Running Toward Something Good

Hi friends,

When Audrey Gruss was a preteen, her father sat her and her two sisters down and told them their mother had suffered a “nervous breakdown” and needed to go to the hospital. No one explained what that meant. On the Perfectly Palm Beach podcast, Gruss recalled that she and her sisters assumed “we thought that we did something to break her nerves.” It would be decades before she understood that what her father called a nervous breakdown was major depressive disorder, and that her mother, Hope, would live with it for the rest of her life without ever finding relief.

“I remember my mother would be taken to the hospital,” Gruss told Forbes. “After a few weeks, she would come home and we would have to stay quiet amongst our family and friends. Her depression was this deep, dark secret and one I had to keep even as a young child."

Hope loved fragrance, especially lily of the valley, and would pick it each spring and say it made her feel uplifted. Hope passed away in 2005. A year later, Gruss founded the Hope for Depression Research Foundation in her memory, and later created a fragrance line in tribute, with profits funding the foundation’s research.

That’s the story behind the little race I ran last weekend. A few friends and I laced up for the Race of Hope 5K in Southampton, on Long Island, a course that loops around Lake Agawam, toward the Atlantic Ocean, amid a sea of yellow shirts and caps. I’ve run nearly every edition of this summer charity race since 2018.

This race is especially meaningful for me.

I know friends and family who have struggled, and I’m sure you do too. Depression and other mental illnesses can eat you alive, make it hard to do anything, let alone work a job. Gruss reminded all of us runners on Sunday before the race that you can’t just “get over it” or exercise or medicate your way out of it. Though movement and medication can really help, it’s usually a longer, more complicated journey. Part of why the research matters so much: on that same podcast, Gruss noted that every antidepressant on the market today is still a variation of Prozac, introduced back in the 1980s, and that as many as half the people who need help don’t respond to it.

And if you’re on that journey today, I hope you find your way back to the light.

About two years ago, my anxiety reached a point I hadn't felt before. It overran me, and there were moments I felt like giving up. Starting medication (Prozac) was one of the more difficult decisions I've made — I really didn’t want to have to rely on prescription drugs — and it's also been one of the best. It hasn't erased everything, but it's given me much steadier ground to stand on.

Gruss has said her mission has always been the same: “I saw what a debilitating disease it was firsthand and made it my mission to build a foundation that could find new and better treatments for depression and its related mood disorders.” Two decades later, that mission has become an annual gathering of over a thousand people in a small village, all moving in the same direction for the same reason.

I finished the race a little out of breath and a lot grateful, for the friends beside me, for the ones still fighting, and for people like Gruss who turned a deep grief into a public mission.

If nothing else, may Gruss and the little race on the East End of Long Island remind us all to check in on a friend or relative, without waiting for them to ask. We all need one another.

Celebrate your life,

Matthew