“I used to be ashamed of my condition and didn’t talk about it. But in recent years, I freely confess I’m a depressive, and that attracts other depressives to me.”
Eleven years
In January 1944 Bill and Lois came home from a three-month tour of the groups in the West, a triumph by Pass It On’s account. Almost at once he fell into a depression “so black that its effect on him was more debilitating than a physical assault.” For long stretches he couldn’t get out of bed, and Lois made sure he ate. “An awful lot of people believed he was drinking,” Marty M. remembered. Lois admitted, “I wasn’t too sympathetic, actually.”
He tried everything he could think of. In 1944 he began seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Tiebout. An osteopath found what Bill called “a lesion in my spine near the base of the skull,” and gave him “a tremendous lift.” He cut his sugar to a third, took a little thyroid, and later tried “B-12, male hormones, ACE and the like.” By about 1949 he was seeing a second therapist on Fridays and taking instruction in Catholicism from Monsignor Fulton Sheen on Saturdays. Pass It On names the therapist Frances Weekes; one AA history timeline identifies her as Frances Wickes, a New York analyst of Carl Jung’s school.
What he kept coming back to was walking: a quarter mile at a time, counting his steps against his breath. On good days he walked five miles on the wooded trails around Bedford Hills. He blamed himself for not working the Steps well enough, and many members told him the same.
In the spring of 1946 he canceled every engagement and went with Lois to an old farmhouse near Brattleboro, Vermont. About ten days in, while she read to him, he went “quiet.” It was as if the car had been put in neutral, he wrote, “But — this is very important — the engine was still running.”
Back at work, he set out to make AA’s trustees answerable to a conference elected by the groups. Most of the trustees were against it, and he fought them with what he later called “sledgehammer tactics” and “blistering memorandums.” Looking back, he said he had been “on a dry bender of the worst possible sort.” Some of the alcoholic trustees, he wrote, “darkly murmured that I must have gone crazy.” In 1948 Dr. Bob wrote to him that “Easy Does It” seemed the best course.
In 1951 and 1952 he wrote Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions while, as Pass It On puts it, “suffering almost constant depression.” On January 24, 1954, their wedding anniversary, Lois had a heart attack. Bill wrote to Father Dowling that she had been “grass-widowed by A.A. May God forgive my part in all this.” On February 2 he turned down an honorary degree from Yale, and on February 14 his father died.
At St. Louis in July 1955 he handed AA over to its members. As he spoke, he said later, “for a moment I dreaded the coming change as much as anyone.” Pass It On says the depression lifted after 1955. Yet in 1956, back from a trip west “in a state of almost complete collapse,” he heard that his old East Dorset friend Mark Whalon had died. “This all hit me so hard that I got into a hysteria and felt that I simply couldn’t face it.”
It’s 1944, at Bedford Hills. Bill W. has been sober nine years, AA is growing fast, and he can hardly get out of bed. The depression that comes on him that year will last, on and off, for eleven years. Some members whisper that he must be drinking.
He tries psychiatrists, an osteopath, less sugar, thyroid, vitamins. What helps most is walking.
He sets himself a quarter of a mile, and counts his steps against his breath: six steps breathing in, four breathing out. Some days he has to force himself to do even that. But he has learned that quitting, just sitting and staring at the wall, is worse.
And when he’s done the quarter mile, he often finds he can go on. Another half mile, and another.
