A recent viewing of the new Bruce Springsteen biopic, “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” has caused me to exhume some buried thoughts. In the film, Springsteen struggled to deal with troubling memories from his childhood, having grown up in a home with an alcoholic and abusive father. He successfully navigated the minefield he found himself in and, since one already knew the ending of the story, that outcome was never in doubt. Nevertheless, it raised strong emotions in me to watch him in the throes of his depression and it should make everyone reflect on those who were not as fortunate to escape being eaten alive by the acids of their unhappy pasts or innate organic mental imbalances.
I had similar struggles at a similar age. I too came out of them, more or less, intact but the chances of that seem, in retrospect, to have rested at times on the sharp edge of a knife and a far different outcome was no less certain than the one that I have come to enjoy. There were moments I can remember when hands were extended to me at the brink of drowning and finally disappearing under the waves and those successive hands are probably what saved me. Springsteen experiences a similar kind of help when he most needed it.
Knowledge of the deaths of those whose lives they’ve once nurtured, and who’ve died before their rightful time, at their own hands, or because of reckless behavior, are part of the unhappy baggage former teachers carry with them to their graves. Springsteen didn’t get quite far enough in his one attempt, shown in the movie, to end his own life but he came very close to succeeding and things were balanced on the proverbial knife blade for him at that moment, too.
Gallup, Inc. reported, this past September, that: “The percentage of U.S. adults who report currently having or being treated for depression has exceeded 18% in both 2024 and 2025, up about eight percentage points since the initial measurement in 2015. The current rate of 18.3% measured so far in 2025 projects to an estimated 47.8 million Americans suffering from depression.”
Not everyone who is depressed or anxious shows it outwardly. Many are able to hide their deepest feelings from others. Please keep that in mind when dealing with those around you. Negative interactions can increase the load they are already carrying on their shoulders.
Those of us who are healthy and feeling grounded need to be the ones showing a way out for others who are in distress. We need to show compassion for those who, but for circumstance or God’s grace, could be us, if faced with the same predicaments. As a society, we need to ensure that we provide safety nets with no holes in them. We should not make achieving a healthy mental state a matter of socioeconomic status thereby condemning those without the means to acquire the necessary help, to lives spent in psychic torment. We must resist our current government’s trend to cut off funding for social services and the research into the causes of mental illness and, in our daily lives, we should look for ways to be that helping hand for others.
Philip Lussier is a retired educator who lives in Ashfield.