I just finished a memoir by Naomi Judd, addressing her struggle with profound depression, anxiety disorder and PTSD. I had the book for a couple of years, but hadn’t started reading it until she committed suicide.
The book ended with her climbing out of her depression and giving lots of advice about how to cope with it. It’s heartbreaking that all of those struggles and a seeming recovery, she couldn’t make it. She and Wynonna made an appearance at an awards show, announced an impending tour and were finally to be inducted in the Country Music Hall of Fame. The day before the ceremony, she put a gun to her head and ended her life.
Her struggles with depression , anxiety disorders and PTSD resonated with me because I’m coming off of 18 months of nearly unbearable physical and mental anguish.
Ms. Judd made a comment about feeling alone and isolated, but feeling unable to interact with others. Mine developed into one of my infrequent bouts of agoraphobia.
I actually walked over to the Clubhouse last evening and played Bingo with other residents, most of whom I was just meeting. I also walked both yesterday and today, things I thought I was unable to do even a few days ago. It took a lot of encouragement from friends and my therapist giving me homework, for me to follow through on it.
If you suffer with mental health issues, please reach out. There are people and agencies willing to help, although Covid has greatly exacerbated the issues with overextended resources along with increased demand for services. Reach out, you are loved and needed and worthy. You are NOT alone.
Reading these comments has brought some unexpected or unacknowledged feelings up for me about the Judds and their music, but I don't want this post to be about me. I think that the comments above show a sensitivity to life and death and demonstrate how someone's life and writing and music can touch people's hearts after they die. I think that this also cuts through so many of the judgmental attitudes about suicide that prevent us from coming to grips with what suicide is and how to prevent it. Depression is real, and these days you might well be taken for crazy if you're not struggling with depression or being swept away by it.
We try to affirm and encourage people on this blog, but I know that it takes much more than this to really help and be present for folks. I do believe that you're precious and a necessary part of a larger picture. I hope that that is of some help.
I think that my friend's commentary also begins to cut through the prejudices against country music, and against women country musicians and singers in particular. Those women get stereotyped and looked down on and commercialized or Nashvilleized, but at their best they are telling stories that people can see themselves in. That looking down on the music and the musicians and performers is looking down on the people who see themselves in that music.
Kerry Leigh Merritt published her book Masterless Men about five years ago. This is a tough book to read, and its not for everyone, but it tells a true story of poor whites and their relationship to slavery in the Antebellum South. A significant number of poor whites living in the Deep or Solid South had no material interest in slavery as an institution and likely either opposed it or were indifferent to it prior to the Civil War. They had to be forced to join the Confederate armies in large numbers, and many deserted. As many as 100,000 white southerners crossed the lines during the Civil War. Large numbers of those who stayed behind helped cause the slave economy to collapse. It is a lasting tragedy of our history that there was not greater unity across racial lines in the anti-slavery struggle in the south, but Merritt helps us better understand why that was so.
Kerry Leigh Merritt does a great job in building on work done by W. E. B. Du Bois and others in tracing the Black freedom struggle before and during the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But I think that she is at her best in describing white poverty, mass white disaffection in the south in the early 19th century, cooperation between oppressed whites and Blacks where and when it did occur, and the conditions of dictatorship that the white southern ruling class used in order to separate Blacks and whites and terrorize each group.
The anger and listlessness (I cannot think of another word) that poor whites held onto as they hid in isolated communities or became an itinerant and precarious population that sometimes threatened the social order are in some measure the seeds of white depression and anger in the south. And that depression and anger (I think) helped birth country music. Seen in this way, Naomi Judd was living history, or was representing a history that we have not yet acknowledged as a nation.
I don't know that we will ever get to a point of stopping suicide if we can't confront this history and come to terms with it and turn this country around.
If you're struggling right now, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.
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