Hammering Her Message Home, Rosalynn Carter Has Own Project: Battling Stigma Of Mental Illness

By Leslie Sowers

For nearly 15 years, Rosalynn Carter has pounded nails with Jimmy at his annual Habitat for Humanity Work Project. This year, she's not hammering. She's got a medical excuse, and it isn't the Houston heat. The former first lady has carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands. She flexes her right wrist, demonstrating therapeutic exercises she's been doing since last fall. She'd like to give hammering a try, but she's afraid to risk the small, hard-won improvement she's made. For nearly 15 years, Rosalynn Carter has pounded nails with Jimmy at his annual Habitat for Humanity Work Project. This year, she's not hammering. She's got a medical excuse, and it isn't the Houston heat.

The former first lady has carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands. She flexes her right wrist, demonstrating therapeutic exercises she's been doing since last fall. She'd like to give hammering a try, but she's afraid to risk the small, hard-won improvement she's made. After all these years with Habitat, Carter lays claim to being a pretty fair carpenter, and has worked on almost every aspect of home construction.

"I don't get on the roof," she said, with a hint of confession. But on the first day of the weeklong project here, she has worked as a carpenter's helper alongside her husband.

Not 10 minutes after concluding her interviews in a small, trying-to-be-air-conditioned press trailer, which is as close to cool as it gets at the Fifth Ward site, Rosalynn is back on the job, ready to hand a section of 2-by-4 to Jimmy who's nailing in a window header. It's 5 o'clock, but it isn't quitting time until the tar paper and roof sheeting go up, and the face of the 39th president of the United States has a four-alarm flush.

"I'm worried about him," said LeRoy Troyer, an Indiana architect who volunteers each year, coordinating the work at the house Jimmy and Rosalynn help build. "It isn't any hotter than it was in Charlotte, but he's older. I won't put him on the roof today.
" Their days of roofing may be behind them, but the Carters make few other concessions to age. Actively using the influence, knowledge and connections of the presidency for a wide variety of humanitarian causes, they are the pacesetters for a new, appealingly vigorous style of retirement.

Rosalynn's publicity tour on behalf of her most recent book, "Helping Someone with Mental Illness" (Times Books, $24), included appearances on Good Morning America and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. At all her media stops, Carter heard personal stories of depression or bipolar disorder or other illnesses from the famous and not-famous alike.

"I'm glad when somebody speaks out about mental illness," Carter said. "And that they feel like I'll understand."
She subtitled the book, A Compassionate Guide for Family, Friends and Caregivers. The voice of compassion warms her prose as it softens her air of friendly reserve. And a hint of indignation peppers her expression of surprise that stigma about mental illness persists so tenaciously.

"Why we keep having this stigma I don't know," Carter said. "I guess it's just too close to home." Combatting stigma has been her personal campaign since she first began her work on behalf of those with mental illness during the years when her husband was governor of Georgia. In the intervening years, her efforts on behalf of better treatment for the mentally ill at the White House and through the Carter Center at Atlanta always emphasize reducing the stigma.

She believes the shame and secretiveness about mental illness persist because they arose in an era when no one understood it or knew what to do about it. The myths about mental illness melt away, she said, once you understand the facts about its biologic underpinnings.

In addition to offering suggestions and resources, Carter updates readers on the newest theories arising from the research of the past 10 years, a period designated by George Bush as the Decade of the Brain.

She warns readers that it takes a Ph.D. in biology to understand the workings of the brain, and concludes her introduction to the breakthroughs by wishing the reader luck.

Every time an editor sent back a draft with "Good Luck" erased, Carter said she penciled it back in. If she were writing her 92-year-old mother, she'd no doubt encourage her the same way.

Researching the workings of the brain challenged her, and finding a way to express them in simple rather than technical language was even harder. But understanding the role of neurotransmitters is crucial to current medical knowledge about these complex illnesses.

So Carter persevered in her research. And prevailed with her editors. The "Good Luck" stands.

"It's an exciting time," Carter said. "Now we know so much, and there are so many new medications being developed.

" She brings readers out of the dark ages when it was believed mental illness was a curse, and dispels the notion that neurobiologic illnesses like schizophrenia have their origins in poor parenting.

Poor parenting can make a child's life more difficult, but modern brain research outlined in the book explains how genetic vulnerability and environmental stress interact to induce biological diseases like depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia. In explaining the difference between the sad moods we all fall into and the illness, the book points out that depression is a physical disease. It affects more than mood; it can alter sleeping and eating patterns, energy levels and more.

Carter believes these facts help decrease the shroud of stigma that still prevents people from getting effective treatment for depression. But she's not prepared to leave it at that. Currently, she is brainstorming with others to create a national anti-stigma campaign that might feature prominent figures speaking out about their personal experiences with depression.

The book makes a start with human sagas from Rod Steiger, who has lived with major depression, and from Margot Kidder who talks about her nationally publicized episode with bipolar disorder.

While Carter's book offers resources, including chapters on treatment, and advice for caregivers, it is the people stories that reveal mental illness for the ordinary experience it truly is.

Ordinary does not mean painless, and the losses are chronicled. But there's something almost reassuring in Carter's conversations with her neighbor from Plains when they meet in the town drugstore. Or her support of a friend in seeking medication to help him return to the work he still wants to do.

Carter has begun to expand her work on mental illness beyond this country. A leader in the World Federation for Mental Health, Carter is involved in raising awareness of mental health issues in developing countries that have no information about the diseases. While traveling in Africa in her role as the vice-chair of the Carter Center, Carter visited an orphanage in Liberia being run with no help by two women who cooked gruel for the children in a can on a brick in the back yard. The mentally ill children received no treatment.

"It was one of the worst things I've ever seen," she said.

Her work at the Carter Center encompasses many issues in addition to mental health, from inner city poverty to election monitoring in developing countries. She co-founded a national vaccination program for toddlers. But everywhere, including today amid the pounding of thousands of hammers, people find her to talk about mental illness.

A woman told her about her daughter's recent diagnosis of bipolar disorder and the doctor's recommendation that she read Carter's new book.

For all her straightforward, down-to-earth qualities, you can't miss a little bit of thrill in her voice. Being an author can be a vulnerable experience. Even for a first lady.

Reprinted with permission of the Houston Chronicle, copyright 1998