Mental illness, suicide, depression were in my family. But they didn’t have to be in me.

By Kate Woodsome, Published: February 3 E-mail the writer

My mother is mentally ill. My 15-year-old cousin committed suicide. Many of my relatives struggle with depression, although few use the word.
By all accounts, I should be mentally ill, right? It’s inherited — or contagious — isn’t it?

For years, I subscribed to that thinking. I lived in fear that one day a chemically imbalanced sleeper cell would wake up and make me “crazy.”
In high school, I was terrified that my friends would stop hanging out with me if they discovered my mom had lost touch with reality. I didn’t tell anyone that she would fly into violent rages, pummeling me for stretching out the collars of my T-shirts so I could breathe easier, or that she would punish me by refusing me food.
Few knew that when I was 14 my big sister slipped out her bedroom window to escape my mother’s sickness and never came back. Or that two years later, my mom, a respected teacher, had spent the weekend in jail for stalking me after I ran away to live with my father, a man I hardly knew because they divorced when I was 3 months old. I figured my friends wouldn’t want the “crazy” to rub off on them.
I was ashamed of the crazy. I thought the best way to make it go away was to pretend it wasn’t happening. As I grew up, I polished my public persona: Straight-A student! Varsity tennis! Managing editor of the school newspaper! College scholarship! Foreign correspondent! Good job in a Washington newsroom!
I wasn’t crazy. But the effects of pretending nothing was wrong all those years were not healthy. In high school, I flirted with bulimia and cut myself once with a Gillette razor, not because I wanted to die but because pain was more familiar than peace. As soon as I got to college, I found myself a mentally unstable boyfriend. I thought I could fix him. Wrong. He grew up to die in a fiery car crash.
I craved adrenaline and conflict. I moved to Cambodia after college, stopped talking to my dad and sister, and picked fights with friends. I tested my gravity, riding the roofs of moving trains and praying my buddies weren’t too drunk to race their motorcycles with me on the back.
I was terrified that if I stopped doing, running, pushing against someone or something, the pain would swallow me. So I lived in a high-functioning state of chaos.
A therapist later would give me a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. I was numb, detached from the war that raised me yet vibrating with anxiety, and I had no idea it didn’t have to be that way.