What If Your Anxiety or Depression Is Actually "DDD"?
There are many analogies Sandy Gale uses to describe her affliction: It's as if she is separated from others by an invisible barrier, as though her "self" doesn't completely fill out her skin, or that she is like a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox. But none of them, she says, really captures how she feels. "Nobody really gets it," she says, sighing. "Nobody."
Gale is sitting in the lobby of the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue, where a convention of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is under way. Attendees include doctors, health care administrators, and concerned relatives, but Gale is, as NAMI euphemistically puts it, a consumer; i.e., a mental patient — "a science experiment," she says. Although back home in Ypsilanti, Michigan, she considers it a success if she can make it from her apartment to her local Panera's for coffee and a danish, Gale left her comfort zone to fly to DC because she needs to do some reconnaissance for a workshop she's planning for next year's NAMI convention. Unfortunately, the syndrome she's desperate to publicize makes normal functioning a challenge. "If I feel in the middle of this interview that I have to go back to my room, I will," she says, somewhat bashfully. "I gave myself a ton of time to get ready to meet you this morning," she continues, and the casualness of her clothes — khaki clam diggers and a pink hoodie — suggests that it wasn't her outfit that took so long to put together.
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