Struck by Living

From the exterior, Julie Hersh’s life looks like the American Dream: supportive husband, two healthy children, financial success beyond her wildest dreams, and a colossal house with a tall electronic gate. Yet her story begins, “I tried to kill myself three times.” A forty year-old, well-educated woman, Hersh’s vision is skewed by depression. After various attempts with medication and psychotherapy, her psychiatrist recommends electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

Hersh does ECT and finds herself catapulted into a different perspective. She picks up her journal and reads her self-imposed death sentence in disbelief. “Why?” she asks herself. “How could I want to kill myself one day, not as a passing thought but as an obsession, and the next day understand the futility of suicide?” ECT provided the start to recovery, but Hersh knows if she doesn’t understand the root of her mental illness, recurrence is likely.

Hersh begins her exploration through psychotherapy, pulling apart scenes from her life in an attempt to understand the “Why” of her life. A successful business person in her own right, Hersh examines the difficulty of abandoning work to raise her children, constantly in the shadow of her husband’s success. She picks apart her life with brutal honesty, examining the challenges of living in a world that clashes with her cultural upbringing: wealthy versus not, Jewish versus Catholic, and a life rooted in one place versus her nomadic start as the child of a military officer.

Hersh makes changes in her life, and determines she is “cured” in a victory scene on a mountaintop. She goes off medication, certain she has changed her life enough that medicine is no longer required. She relapses. Ultimately she accepts that mental illness is a disease, her disease. She understands her mental illness has no solution, but can be managed.

She chooses to live. This book encourages others to do the same.