By Alan J. Borsuk of the Journal Sentinel staff
Nov. 18, 1999
Photo/Erwin Gebhard
Kate Leung chats with math and
science teacher Karen Hurka before class at Kradwell School in
Wauwatosa. The school has 105 students who have a variety of
mental and emotional problems. |
Kate Leung was only 11 when she started
feeling like she was wearing an old, heavy overcoat.
"You can't move, you can't stand up,
you can't do anything; it just holds you," she says.
"There've been days or months or years
where you sort of feel like Atlas trying to hold up the world, but the
world instead is the depression, and you're trying to keep it away from
you. Sometimes you just can't fight because the fight's too
exhausting."
Leung, now 17, has not taken off the coat
completely in the years since then. But it is much less confining now, and
Kate is able to move, to stand up, to do things - and to tell a story that
carries a theme of hope.
In fact Kate has a clear idea of what
message she wants people to get from the telling of her story: "The
issues I feel the strongest about are the understanding and acceptance of
these disorders and diseases. The fact that there is a way to get through
this and you can get through it. It may be a never-ending struggle, but
things get better."
Kate is a serious person, who speaks
deliberately and quietly. She is the only child of Andrea Leung, a
violinist for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and her husband, Woodrow,
a computer systems analyst. The family lives in Shorewood.
Kate loves birds and horses. She likes
literature and science. She's not much into shopping and that kind of
stuff. She has a boyfriend. She scored in the 99th percentile on the ACT
college admission exams recently.
And - who knows exactly why - she has
struggled for years for control of her life with a force called
depression.
The bad news is that Kate's depression was
about as severe and resistant to treatment as such things can get. The
good news is that if Kate can make it through, so can a large number of
other teens whose depressions can be dealt with in simpler ways.
Kate's success in dealing with her illness
includes a supportive cast of family and friends. It includes a lot of
medication and treatment - round after round, just about everything in the
arsenal.
And, as Kate stands a few weeks away from
graduating high school, it includes a distinctive private school that aims
to help seventh- to 12th-graders with emotional, behavioral or mental
problems who aren't succeeding in conventional schools. Called Kradwell
School, it is located on the grounds of the Milwaukee Psychiatric Hospital
in Wauwatosa.
Up until she was in sixth grade, Kate
seemed noteworthy only for the high level of her success in school.
Photo/Erwin Gebhard
Kate exercises her
thoroughbred, Floppy Disc, at Lignite Stables near West Bend. |
Her father admits he's a perfectionist; her
mother is inclined that way, too. But, Woodrow Leung says, they thought
they were doing a good job of avoiding pressuring Kate and putting her in
"the trap" of perfectionism.
It didn't work. "I felt an extreme
pressure from others to be perfect and I was very perfectionist
myself," Kate says. "Anything less than perfect was not
acceptable." If Kate were assigned to write a sentence using each
word on a spelling list, she'd write a story using each word, her mother
says.
The cause of depression is rarely one
thing, experts say. Anthony Meyer, medical director of Milwaukee
Psychiatric Hospital, says stressful environments can leave a child's
coping skills bankrupt and, perhaps combined with a genetic disposition or
physical issues, lead to a depression.
Kate says it was clear to her that she was
in a major depression by the middle of her sixth-grade year. But, she
says, "I didn't think anyone would accept it or I felt people would
be disappointed in me, so I didn't tell anyone."
She was able to pretend until early in
seventh grade, when she ended up as an inpatient in a hospital, and,
following her release, made a suicide attempt.
Meyer, who is also director of child and
adolescent psychiatry for the Medical College of Wisconsin, says that in a
large proportion of juvenile depression cases, a sound course of treatment
can result in a child getting back to normal functioning in two to four
months.
But Kate's case was not typical and the
course of the next several years was filled with both the difficulty of
her situation and the frustrating search for a way to turn things around.
Combined with a sleep disorder she was experiencing, a common situation in
depression, her depression put her school attendance in a slump and led to
serious differences with school officials.
"My school didn't want to deal with
me, they didn't want to deal with anyone who was different," Kate
says. She ended up sitting out much of her seventh-grade year, a period
that included several hospitalizations.
Eighth grade found her in public school.
"I liked it but the schedule was just too hard for me, too
demanding," Kate says. She had attendance problems, especially in the
mornings, given her sleep disorder.
That led her and her parents to look into
Kradwell, where she ended up spending all her high school years. The
unusual program calls for only three hours of classes each day and
generally has no more than five students in a class. The family now sees
Kradwell as a godsend that saved her educational career.
While Kate speaks highly of the school, she
says the key to her improvement in the last couple years has been her
medication. Without it, "I would have been dead years ago," she
says. "My meds are definitely what keeps me alive, like insulin helps
a diabetic."
But finding drugs that worked for her on a
continuing basis was especially difficult. Andrea Leung says that by her
count, Kate has been through courses of treatment involving 15
anti-depressants, nine sleep medications and five mood stabilizers.
While the use of drugs in treating both
adult and juvenile depression is growing, Meyer and Randall B. Steinhaus,
a psychiatrist who deals with many young people, said they should not be
the first resort in a depression case. A thorough look at the patient's
situation and other therapies should be tried first, they suggested.
Meyer says there is a bell curve of how
easy it is to find successful results with meds, and a case such as Kate's
is way toward the end of the curve where you find the small number of
especially difficult cases.
Kate puts the support of family and friends
second on the list of what has helped her. She knows friends who didn't
get that support and it was very hard for them. "You need support
from people to get better," she says.
Photo/Erwin Gebhard
Kate and her friend Aaron
Fritter, 18, Wauwatosa, leave Kradwell School after their classes. |
Kate sometimes talks about her depression
as a force with a life of its own, a life that has the power to dominate
her life.
"It doesn't go away unless it really
wants to," she says. "You don't have control over it - it has
control over you."
Andrea Leung says that no one who hasn't
been through it can understand the anguish of having your child curled up
in a corner, saying that there is no reason to want to live to see
tomorrow.
"Kate would say, 'You don't
understand,' and it's true, you don't understand," her mother says.
"You pull apart your whole life, trying to figure out why this
happened . . . You begin to question everything, everything you did . . .
At some point, you just have to let go and say, what was was, and you just
go on."
Kate says, "Depression's really rotten
. . . It's an actual disease and it strikes and you don't know why it
strikes."
Kate says she has trouble now remembering a
lot of what went on during her most depressed times, in part because of
the nature and extent of her treatments.
"I forget what I've gone through. I
forget the pain and the hate and the anger and just all those
feelings," she says. "I've been doing a lot better lately, and
you take every day for what you can make it."
Both her parents are moved as their
daughter approaches something they once would have taken for granted, her
high school graduation.
"We've seen this change from despair
and no hope to being productive and having goals and being able to
live," Woodrow says.
Andrea says, "Kate, I'm very proud of
who she is right now. She's had an incredible time; I don't think any
teenager should have to go through what she's done."
But teenagers have and will. What would
Kate tell an eighth-grader now in the situation she was in when she was
that age?
"Life is never hopeless, even though
it may seem that way. To never give up. I always told myself that there is
life beyond depression and you're worth it. . . . It's just such a hard
thing . . . "
Her voice trails off. She returns to
talking about depression as if it were a being that inhabits her life:
"Even though I hate it, I still thank
it for what it allowed me to learn."
The being has not gone away completely.
Steinhaus says depression is a highly recurrent disorder and continuing
treatment is a key to fending it off. And Kate continues to get treatment.
She says she's been struggling a little
more lately, and says that's likely because of the short days of winter
arriving.
But she has reached a point where she has a
definite sense of the future - maybe a PhD, maybe an M.D., maybe work in
research psychiatry ("that would be really interesting"). Or
maybe something that would pick up on her strong interest in birds, like
field ornithology.
"Every day, you can do a lot with that
day," she says.
That can be easy to say and a great
accomplishment to practice.
©1999 Journal Sentinel Inc., reproduced
with permission
