Stahl Gets Personal in Erie Talk
By Steven M. Sweeney, Erie Times-News, Pa.
May 29–Journalists rarely express their feelings as openly as veteran CBS reporter Lesley Stahl did Wednesday evening at the Bayfront Convention Center.
That’s where she shared her thoughts on mental health and the American psyche with an audience of about 400.
Stahl was the keynote speaker at Safe Harbor Behavioral Health’s 15th anniversary banquet.
She first spoke about the personal emotions she has felt in the dramatic campaign for the presidency this year, then she talked about her very personal experiences with mental illness. Her husband suffered from depression.
“Depression and mental disorders affect the whole family. We spouses live with terrible fear and anger. Should we be enabling or be tough? When do we force someone to take their medication when they don’t want to? When do we step in and call the doctor for them?” Stahl said.
Stahl said her husband, Aaron Latham, had shown classic signs of clinical depression for years, but it wasn’t until a conversation with fellow reporter Mike Wallace that she blurted out she thought that Latham was depressed.
“I never put the two together before,” Stahl said. “I said Aaron would never see a psychiatrist. Mike took me by the shoulders … and told me to get him help, ‘You find a way.’” The help eventually included medication to correct chemical imbalances in the brain, enough sleep, and therapy.
Stahl also talked about the mental stability that people like John Kanzius have naturally in their life despite personal difficulty, like cancer and stress.
“One of my lifetime favorite stories is the piece I did on John Kanzius. It was a classic “60 Minutes” story. It had this great heroic central character … and it left you with hope,” she said.
She said she was impressed with the way Kanzius was able to explain technology in a way “that even a first-grader could understand,” she said.
“And there was that moment. When he would think about the children he would see in the cancer wards at M.D. Anderson waiting for chemotherapy treatments: ‘We can send a man to the moon, but we’re still giving poison to children.’”
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