educating themselves on mental illness and attempting to understand depression and suicide is crucial in helping those who suffer.
“As much as I can,” Morris said. “I try to be there for them and not let them think they’re alone.”
