Renée Arnold had become a shell of her former self. No longer the leader she was born to be. No longer active in her church. No longer happy.
By the fall of 1998, she’d just as soon spend the day in bed than venture outside her southwest Atlanta home. If she happened to try to go into work or drive her sons to school, she’d have to pull to the side of the road or into a parking garage for a quick nap. If she forced herself to return to step aerobics class, once a favorite pastime, she struggled to lift her feet onto the steps.
For the first time in her life, she felt a halting heaviness, like a weight holding her down and back.
“I wasn’t the person I once was,” she said.
Arnold was a former cheerleader, student council president and youth leader at her church. When she graduated in 1986 from Plantation High School in the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., area, she headed to Howard University. She earned a journalism degree there in 1990 and two years later married Darrell Arnold before settling in Atlanta and giving birth to two sons.
But something had shifted inside of her. As she approached her 30th birthday in 1998, Renée Arnold had essentially checked out. Instead of living her life, she was existing in it.
RELATED | Cumming sibling duo creates app for when you're not OK
Doctors told her she was suffering from anxiety and suggested she take a leave of absence from work, enough to get herself together.
“When I complained I was feeling worse, they referred me to a psychiatrist, who put me on antidepressant medication,” she said.
Sixteen million adults suffer from depression in the U.S. And though rates of mental illnesses in African-Americans like Arnold are similar to those of the general population, only 1 in 3 African-Americans who need mental health care actually receive it because of, among other things, a lack of insurance, a lack of culturally competent providers, and the big one, stigma associated with mental illness.
Alone at home one day in January 2010, Arnold began to pray.
“Lord, I’ve read about the power of deliverance. I need my own deliverance. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life like this. It’s been too long.”
RELATED | Are suicides really preventable?
For more than a decade, Arnold had suffered constant verbal abuse from someone she refers to as Judas. When Judas wasn’t belittling her or accusing her of something, she was accusing herself.
Credit: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“I felt a lot of bitterness and probably resentment, but I didn’t realize it,” she said.
Experts call what was happening to Arnold gaslighting and Judas was a master at it. They say bitterness is anger toward your abuser turned inward. Judas was good at that, too, making her feel responsible even for the pain he inflicted.
A few months later on Easter Sunday, Arnold was having dinner at her parents’ home when she overheard her sister introduce a husband and wife who were both ministers. At first, their presence barely registered with her. The wife and granddaughter of ministers, she was used to being around clergy.
But as the day progressed, Arnold said she heard the Holy Spirit speak to her: “Those are your deliverance ministers.”
Not sure she’d heard correctly, Arnold pulled the couple’s daughter to the side to inquire. Are your parents deliverance ministers? she asked.
Arnold then spoke to the girl’s mother.
“I’ve been going through depression,” she said. “I need help.”
They exchanged phone numbers, and the next day, Arnold received a call.
“I poured out everything that was inside me,” she said. “I cried more than I had in 12 years.”
RELATED | Pain of son's suicide became strength to help others
There on the phone, in a conversation that would last six hours, Arnold let go of her pain and the bitterness she felt from the abuse and the anger she felt toward herself for having allowed it.
There on the phone she forgave Judas and herself. There they prayed for him and “released him to Jesus’ care.”
“Before I knew it, I felt like the sun was coming out and the birds were chirping,” Arnold recalled.
Before long, she started weaning herself off the antidepressant medication was taking. She started to dream and journal again. She started to attend church regularly again. She stopped internalizing the ugliness Judas piled onto her.
“When you’re not holding bitterness, God can really use you to walk in all the things you were created to do,” she said.
For Arnold, now 49 and the mother of grown sons, that has meant writing under the pen name G. Renée and doing what she can to pull others from the darkness. In addition to having produced a CD titled "You'll Make It," she recently chronicled her journey through depression in a book titled "God Wants Your Relationship Greater Than Your Religion" that's now available on Amazon.com, and founded Peacemakers Inner Healing Inc., a nonprofit that provides prayer counseling at no cost.
Too often, depression is seen as an incurable illness. Arnold believes depression is an evil spirit that can be cast out, not a character flaw to be shamed into hiding.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month and September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, but any time people like Arnold share their story, the stigma still associated with depression and other manifestations of mental health falls away.
Hopefully, this is one of those times.
Find Gracie on Facebook (www.facebook.com/graciestaplesajc/) and Twitter (@GStaples_AJC) or email her at gstaples@ajc.com.
