Future Visionaries Wanted.

2011 Dallas and Plano Programs

Calatrava Colossal Constructors, LEGO ®Mindstorms: Apprentice Droids, LEGO Crazy Contraptions, Movie Makers, LEGO Mania, CSI, Academic Enhancement*, Exploring History with American Dolls,* LEGO Car Rally, Battlebots, Fashion Sketching*, Allakhazam Magic *Plano only

SMU Dallas, 6116 N. Central Expressway, Dallas, TX 75206 SMU-in-Plano, 5236 Tennyson Parkway, Plano, TX 75024 214.768.5437 or www.smu.edu/youth.

SMU Summer Youth Programs bridge the gap between spring and fall with weeklong camps in writing, technology, arts, LEGOs, math, science and more. 10540 Church Rd. (at the Plano Rd. LBJ Exit) Open 7 Days A Week

JulieHersh

As she teetered on the edge of a cliff, JulieHershcontemplatedwhatmight happen if she jumped. She didn’t think about leaving her children motherless or her husband a widower.

“I thought, well, if I jump, I might hit that other rock and survive. Then I’ll just be paralyzed and depressed. That’s how distorted I was.”

Today, most people know Hersh as the DallasChildren’sTheaterboardpresident. But for years, she battled severe depression,attemptingsuicidethree times before seeking serious help. She wrote about her experience in the book “Struck By Living”, and she speaks at venues across the country to raise awareness about mental illness. She’s also an active supporter of the suicide and crisis center CONTACT.

Hersh’s story doesn’t begin with a troubled childhood or traumatic event that led to her mental illness. She had a normal life, a loving husband, two beautiful children and no logical reason to abandon it all.

“I think I was depressed long before I knew it,” she says. “I just felt more disconnected from the world. It’s like being inside a glass tube. You can see everything going on outside, but you can’t participate in it. I had a mental deficiency. I was convinced I would never get better.”

That’s what drove Hersh to suicide.

First, she stood outside her home with a knife to her wrist, but her husband found her in time. She checked into rehab, but relapsed and nearly jumped off a cliff during a family hiking vacation. Lastly, Hersh closed the garage door and locked herself in the car with the engine running for 90 minutes. She thought, for sure, that would work.

But the garage was well ventilated, so she survived.

Hershsoughttreatmentagain this

MIchELEDERRINGTON

continued from page 33 time undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, also known as EcT. Through the procedure, doctors attach probes to the head and send a small pulse of electricity through the body — basically resetting the brain.

The Food and Drug administration is currently debating the use of EcT, but hersh says the controversial treatment saved her life.

“When people think of EcT, they think of ‘[One Flew Over the] cuckoo’s Nest’. Unfortunately, it was abused during the ’40s and ’50s. But today, it has an 80 percent success rate.” hersh says it’s like a triple bypass for the brain. although results differ from person to person, she remembers exactly how she felt after her first treatment.

“Myexperience was instantaneous,” hersh says. “I can remember looking at my journal and thinking, ‘Who is this person?’ Something completely changed my brain.” hersh believes that people have chemical predispositions for depression just like those with heart disease, diabetes or cancer.

“Every thought and every feeling we have creates an electric and chemical reaction in the body. We are the environment.”

Part of her mission is to help eliminate the stigma attached to mental illness so people won’t feel afraid or embarrassed to seek help.

“You can’t measure it,” she says. “If you break a leg, the doctor takes an X-ray, and you can see it. With mental illness, there’s really nothing to show in a tangible way.”

To maintain her current mental health, hershfollows a consistentstructure that includes what she calls her “top six”. She takes her daily anti-depressant medication; gets plenty of sleep, nutrition and exercise; listens to family and friends; plans ahead for times of emotionalstress;excitesherbrainwith newactivitiessuchasattendingan art exhibit; and finally, she surrounds herself with friends who have different perspectives on life — older people who are living proof that life gets better.

“Don’t underestimatethepower of reaching out to each other. Saying a kind word to someone, physically being there for someone — I believe that can save a life.” t to the 24-hour club on ross.

“I cussed at them the whole way, and when they dropped me off, I looked at the director and said, ‘I hate this place.’”

The 24-hour club, which provides transitional living for alcoholics and drug addicts, is located inside a dusty, well-worn hotel.

“It is the last house on the block,” Derrington says. “I was pretty disturbed to be there.” again, she looked around at her bedraggled new dorm mates. Only this time, rather than saying to herself, “I’m not like them,” she said, “I am like them; this is me.”

Once you make it to this point, you basically have to choose to change or die, Derrington says.

So she changed.

She worked for a while at the 24-hour club, in the kitchen.

“I sat there thinking about how my mom used to say, ‘Get an education so you don’t wind up flippin’ burgers,’ and there I was, in my late 30s, flipping burgers at the 24-hour club.”

But it was better than the alternative; she was sober.

Today she loves the dusty old 24-hour club, where she says she realized that the key to staying sober was helping others.

In 2007, she took a job at Magdalene house, where she is now executive director. When women come in feeling like trash, she helps them understand that they are worth saving. That they are not bad, but sick. and she is living proof, for them, that recovery is possible.

She says her job gives her the opportunity to stay connected to the recovery community and the 12-step recovery program on which the Magdalene program is based.

“I’m not actually doing service work here, because I get paid, but it gives me the unique opportunity to be among women who have been where I have been.” and work with alcoholics is not always happy — a day earlier, Derrington received a call about a former Magdalene house resident who had relapsed and died.

It’s a reminder of the seriousness of alcoholism and addiction, she says.

“You can’t take this lightly. If I don’t stay connected, that could be me. With this disease you are either working at living or dying. I still have to work every day to maintain my serenity and sobriety.” t

hollyHunter

She had everyone snowed — her parents, teachers, school administrators all thought the private school honor student was a relatively good kid.

Sure, she’d been kicked out of the hockaday School for swearing at a staffer, but that was typical teenage angst, no?

and, yeah, she had wrecked the car, but she was trying to avoid a dog that ran into the street — that’s what she told her dad anyway.

“Of course he believed me — he knew how I loved animals,” says holly hunter, who today runs a counseling service with an office in our neighborhood.

In truth, at age 16 hunter was the school drug dealer. She asks that we don’t share the name of her private Dallas high school (the one she attended after the hockaday incident) where she was such a good student that she graduated a year early.

Marijuana, alcohol, cocaine — she loved drugs, she says. She started selling them not to feed a habit as much as to nourish her ego.

“Ego is when you edge God out,” she says. She points to the book “alcoholics anonymous”, which sits on her desk. “That’s where I got that acronym — E-G-O, see? I like acronyms.” her boyfriend, who was older, cooked the drugs, and she sold them.

“I was trapped in the money game,” she says. “I could make $1,000 for 20 minutes of work.” and while that sounded pretty cool to the young rebel in hunter, she knew deep down that something was terribly wrong.

“I thought I had it good, but I was living in fear. constant fear. I no longer had a relationship with my family.”

One day, after sleeping for several hours — “I didn’t sleep much back then,” she says — she woke up staring at a copy of the Bible that a family member had given her.

“It was covered in dust — that made me feel bad. Then I prayed. I said, ‘God, I wish I had my life back.’ Well, be careful what you wish for. Less than 72 hours later, I was sitting in jail.”

Police raided hunter’s place and locked her up — that wasn’t her last time in jail, either. She couldn’t shaketheaddiction,andsheultimatelyrevisited prison multiple times.

“Let’s just say — all told — about a third of my life was spent in prison.”

It was during that last stint that she committed to getting clean.

She could have taken drugs while behind bars. her cellmates regularly did, she says, but instead she asked for help.

“I began requesting substance abuse counseling immediately when I got to prison [in the 1990s]. It took two years for me to get into classes — Life Skills and Drug Education.” after her last release, she embarked on an education in chemical dependency treatment that included becoming certified as a licensed chemical dependency counselor,certifiedclinicalsupervisor and certified anger resolution specialist.

Now she runs acourt class, which specializes in drug counseling and education, especially for those in legal trouble because of drug abuse.

Neighborhood attorney Sharon Diaz says she refers her drug-related offenders to hunter. Diaz says hunter’s personal experience makes her an effective counselor.

“I send my criminal drug clients to her for evaluation and to get them sober to face their cases,” Diaz says. “She is amazing, and open about her journey.” hunter’s office is filled with gifts and cards from clients she has helped (one is from a well-known newscaster who was a heroin user, she confides).

“This is not a zip code problem,” she says. “People from all walks of life are subject to [drug or alcohol abuse problems].”

Forexample,shementions a high school student from a “good neighborhood” with whom she’s currently working. he and his friends were smoking marijuana in a garage in his gated community when an off-duty officer patroling the neighborhood arrested them. The youngster tried to run from the officer and, in the process, ran into him.

“Nowthekidislookingatpossession, assault and evading arrest charges. Those charges kept him from going to the college he had already been accepted to. Yes, what he did was very wrong, but he needs help. he needs someone to work on his behalf to make sure legal problems don’t prevent him from becoming a productive member of society.” hunter works closely with the courts to help people — some like this teenager, others with even deeper problems — successfully complete court-mandated probation and find sobriety. Each person is different and requires an individualized treatment plan, she says.

Inadditiontohaving a successful business that serves people from many Dallas neighborhoods, hunter says her personal life is back on track and better than she could have ever imagined.

“I have a relationship with my mom. We talk every day. I have true friendships and intimate relationships.” and maybe most importantly, she is at peace: hunter says she doesn’t condemn herself today for what happened in the past. again, she reads from the literature on her desk: “Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s world by mistake.” n