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LG: We had this question here about intergenerational trauma, and you'd mentioned you maybe wanted to talk a little about it?

DM: Yes, yes. As I said, I always had an inferiority complex. And I used to get anxiety attacks, and it wasn't until I went into my depression while I was working, and I'll you how that came about. I worked under a wonderful nurse. She had the three schools, and so she asked me if I would consider becoming a school nurse. This was back in, I would say, 1979. By then all my children were in school. So my husband being my husband, had told me he never wanted me to work, and if I ever wanted to work, he told me early on in our marriage, "There's the door, you can leave." So he was really against my working. Well, my children are getting into middle school, and I was seeing college. So when she asked me to work, I got on my hands and knees and said to my husband, "Grace Koch said, asked me if I would consider working as a school nurse." So what he said to me was -- which I took as a yes -- he said, "I don't care what you do." Being the male Japanese that he was, of his generation. So I hopped on it, I had to go back to college to get my certification in school nursing, had my parents come and watch the kids for me while I went back to college. And it was not easy, but I was determined, so I did it. Thanks be to my parents who were willing to watch my children. Put them to bed when Mommy was at college and Mommy was studying, but I managed. I only needed twenty-eight credits, so I got those twenty-eight credits, and then I was ready to go. So then they hired me on as part-time and so I worked part-time under this wonderful nurse. And you know how you hear horror stories about sometimes the boss doesn't want you to know everything because he's afraid you'll take his job. She was not like that at all; she shared everything with me.

So I was fine until she told me she was retiring. I panicked. I said, "I can't do this job without her, I'm a second banana." I don't want the top job. If I was going to stay on, I had to take the top job. So I panicked, and that was the first time I had what you'd call a nervous breakdown. I struggled, but I was hospitalized, and I did go back to work, because I had my secretary, another wonderful person. She was my backbone, she was going to retire a few years later. That's when I really panicked, and I was so depressed at that time, I tried to take my life. Because Darlene Mukoda is not fit to be the top banana. She's a wonderful second banana, but not good enough to be the top banana. That's how I felt about myself. No way to get out of it, just leave the serve. So I took two containers of pills, but I immediately vomited. And this is where I said God intervened. He didn't let those pills stay within me to kill me, he had other plans. My parents had just left me that day, I was still in my pajamas, and my mom tried to be as cheerful as can be and said, "Get dressed and you'll feel better." Well, I knew I wasn't going to feel better. My husband was out on this job. He was a courier for the bank, but in between his pick-ups, he would go from bank to bank to pick up things, he stopped in. He says, "Something told me something wasn't right." So he says, "How are you doing?" And I had the courage -- I don't know if you'd call it courage, but I told him what I did. Well, he called my psychiatrist, and I guess my psychiatrist said to call 911. So 911 came and got me, put me in the hospital, and that was the most... that period when I went into the hospital and until the time I was treated and released from another hospital was horrible. I realized what a terrible mistake it was, number one, it was very dehumanizing to have a tube put down your throat, charcoal put down, because they didn't know how much of the medication was there, so they tried to neutralize it and remove it from my body. And then I was put on suicide alert, so they had to have someone watching me all the time.

And then the hospital released me, and I didn't feel right. I told my husband, I said, "I feel as though I still need help." So he got in touch with my psychiatrist, and then I think he also spoke with my minister, and they suggested Friends Hospital up in Philly, so that's where I went, and that saved my life. I had a young psychiatrist who told me, he says, "With your history, I think you need ECT," that's electric shock treatment. So my family researched it, my daughter-in-laws researched it, and I agreed I would go because I didn't like the way I was living. It wasn't worth living. So I said something has to be done, and I think I had a total of seventy ECT treatments. And then the young doctor whose care I was under at Friends Hospital said to me, "The medication you're on is so antiquated," and I was going to an older psychiatrist. He says, "We have much better medication now," so he says, "I want to put you on one of them." First one he put me on, I'm still taking to this day. No ill effects, no side effects, the ECT cleared my head. They say it's a chemical imbalance and you've got to sort of joggle that chemical imbalance into place. So on the medication I've been fine. And my husband said to me, he said, because it was hard on him, it was hard on my children. He said to me, "How come you became this way? There were all those people in camp, they went through the same thing." He says, "Robert, not everyone is made the same. We each have our own personalities, we each react to situations differently," and unfortunately, because of my feeling of inferiority, and you know, you hate to say this, but I felt it as a little child. I wasn't good as my older sister, and I would never be better than my younger brother because he was number one son. And so I felt, in talking to one of my sister-in-laws, she felt she was adopted because she didn't seem to fit in. I thought I was adopted at one point because I didn't fit in. So you know, this is why I am so adamant about being kind to everyone. Because you know, you don't know what that one person in the group may feel. They may feel inferior like I did, and I don't want them to feel that way. They're as good as anyone else, and no one should ever make you feel otherwise.

So this is where I very freely talk about my mental illness, because there's a number of circumstances that entail why this happened to me. And we're all individuals and can't put everyone into one basket and say, "You weren't strong enough, that's why." "You weren't this enough, that's what." Maybe you were good enough. You know, how good is good enough? Good enough for one person may be not be good enough for the next person, and no one should ever feel that way, never. So I have my soap boxes to stand on, there may be many. But I firmly stand on them and I speak my mind. Because if I can help one person in this whole wide world, it's all worth it. Then I could tell my grandfather, who lived the American Dream, and I've lived it; I've lived it. Even though some parts were not dreams, they were more like nightmares, I've lived the American Dream. And for that, God Bless America.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.