This In the Mix special was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In the Mix Host Andrea: Hi, I’m Andrea. Today’s show’s on depression. I’m here at the Third Eye Blind concert and recently the band wrote a song about suicide.

Stephan: This is probably the most depressing song we know how to play but it makes us feel good we can play it. This is a song for you. This is called "Jumper." [start of song]

Andrea: We’re going to talk to them a little bit later and hear the song live in concert. We’re also visiting Pierre, South Dakota, a small town struggling with an outbreak of teen suicide. We’re going to find out how they’re coping and what they’re doing to tackle depression before it goes too far. Today we’re going to show you the difference between everyday blues and when you need to get help.

Teen: When you’re depressed, from what I’ve learned, you feel hopeless, like nothing can help you.

Andrea: In Pierre, we talk with some teens about the pressures that lead to depression and how to deal with it.

Teen: Pierre’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody else.

Teen: Growing up in Pierre is awesome. I love it. It’s been a great place to grow up. It’s been safe.

Teen: The minute you get out, it’s just flat open nothing.

Teen: It’s a really beautiful town, but there’s not much to do. If you have stuff to do, it’s almost the same thing every single day.

Teen: I don’t think that there’s nothing to do here. I think that you just have to try to find something that you like, find your friends, hang out. Tonight we’re going to play softball.

Meet up at the Zesto and go from there. School life is, I think, just like anybody else’s. I think it’s very, very typical.

Teen: The pressure to fit in in this high school, it’s there. You want to fit it in. You want to be popular. You want to be—you want to be liked. What teen today doesn’t?

Teen: I mean, you don’t want to just exclude yourself to one group. You want to be with all groups but it’s kind of hard because maybe this one group doesn’t like this other group, you know.

Teen: It’s really hard to find a balance. Like with your friends and if you have a boyfriend.

Teen: I had a time where all of my friends had boyfriends or other friends and they weren’t calling me at that time. And I just started getting sadder and you know worse and worse. Friends will try and pressure you to do a lot of things that may go against your values.

Teen: I think peer pressure is good. I think—I really do. I really believe that pressure is good and it’s how you deal with that pressure that makes you an individual that’s going to either have character and have problems.

Teen: I just feel like sometimes I can’t do anything right. Like I think that a lot of it comes from girlfriend.

Teen: Getting rejected by a girl who—that’s really upsetting sometimes.

Teen: I think to a certain extent there’s a point where a guy cannot show, you know, any emotion.

Teen: I find it a lot easier to cry in front of girls just because [laughter] you know you cry in front of a guy, they’ll be, ‘Yeh, wussie boy, you crying over that." There’s a thin line between being upset and depressed.

Teen: I think sometimes you may not even know that you’re depressed. It’s just something—it’s just a phase that you’re going through and you think, ‘Oh, this will be over by morning.’

Teen: My parents were striving me to do a million and one things at one time. I got really stressed out and I was really down and every time I’d go home after school, I’d like lock myself in my room and listen to music and just cry.

Teen: No matter how good you do, you know, they always—and it’s good to be pushed but they’re always looking for so much more.

Teen: Endless pushing, that’s not good.

Teen: My dad been through two divorces now and that’s put a lot of stress on my life going through high school.

Teen: When you take out your stress in a physical manner, it doesn’t bother you any more.

Teen: I’m going out on bike riding and that gives me time to think about things, you know, and get out in the fresh air and it clears you mind a little bit more.

Teen: I didn’t make the volleyball team this year. Well, I put all my efforts into my ballet and I tried doing something different. I took the attention off what was—what had gone wrong in my life and put it onto something that I could improve.

Teen: I’ve been writing in a notebook and that seems to really help get things out of my system.

Teen: When I’m upset, it’s like the only thing I can think about and it just kind of drives you worse and worse, until you know, you actually find someone to talk to that really understands where you’re coming from.

Teen: Yeh, there’s going to be ups and downs in everyone’s life, no matter where you live, no matter where you grow up, no matter what kind of family you come from.

Teen: I think everybody feels depressed. I couldn’t imagine anyone not experiencing that emotion.

Teen: It’s when you can’t get out of that and you’re having bad days every day that you need to get help.

[back to concert]

Andrea: Hey, guys, we’re here with Third Eye Blind backstage at their concert. What kind of things get you guys down? What kind of things make you not feel, you know, on top of the world?

Kevin: The songs are about the moods that we’re in and I know that when I’m playing, playing the guitar I’m expressing the mood that I’m in, the anxiety, the pressure or joy. It could be any of those. It’s kind of a release for me.

Band Member: Bad shows make me depressed. I get depressed at a bad show. But also sometimes I can be in a bad mood and then I’ll do a show and I’ll feel much better.

Arion: I really, I don’t get depressed very often. I try—I work really hard at being happy. It’s important to me to just be happy and that keeps me feeling healthy, too. I listen to a lot of music and play music. That’s really a major force in keeping me happy and sane. I listen to music so much every day. It’s really important to me.

Andrea: You know there are a couple of things that can cure the everyday blues, exercise, for example and there’s also food. If you cut out things like red meat, salt, caffeine, alcohol in excess, you might find that you mood actually improves. Also, if you’re dieting, you may be not allowing yourself to get essential things that you need for energy and you’re not going to be in a good mood.

Kevin: But if you’re really depressed and find that you don’t enjoy things you used to and you can’t—you have trouble sleeping or you just can’t wake up in the morning, just don’t buy into the stigma of having the possibility of having a mental illness. Go in and get help.

Kevin: In my early twenties, I went through a period where I was just—felt like I was on my deathbed and I went through practically every antidepressant there was on the market. So I know what it feels like to, you know, to wake up and just want to go right back to bed. Anyone that’s feeling that way, I’m down with you and you just got to have faith that in time it will end, you know.

Andrea: When it comes to depression, you need to seek help. We talked to a psychologist to get some of the facts and talked to some young people who are getting help themselves.

Paul: I’ve been so depressed I couldn’t get up and leave the house. The first time I really noticed I was in depression was during eighth grade after my parents’ divorce. I thought that I would never be happy again.

Teen: My depression started approximately almost three, three and a half years ago, when my father died. I felt really angry, you know, it’s like, ‘How dare you die on me now!’

Shiloh: I was a real happy little girl. I used to play outside. I was a tomboy. When I started seventh grade, it was probably the time I noticed I was being more depressed because I was insecure about myself. I tried to fit in with the other people who I thought were more popular, or who I thought were cooler than others. That helped me get a lot deeper into depression because I wasn’t my own person.

Teen: Anyone can feel depressed at one point in their life. Anyone can feel sad, but when you’re depressed, from what I’ve learned, you feel hopeless, like nothing can help you. It’s not like, ‘Okay, snap out of it. Now, it’s time to move on.’ You don’t have that motivation anymore.

Belisa Vranich, Counselor: There’s a very big difference between just feeling down and feeling blue and being clinically depressed. One of thing things is if you feel down, you know that you can pick yourself up. With depression, you can’t do that.

Teen: I had a lot of migraines and insomnia. I would go to bed and it would be three or four in the morning and get up a couple of hours later. I didn’t sleep a lot. I didn’t eat a lot.

Teen: I was very lethargic. I was doing very poorly grade-wise. I failed English for the year.

Teen: I was very alone. I didn’t have many friends. I didn’t have a high self-esteem. I was never active in any school activities.

Vranich: You need to seek help when the symptoms get so bad that they’re affecting the way you function in a daily way.

Teen: I wasn’t really aware of what was happening outside, in the outside world. I was feeling very lonely, like no one was there.

Teen: When I get sad, I’d sit and I’d go into myself. It’s very hard to just communicate with people.

Teen: Drinking and using drugs is a lot of what I used to get a way my depression and hide it and make it look like I was having fun. I was rebelling because I wanted attention. I wanted my family to notice that I was depressed and that I needed help. I needed them to tell me that they loved me and tell me that they cared about me. I used to sit in my room and just cry or write stories. I wrote my obituary a couple of times.

Teen: I told a friend I wanted to die and she told my teacher and then from there my teacher sent me to the office and they sat down and talked to me.

Vranich: There’s a very big difference between thinking about death and thinking about afterlife, and having questions about it, and actually thinking about wanting to hurt yourself or wanting to end your life. That is one of the symptoms of depression. It is a very serious symptom of depression and you should look for help immediately.

Teen: I was diagnosed with manic depression. You feel down one moment, crying, and maybe a couple of hours later, everything’s fine. All of a sudden, you’re excited. You really don’t know what you’re excited about. It’s, it’s not really real. You’re really covering up what you really feel.

Vranich: Sometimes when people have depression it is that they have a chemical imbalance. The chemicals in the body change and that’s where the imbalance comes in. You can develop a chemical imbalance and you can be born with one.

Teen: I’ve been on many medications. It has helped me…help control my moods.

Vranich: What the medication will do, the antidepressants will do is take the very lows off of your depression, stop you feeling suicidal, help you sleep better, get you back on track. It will not stop you from being sad if something sad happens and it definitely won’t make you feel high or happy all the time. Antidepressants should always be used in combination with therapy.

Teen: I was diagnosed with depression. I was in the hospital. People would make fun of me, or you know say that she’s crazy or something.

Vranich: People forget that it’s a medical condition and part of the reason that it’s difficult is because you can’t see it. Depression is neither a weakness—it’s not something you can be blamed for—it’s also not something you can fix on your own. You need to find an adult that you trust and let them know that you want help and let you know how you’re feeling. This can be a school counselor. It can be a teacher, your parent.

Teen: I figured that I should look into something like for a support group or something like, so we checked it out and decided to join.

Teen: I go to counseling now. It’s an easy way to get your feelings out without having to be embarrassed. Cause if the person that you have confidence in and you can tell them whatever you want and it will be confidential between you and that other person.

Vranich: Eighty percent of people that seek treatment feel better. The treatment is successful. They feel much better. The symptoms either go away completely or are reduced a significant amount.

Teen: I’ve learned that depression is very common amongst teenagers, preteens and that it’s curable if you want to cure it.

Teen: I got to realize that people did care for me and that I had value, that I had self worth for myself after a while and I had confidence.

Teen: I’ve grown a lot with learning how to fight my depression, learning how to take control over it and not letting it control me.

Andrea: If depression is left untreated, it may result in suicide, which is one of the leading causes of death among teenagers. Now, you guys wrote a song about suicide called "Jumper."

Stephen: This is probably the most depressing song we know how to play but it makes us feel good to play it. This is a song for you. This is called "Jumper." [band begins to sing "Jumper"]

Andrea: What made you write this song?

Stephen: It’s not just a song about some guy offing himself. It’s really—the songs that we write, even though they deal with dark themes, there’s something much more redemptive about them. I think they’re—"Jumper" is really about understanding. And everybody carries demons around and everybody carries some sort of or they carry some sort of scar around. The message of "Jumper" is just there comes a time where you just put the past away. The response we got to "Jumper" has been quite phenomenal. We’ve been like feel really good about being able to make some, some statement that is in some way redemptive.

Andrea: Suicide is preventable. Most people who are suicidal can’t see alternatives to their problems.We visited Pierre, South Dakota, to see how teens are dealing with suicide in their community.

Teen: Since I’ve been in high school, there’s been four teen suicides.

Teen: I feel trapped in this town. I really do. You go to a different town and [they] say, ‘Yeh, where are you from?’ ‘Pierre, South Dakota.’ ‘Oh, yeh, suicide town.’

Teen: Here in Pierre, we’ve always been considered an innocent town. I don’t want to seem naïve, but we’re very innocent. We have that small, small town goodness to us. And I think that for such a new problem as teen suicide, that was kind of an awakening, and I think a lot of people saw that as a loss of our innocence.

Teen: Every teenager in this town has in one way or another been affected by suicide. Whether they’ve lost a best friend or a boyfriend or, you know, a brother or sister, they’ve been affected by it.

Kelsey: My brother never showed any signs of depression. I mean, he’d get in fights with my dad and that’s about it. I mean, the signs that he showed weren’t very strong. I was thirteen when he killed himself. It’s been two years. The year before he died, he started giving me clothes. Now I look back at it, I think it was a sign that, you know, something’s wrong. I’m guessing that he couldn’t, he felt like he couldn’t’ talk to anybody, but if he really wanted to, he probably would have tried. I just don’t think he tried hard enough.

I was really scared to go into the first day of school, having everybody look at me, wondering, ‘Hey, look, that’s the girl whose brother committed suicide this past summer.’ I got really bad depression. I did not like the way I looked. I did not like the way I dressed. I was caught drinking and got grounded for a month. About a week later after that, I was caught smoking and grounded for another month and that’s when I OD’d. I did not want to die. I never, I never ever wanted to die. I think that the reason why, you know, part of the reason why I OD’d was because my brother had all the attention after he died and thinking, well, maybe, I’d be able to do the same thing and get as much attention as he did.

Madelyn Gould, New York Psychiatric Institute: You will often see that after suicide the victim’s get a lot of attention. That’s nothing to be envious about but that’s not the attention that you want. For one, it’s a very fleeting attention. You’re forgotten. Not by the family, but after a while, they’re not there to make the contributions to people and their community and to themselves.

Teen: One thing about Pierre is after the first person committed suicide, it kind of made it an option for other people to commit suicide. Like if they got depressed, they’re like, ‘Oh, well, that person did it, so maybe I can do that.’

Gould: Pierre, South Dakota, has experienced a cluster of suicides. Across the U.S., there have been hundreds of suicide clusters and so there is nothing about Pierre, South Dakota, per se that makes it the "suicide town" or the "depression town."

Teen: After a while, it got to a point where you’d hear about it and really you wouldn’t feel anything.

Teen: It doesn’t affect us like it used to and how it should.

Teen: It’s just like another suicide, you know, another kid killed himself.

Gould: After one suicide, the likelihood that another suicide will occur is greater. It just is. We know that suicide contagion is real.

Teen: We have a problem but for the longest time I think the older population in this community really didn’t want to admit that.

Teen: It wasn’t talked about and I just didn’t feel that it was working so I thought, you know, it’s something that does need to be brought up.

Gould: You can’t discern that there won’t another suicide. You have to do something about it by joining forces with school and hospitals and police.

Teen: We’ve had countless talks with the students in the school on how they’re to deal and what to look for in their friends. And we just had a number of different ways of recognizing the problem.

Teacher: Today, we’re going to focus in on depression. So I want to introduce you to the Improv Group.

Improv Group Member: You came to this job with high recommendations from a lot of people in this house saying you would be a hard worker.

Improv Group Member: I just don’t want our daughter going out with a senior.

Improv Group Member: I thought we were best friends, but anymore I guess I just don’t know.

Improv Group Member: I thought we would do something this weekend, but now you just say, no, you’re going to hang with your freshmen friends. I don’t think so.

Improv Group Member: We’re giving every single kid in the high school and the junior high and maybe down to the elementary schools one of these cards. And it says that if you need help or you need, or you just have problems and you need to talk to somebody about it, you can go and give this card to a person you trust.

Teacher: What are the things you can do for each other?

Teen: Sit down and listen to him and, you know, hear their problems and try and help them with them.

Teen: Share your own stories with your friends because I think that makes your friends feel like they’re not alone and then you can work it out together.

Teen: Watch for little things, the little differences that they’re showing signs of they need to talk.

Teen: Reach out to them and ask them if they need help or even just invite them to do stuff, get them going again.

Teen: But if it’s something you can’t deal with, you need to tell somebody, you know, that would know how to take care of that kind of thing.

Gould: If you have problems at home, if you’re under stress, if you’re having alcohol problems, if you’re really overwhelmed by life and you can be, get help for it.

Kelsey: I started going to counseling after I OD’d and then about two months later our whole family has been going to work out the problems. And it works really well cause I think we solved a lot of things that needed to be solved a long time ago. I really do think that issues start at home with the families cause that’s who you’re growing up with, that’s how you’re going to act, that’s where you get all you stuff from. Now that I think about how I could be dead right now I regret even taking one pill.

Gould: Suicidal feelings are fleeting. You can feel a certain way today, tomorrow, even for a week, or two weeks and not feel that same way next month. You can’t keep that to yourself. Talk to someone.

Teen: I’m not as depressed as I used to be. My grades have gone up. You know, I found a great guy. My friends, I have a lot of friends now.

Teen: I think that I understand the value of my life and the value of life to everybody more than most people and I’ve gained that from growing up around all the things I grew up around and learning it in treatment and just finding it within myself.

Teen: These days I’m feeling a lot better than I did. I still have my good days and my bad days, I should say. But everybody has their good days and their bad days, you know. I just learn how to—if there’s something bothering me—to talk to somebody, even if it’s hard for me to talk, to talk to somebody, to write it down, at least get it out of my system.

Teen: When you think, ‘Oh, I’m depressed now,’ you’re going to get more depressed. And really in order to become less depressed, you have to think, think like, ‘I want to be happy. I want to be happy,’ and just hang in there.

Andrea to band: Thank you so much for talking to me.

Band member: Thank you.

Andrea: Thank you! One of the most important things to remember is that there’s always someone to talk to, a guidance counselor, a teacher, a family doctor, or even a neighbor. Depression can be cured, but it’s up to you to take the first step and reach out to someone. There are local hotlines you can call for help. You can find the number in the blue pages of your phone book, or you can call these national hotlines.

You can call Covenant House at 1-800-999-9999, or the Boys Town National Crisis Hotline at 1-800-448-3000, or the Children’s Rights of America Youth Crisis Hotline at 1-800-442-4673. And if you have any questions or comments, you can write to us at In the Mix, 114 East 32^nd Street, New York, New York 10016, or e-mail us and check out our website at www.pbs.org.

Andrea: That’s all the time we have so let’s take a look at some more Third Eye Blind.

This In the Mix special is made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[end of program]

PRODUCTION STATS

The segments in Pierre, North Dakota were shot at Riggs High School, and with the Yellow Ribbon Campaign Improv Troupe.

The Third Eye Blind live concert was shot at the Hammerstein Theater in New York City on July 15, 1998.