The group therapy with other patients was the high point of the clinic experience for Coleman.
"It was the most interesting thing I've ever been involved in," says the legislator. "You have these folks who are going through similar things you are going through telling you when you're not expressing something in a realistic way ... how you perceive something to yourself. It was great. They point out that you're holding in anger, or being too formal when you're talking about something that's obviously very painful."
The final phase of the clinic stay, says Coleman, was relapse prevention, the designing of a plan to prevent the recurrence of depression episodes. "In that plan you find the early warning signals, those things that you see or others see that come on before you get depressed. You pick people in your everyday life to help you see these things and monitor them."
Coleman, who had spent his young adult years learning not to ask for help, found opening up very difficult. "I don't like to ask people for things, but it does work well. Because if they're in on it you've got a support group. You pick these folks to provide what everybody has -- affirmation, people who you can disclose to, tell things to. People who provide balance in your life. Those are folks we all generally have in our circle of friends or family. You tell them 'Look, I need you to help me help myself do this. Here's some things you can tell me if I'm not doing them.'"
Skepticism -- and the reluctance to discuss his problems that Coleman exhibit-ed in that October phone conversation with the Press -- eventually gave way to acceptance.
"At first I said no way is this going to work," he laughs. "But it does. It really, really does."
Coleman's plan includes taking the anti-depressive drug Zoloft and adhering to a regular schedule that includes exercise and periods of time blocked out for family activities, rather than politics. It's a regimen that he will likely maintain for the rest of his life.
Gloria Coleman is delighted with her son's commitment to making time for his family. "My husband was so busy out there with the medical practice and other things, my children and I basically did all the family things together," she recalls.
As for what some people might consider a startling openness about his condition, Coleman says part of his motivation is for himself and part for the public.
"The more comfortable I am with this and the more other people know, the better I feel about it," he says. "I'm a legislator, yeah, but I'm Garnet and I have problems, too. Because I have a problem doesn't mean problems are insurmountable."
Coleman plans to make mental health services a special focus in the legislative session that opens January 10 by using his own experience to educate others about a problem, he says, "that has a stigma that's hard to deal with."
"People don't like to talk about mental illness," he continues. "It's almost worse than AIDS in the way people feel about it. And there's no difference from diabetes ... this is just take a pill every day and move on. If I can be an example as someone who can deal with something that has been debilitating and be open and comfortable with it, then other people can be, too.
