Personal Stories

Janine Bertram

"In my agony, in my pain, in my utter insanity, my light was so faint it hardly flickered, and now…, and now I’m strong. I'm a strong healthy person. And if I can recover, cope on a daily basis and keep shining, all of us can. Every psychiatric survivor can make it."

Born: 25 November 1950

Contact info: Rhododendron, Oregon, USA

Currently doing: Janine is a semi-retired consultant with the disability movement. She now provides public relations consulting for organizations to help them with media planning, empowerment training, and event planning.

Mental health experience: Outpatient, Psychiatric Drugs

Psychiatric labels: Trazodone, Tegretol, Zoloft (for one day)

Psychiatric drugs taken in the past: Depression

Off psychiatric drugs since: 1995

Recovery methods: Spirituality, Meditation, Social Activism, One-on-One Therapy, Peer Support, Literature, Exercise, Art/Music

Greatest obstacle: Old coping and thinking habits die hard.

Brief History:

Luckily, I was never an inpatient at a psychiatric ward, but I definitely could have been if I was in different circumstances. I had been severely depressed as a young woman, but I had never been treated. Then in 1986, I fell in love and moved three thousand miles away to Washington D.C. to join my husband.

That's when it got worse. I went into the depths for awhile. In my agony, in my pain, in my utter insanity, my light was so faint it hardly flickered, and now…, and now I’m strong. I'm a strong healthy person. And if I can recover, cope on a daily basis and keep shining, all of us can. Every psychiatric survivor can make it.

You see, I had a history of using alcohol and a lot of my symptoms would be like I was drunk even though I had ingested no alcohol. I had no idea what was happening. At one point I remember being convinced that my husband was going to give me a lobotomy. In some cases, one ought to fear that, but not in my situation. Yet I was convinced of it. Creating a crisis/high drama was one way I coped with stress.

I had moved to Washington D.C. from the West Coast and I was in a pretty upscale political environment. The whole scene there is you go to dinner parties and you go there because you want something from them and they go because they want something from you.

I didn't have a community at that time, a support network, so I was pretty stressed out. The way I reacted was as if I was ingesting alcohol, even though I had quit drinking years ago. I would slur my words, I would have no idea where I was, I would have very typical drunk symptoms. This went on for a number of years.

My husband was miserable about the whole thing. At times he would get furious, at times he would try to help. I can understand that it was very difficult to live with me like this. It was hard for me to live with me. And like I said, I didn't have much support. Basically, everybody was flabbergasted and didn't know what to do about me. So my husband suggested that I go to a therapist and I agreed.

The first psychiatrist was terrible. He would take phone calls during the sessions, and just leave the room to talk to other people. So I left him pretty soon after starting.

Then I went to another psychiatrist who was pretty helpful. The process of going to therapy throughout this time probably kept me from killing myself. He established an agreement with me that I wouldn't harm myself. And we had established something of a bond, so I held to it. Now, I don't know if I would have killed myself or not, but I think the therapy definitely helped.

I also wanted to address the issue of money. My late husband had a lot of money. I think if had been displaying those symptoms solely on my income, I would have been heavily drugged on psychotropic medication, as opposed to being given fairly low doses of an antidepressant, Trazodone. With my symptoms, I probably would have been incarcerated in a mental institution. This didn't happen in large part because of my financial privilege, which is unfortunately the way our society works.

So I was lucky in that I do think my therapist was trying not to over-drug me. I don't think this is typical, because I had severe symptoms. The dominant attitude out there now is: "If you're having difficulty, we will fill you with drugs so that we feel safe." But I was only on Trazodone for about five years and for a couple years I was on an anti-seizure medication as well, Tegretol. Tegretol is a much heavier drug that can debilitate the liver. Luckily, I didn't sustain any long-term damage and I dropped the medications completely in 1995.

I was also on Zoloft for a total of one day. When the designer drugs started coming out, Paxil, Zoloft, etc., I wanted to try them. My psychiatrist prescribed me Zoloft and it made me feel so anxious and speeded up, it was terrible. It was worse than taking diet pills. So I just stopped.

When I went off psychiatric drugs, it felt good. It felt like I was freeing myself from the bonds of my disease. That doesn't mean that I don't sometimes think, "Oh my god, I just can't get through this day," although that doesn't happen as often anymore. I think now I've got a peace inside of me that even when the day is the pits, there is an inner core that remains happy, joyous, and free. That inner balance is due to my willingness to change coupled with the emotional work it takes to get there.

I started meditating several years ago. I don't know why it is that the universe has to land on me with both feet before I decide to try something different. In recovery programs there is a saying that insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over while expecting to get different results. The pain continued. I wasn't having symptoms that were visible to other people, but I was still miserable. So I started meditating every morning. In time, that made dramatic difference.

I joined A Course in Miracles study group. That has been a tremendous path for me. It started shifting the way I thought and felt. Through my spiritual practice, I've let go of a lot of negative, guilty feelings that can sometimes be exasperated by traditional religious practices.

And I think organizing helps as well. I've been a community organizer pretty much my whole life. What I'm committed to is creating a society where all people are included in the mainstream. This has helped me with dealing with my psychiatric disability as well, because often I have felt like I don't fit in.

When I married my late husband Evan Kemp, a disability rights worker, I stopped doing prison reform work and moved to Washington D.C. to work with him on passing the Americans with Disabilities Act. My husband had a significant disability and was appointed by President Bush Sr. to be the Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He was responsible for winning Republican support for the ADA.

It meant so much to me when people labeled with mental disabilities were included in the ADA, because a few Senators at the time, Senator Armstrong and I believe Senator Helms, were pushing to not have our people included.

For a long time, even though I was crazy as a loon and everybody knew it, I wasn't out as a psychiatric survivor. So even when I was working on the ADA, I didn't make these cross-disability links until later.

In fact, when David Oaks contacted me about this oral history project, I said I would be interviewed, but with the idea that my name or video wouldn't have to be used. If people think you're crazy they respond to you differently.

But I thought about it for awhile and I realized that it is important that I am open, that I'm out about who I am. I think it's debilitating to people when you try to hide a part of yourself. So I am making the decision to come out about this not only for myself, but also because people need to be open about discrimination and psychiatric disability, because everybody has the burden of ending this discrimination.

Interviewer's Comments: Janine is a thoughtful, spiritual, insightful woman who has dedicated her life to fighting for the rights of those labeled with disabilities of all kinds. At first reticent about "coming out" in regards to her own mental health history, she decided this would not only be an important step for her, but also important in terms of informing the public about a highly misunderstood issue.