Afraid of the Day: A Daughter's Journey

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

The author’s mother, Martha, began a lifelong struggle with clinical
depression shortly after giving birth to her daughter in 1962. Over the
next 20 years of days when she never got out of bed, she endured
hundreds of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) treatments, continuous
antidepressant medication, and endless exhortations to pull herself
together. Only when a new doctor in a new hospital put her on lithium, a
treatment dismissed by an earlier doctor, did Martha begin to lead a
more stable life, albeit a greatly damaged one.

In the meantime, Martha’s daughter in her teens developed severe
problems with alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and food, which culminated in
her being diagnosed, as an adult, with her own clinical depression. When
she moved out of her parents’ home, she cried at her newfound sense of
peace; when she took a sabbatical in Europe, she had a good time; when
she returned to Canada, the bulimia also returned. For years she
stubbornly refused to take medication or to tell any counsellor that she
was gay. When a counsellor gave her Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing
Down the Bones, she left her job to write this book.

One of the most distressing aspects of this memoir is the doctors’
failure to acknowledge or to treat the effect of Martha’s depression
on her whole family. The author’s father retreated into anger, her
brother seemingly into distance; we hear little of any professional help
for these men. The women, on the other hand, found help with friends,
neighbours, doctors, counsellors, teachers, and finally a lover, who all
put out a helping hand or stood helplessly by to be there when the women
came in out of the dark.

There is a touch of dispassion in the narrative. Short passages from
early journals bring us jolts of anguish; the few poems allow the reader
moments of reflection. For the rest, it is a detailed and careful
account of a terrible social problem that is still with us.