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| The mask of depression |
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| Friday, 25 August 2006 | ||||||
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Brian Wetzel has struggled with clinical depression for 20 years. “My family went through a bitter break-up. I figured I could attribute it to that,” he said. His depression would not go away, and he was finally diagnosed with a chemical imbalance. “I tried to ignore that I had a disease of depression. I thought if I’d ignore it, it would just go away,” Wetzel said. But eventually he had to confront it, and he is encouraging depressed residents of the Palouse to confront theirs this week with his one-man show, at 8 p.m. today at the Community Congregational United Church of Christ in Pullman. “Side by Side — A Journey with Depression: A Funny Look at Survival” follows Wetzel’s battle with depression. Creating the show was a similar struggle. In the mid-’90s, Wetzel traveled the West Coast performing in comedy clubs. During that time, he started to drink too much. “I got in over my head with alcohol,” he said. “People really liked to party with you, and I started to self-medicate with alcohol and marijuana.” In Tucson, Ariz., after a late show and party where he had too much to drink, Wetzel walked home around 4 a.m. in a depressed haze. “I was very suicidal and scared,” he said. “I was in a place where I could have made an irreversible mistake that night. It was scary enough that it shook me up.” During the night, Wetzel called his father and brother. The conversation was a turning point. “I was crying and really shaken up,” he said. His family wanted him to come home, but he finished the last two weeks of the tour. When he got home he knew he had to do something to help himself, so he decided to go back to school. “I struggled in college, but I felt like that’s what I had to do,” he said. “It was drummed in my head that if I didn’t go to college, life wouldn’t be very good.” But after dealing with depression for years, “I had to drop everything and just deal with it,” he said. In 2000, Wetzel dropped into a depression that nothing could pull him out of. “At that point, he was ready to check out,” said Lizann Bassham, a longtime friend of Wetzel who directs his show. “He became suicidal and eventually went to an emergency psyche clinic in Santa Rosa. That’s when we started working on the show.” Wetzel began going to Bassham’s house just for a reason to get out of bed. There they made masks of his face. “It was sort of art-therapy,” Bassham said. They compared 10 masks of Wetzel’s face, each a little different. “The first had bright colors, the last is completely dark. What happens at each of those stages?” Bassham said. Wetzel began making notes of different things that happened to him in his life. This material turned into “Side by Side.” “I had a theater background and we talked about doing a production on depression. He just started writing and I worked with him to shape it, and it turned into this show,” Bassham said. In the show, Wetzel uses his comic background to take the edge off the topic of depression. “I have the ability to make it really funny, on a subject that isn’t funny at all,” he said. “I can talk about depression and people get it, and they leave with a message of hope. People understand where the pain comes from, and how serious the issue is.” “Side by Side” debuted in 2004 at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts to three sold-out shows. “I knew this would go well and go big,” Bassham said. Since then they have done the show for a number of universities, including Stanford. The show has also been performed for county mental health institutions and National Alliance on Mental Illness chapters. The two Pullman shows — Wetzel performed Thursday night as well — are sponsored by the National Association on Mental Illness, Dean Funabiki Ph.D. and Associates, Washington State University Counseling Services, the Washington Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and Community Congregational UCC. Suggested donations are $10 for mental health workers and $15 for general public, but donations are not mandatory. The show can benefit anyone struggling with depression, who loves someone with depression or who wants to learn more about it, Wetzel said. “Depression is a blanket that covers all aspects of society: Young, old, rich or poor.”  Add as favorites (26) | Views: 570
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