Cindy And Eric’s Silver Linings Playbook… The rest of the story.

Updated April 18th, 2026

Eric on the radio in Sioux City, and me traveling the west country in the village of Lacock, Chippenham, England, the year we first met, as friends. 1999.

I love these quotes that describe what depression feels like. Until you’ve felt it, most of you, thankfully, will never know. But those who belong to the unfortunate club of the mentally ill know it all too well. And we understand each other. From those with more talent for description than I have, I chose these.

“Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.” – Stephen Fry

“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. Through the healing process of time—and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases—most people survive depression, which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.” William Styron Pulitzer Prize Winner, author of Sophie’s Choice THIS RIGHT HERE IS SPOT ON.

You will feel better than this, maybe not yet, but you will. You just keep living until you are alive again.” — Unknown

My husband came out before I did, and he did it publicly. It was 2005.  He was living in Austin, Texas then and was approached by the Austin American Statesman to be a part of  stories of well known people in Austin at the time who’d struggled with mental illness.  He was by joined singer Shawn Colvin,  former NFL player Hollywood Henderson, and a former Lieutenant Governor. Eric was well known at that time for his years as an award winning radio talk show host there, and he was used to speaking his mind.  He’d never spoken about it on the radio as a journalist or talk show host. 

But in the late 90’s he did.  I found this in a file he’d kept.

Eric Blumberg

Age:53

Profession: Former radio personality: program coordinator for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Austin.

Illness: Bipolar Disorder

In the summer of 1983, Eric Blumberg checked himself in to Seton Shoal Creek psychiatric hospital.

He was tired of the racing thoughts, the incredible urge to buy things and the never ending need to keep moving.

Doctors diagnosed Blumberg with Bipolar 1 Disorder. They put him on lithium and Blumberg’s world changed.

“It got me well,” he said. “It calmed me down.”

By 1984, Blumberg was well on his way to local stardom. He spent more than a decade working for radio stations until 1998.

Today, he says he is devoted to improving awareness of mental illness and is the program coordinator for NAMI.

“You can go on and live your life with mental illness, “ he said. “One year before I started a very successful career, I was in Shoal Creek.

He’d left the business in 1998 and was working in the mental health field himself by then, but soon jumped back into radio broadcasting in Sioux City, Iowa, where he worked as news director at KSCJ and talk show host for several years. Radio had changed since he started in the early 80’s. Being moderate to progressive was no longer the style “du jour”. He went from a mid sized market to a small one in 1999.  That’s when our paths crossed as a part of a larger friend group. After being dismissed in 2003 from the Sioux City station as news director and talk show host, for refusing to sign a paper that mandated he not speak negatively about the war in Iraq, he and his late wife eventually moved back to Austin where he continued his work as a peer counselor for Austin Travis County Mental Health. His wife Karen sadly passed away in 2006.

We reconnected 3 years later. He returned again, for a visit to Sioux City in 2009, and eventually stayed. After growing up in Manhattan, then to Austin, he liked the slow pace.  He was again an educator at our community college here as he’d done in Austin before retiring.  In another piece he wrote a few years ago, he spoke about being diagnosed with depression in his early 20’s after an episode at Beloit, and then bipolar disorder in his early 30’s in Austin during graduate school he revisited some of the horrors he’d been through. https://cindywaitt.com/blog/nuts-by-eric-blumberg/

Eric tends to be gutsier about things like that.  I worry too much about what everyone might think.   I always have.  It took me years to discuss my early bout with post partum depression and my later battle with a perfect anxiety and depression storm in 2009.   My rounds with illness were few and far between, but when they come, they’re pretty harsh.  http://cindywaitt.com/the-mean-reds/ . Happily, 42 days in treatment center got me well. I have my family to thank for that. And I have supportive friends. That’s not the end of my story, but the stigma still exists, even by some close to me.

I call it “coming out” because it is.  There’s a great big mental health closet in this country, and it’s bursting at the seams.  An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.  That’s over 50 million of us.  Americans lose over 50,000 lives a year to this illness.   We either need a bigger closet or more people to step out of it.  I get why they don’t.  It’s not because they aren’t brave.  They are.  It takes guts to live with mental health issues.  They don’t  share because the stigma still exists, and it’s rare to find someone who gets what they have. Suicide has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. − yet medical students still don’t receive adequate training to treat suicidal patients | FIU News – Florida International University

When I heard about the plot of the then much lauded  Silver Linings Playbook , based on the novel by Matthew Quick, that looks at the relationship of a young man struggling with bipolar disorder and a young woman who is recovering from tragedy, struggles with relationships, and has a big dose of anxiety on top of it,  I had to see it.  It was, in a strange way, our story.  And, as good issue films can often do, it started a conversation.

One friend told me it hit too close to home.  Another friend stated pretty clearly that although the film had a happy ending, she was frankly worried about the young couple dealing with not only one mental illness, but two. She had a point.  Relationships are hard and relationships where one partner struggles with mental illness are most likely harder.  But what if they both  have one, like the characters played by Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence do, and like my husband and I do?    I wasn’t as worried for them.  When I see happy Hollywood endings, I know there’s more to come, (someone once said that the next scene after the credits roll  is usually about the fight over who’s taking out the garbage…) but I felt that this couple would make it, maybe because… we did. We were lucky. We hadn’t been sick at the same time ever. Not yet. 

I’ve known my husband for 26 years, and have been with him for almost 17 years.  We reconnected when I was fairly newly home from treatment for anxiety in 2009.   Our first conversation was about that, and that’s when he told me about his own battles with what Winston Churchill called “The Black Dog”. I knew vaguely that he’d had depression, but I didn’t know the extent of what he’d gone through.  I heard the whole frightening story in that first conversation and he found the piece and told me about it, written in the late 90’s.  Here’s what he’s said about it, not only to me, but to a larger audience. He used his megaphone to help others. 

He first became ill in the early college years at Beloit.  Then his first mental health crisis hit.  After a horrifying stay in the hospital, and multiple types of treatments, he says, “I was then able to recoup my sanity, work six years in a neighborhood butcher shop in Manhattan and resume my college career, which included  graduating Summa Cum Laude at Hunter College and acceptance into the graduate school of journalism at the University of Texas.” Six years in a butcher shop. It took him 8 years to feel he was able to return to college. 

He goes on to talk about when it came back in his early thirties.   “It was during those years in Austin that my true diagnosis became apparent when I was stricken with a ferocious onset of mania after which I was hospitalized and given my true cross to bear, bipolar disorder. It was a cross I did indeed bear well as I was able to become a successful journalist, radio talk show host and ultimately a certified peer specialist whose charge it was to assist others living with a mental illness in coming to grips with their own so-called demons.”  

For a guy with that harsh an illness, he’d hit a whole bunch of home runs and it seemed he was most likely home free.  But still, it gave me pause.    The Eric I knew was a calm and centered guy, seemingly a perfect foil for my buzzy anxiety driven moods.  And he was.  But what if HE got sick again’?  It hadn’t happened for close to 30 years so there was no indication that it would, but still, I worried.  Not excessively as people with anxiety disorders like me do, if they’re not managing it right, but I did worry sometimes.  I’d gotten so much stronger, and I was proud of my recovery, and I knew I couldn’t let anything put that or me at risk. I have had a couple of base hits myself in my own career in social work and violence prevention, with a happy, {if challenging due to our diagnoses), marriage, a wonderful son who is an educator, beautiful daughter in law who’s whip smart, and beautiful and  kind, a brilliant and talented step daughter, great family, and extraordinary friends. It hasn’t been easy. 

Eric and I have been friends for 26 years, together for almost 17, married 15 years this June.  It’s been the best, healthiest (at least when well), and most important, the happiest relationship of my life.  We could play like kids, but we were both grown ups.  Then he got sick. Again.

It was Valentine’s Day 2012.   I knew he’d been feeling off, and had had a slight medication change, but he just hadn’t been 100% Eric.   But… he was functional.  I was looking forward to a planned night out to dinner and his usual roses and card and all the little wonders he’d do on special occasions.   What I got was a call from his department head at the community college where he taught.  She wanted to know if he’d gotten home all right, as she thought he might be having symptoms of a heart attack or something serious.  It wasn’t his heart, we made sure of that.  It was his brain.  It had stopped functioning the way you need to function when you want to go through life and go through it well.  If you’ve ever seen someone you love like that, you’ll know what I’m talking about.  It’s quite simply…terrifying.  A  “brain illness” (that’s what we call it) is particularly excruciating, not only for the person suffering through it, but for those who love them. You don’t know when it will end, and as psychiatry is still somewhat “trial and error”, you don’t really know IF it will end. Bipolar One is a terrible illness.  If you’ve never seen someone in a severe episode, you are very, very lucky.  He was unable to get out of bed for weeks.  I made sure  he was fed and showered and took him to any number of psychiatrists. but finally landed, through a good friend of mine, a woman who worked in my doctor’s office.  Eric trusted her immediately, and as I’d known her from back in the days of my social work internship, I knew she would be good.  She added an extra med and he slowly recovered.

It ended and it ended well.  We got through it.  Strangely, as Eric got worse,  I got stronger.  Someone had to be.  He’d done it for me as a friend, over the phone, as we’d reconnected in June of 2009, as I was recovering from my anxiety and depression and coming out of  42 days at a treatment center for depression and anxiety.  I was much better, but still working through a lot. He understood it all.  So, it was my turn, then.  Gradually, after a few one step forward, two steps back dance, he pulled out of it.    The meds that had stopped working for him were changed and they landed on the right “cocktail”. He went back to therapy.  And one spring day, he was ,almost suddenly after several months, my Eric again.

I’m not sure if we have an actual “playbook” to manage what we manage.  “My Eric” is the calm, centered, funny, thoughtful, and brilliant man I fell in love with. He can appear aloof, but it’s only that he is more comfortable with one on one conversations, not groups. The man comfortable in a keynote speech, on the air, and doing interviews, has social anxiety. 

The struggling Eric was “My Eric” too. The  “In sickness and in health” clause we’d agreed to in June of 2011 was tested earlier than I’d thought it would be.  But we got through it.  We were better than ever.  We were tested. We passed. And, if it came back again, to either of us, we knew would get through it.

The next depression was mine. It came back again like it had in 2009. I’d had a great 7 years. My work was going well, and our three documentaries exceeded all of our expectations.

It was August 2016. I had some stressors in the spring, but I had had a good summer. Swimming, celebrating my 60th birthday, had dinner parties, went to movies, even went to a neighborhood bar with friends to hear a band I liked, which is not a usual thing I do. I was so grateful that I hadn’t had a severe depression since 2009. Every day, even a bit of  sad days, are a blessing, because clinical severe depression is worse than anything I’ve ever been through. And I’d been through a lot.  

I was given the wrong antibiotic from an internist my mother suggested I see, for something it turned out, an infection I didn’t have. I told Eric first. “I’m very depressed”. He didn’t say, as most people would, “About what?”.  He already knew that meant it was severe. I went to my psychiatrist at the time, who tried me on another medication.  Weeks later, nothing had changed, so I was told to restart and raise my old tried and true. It didn’t work either.  We call that “medication roulette”. I phoned my sister and brother, who did everything in their power to get me into the Mayo Clinic, but we landed on seeing my brother’s doctor in California, who worked with multiple doctors. That was an extraordinary development and one that saved my life.

I’d never heard of becoming depressed from an antibiotic. Luckily, I found doctors in California and their colleague in New York, who knew that this happened. This doctor told me that he’d had a patient become severely depressed from an antibiotic. I spoke to an internist that worked with him who said, “Of course, you didn’t have the infection, and the sulfa ate up all your folate”. I felt a lift knowing that this can happen and it wasn’t just me. Antibiotics and mental health: The good, the bad and the ugly – PMC

I saw a therapist. a brilliant psychiatrist, who specialized in psychopharmacology, a nutritionist, a neurologist, who were all great. But nothing worked quite worked well enough. Finally, my brother’s doctor, who had now become mine,  told me of other options, one of them I had never tried. It was called Ketamine, given medically supervised and ordered by a neurologist. I was scared to death, but I had nothing to lose. This great doctor said something I’ll never forget. “Depression is so terrible, people would take rat poison to just make it stop”. Thankfully, that was not necessary, but I do know that it’s that bad.  It took six rounds and another trip out there, but it worked!  By mid December, the light went back on.  I had climbed out of that dark, dark, tunnel. It was the longest depression I’d ever had. My doctor explained that my 25 year old self, who suffered post partum, and my 52 year old self in 2009, bounced back quicker, simply due to age. After the Ketamine, I was able to stay severe depression free on my usual anti depressant.

But Eric was with me every minute of that dark time. Every minute.

It’s now 2026. My husband had a terrible accident in 2023, which broke his hip and they think now may have weakened his back. It took months of rehab to simply walk again and he did very well despite the hell he went through. And he’d had no severe depression, except for short term bouts and a bit more anxiety Unfortunately, just close to three months ago, he severely injured his back which may have weakened during the 2023 episode. It took one lift of something very heavy to take it to unbelievable pain. We are currently going through a bit of hell again, especially him.   His osteoporosis was not only age related, but three of the bipolar medications he has to take have caused less bone mineral density. Effect of Long-term Carbamazepine Therapy on Bone Health – PMC The Association Between Antipsychotics and Bone Fragility: An Updated Comprehensive Review – PMC.  

The use of antidepressants is linked to bone loss: A systematic review and metanalysis – PMC.

As of early March, he has now also become depressed and very anxious at times. We just had a consult with a top psychiatrist in another state. He made some recommendations. We have found someone within 100 miles, who could actually see him. We both liked and trusted him when we traveled there this week. He’s very highly rated and now I can see why. In our city, this is currently a challenge. I’m very stable, so I have someone who can help. But if I ever needed extra care, it would probably be Ketamine again. There unfortunately is not enough data to support the safety of Ketamine in people with bipolar disorder. He has an excellent therapist, but bipolar is tricky. He can have many stable days, called “euthymia” and those are a blessing. We are working on that now. Again, I’m the support person, but I have help. I returned again to therapy to deal with all that’s happened since 2016. I’m working on “caretaker syndrome”. My brother warned me about it, and it’s real.  Eric’s now starting a new medication. Has this raised my generalized anxiety disorder a notch?  Hell, yes. But I remain stable and not clinically depressed. Thank God.

There are other people with so many medical problems, that are worse, that may make our issues seem trivial. I get that and feel empathy for all. And yet, I never downplay the severity of both our diagnoses. Our challenges can mostly be overcome, even when, in Eric’s case, it took 8 years back in the 70’s.

However, thousands of others take their lives every year, with just what we have. I understand them too and never, ever judge. Their pain is too great to bear. It’s both tragic, yet to us, completely understandable. We give them credit for staying alive as long as they could.

We are both heading into additional therapy, him for weekly sessions, me for dealing “caretaker syndrome” and other issues..

We try to be each other’s cheerleaders. It’s not perfect, but it still works.

I like this line when I’m in a Pollyanna mood.  

You will feel better than this, maybe not yet, but you will. You just keep living until you are alive again.” — Unknown

There is also a line by Hemingway, a genius in many ways, who died by suicide. “The world breaks everyone, and some are strong in the broken places”. The rest of the quote is darker, so I stay with that, because I remain hopeful.

We had begun gathering chapters before his surgery. We’d like to drop a book on Amazon and donate anything, no matter how little, we might get to mental health.  We will pick that up again. He’ll start writing again. I’ll do my work that I love as I do now.

Together, we’ll get back to radio.  It’s something we can do together. His calmness with my humor and zany lines work in a strange way. We’ve done it before. I would occasionally guest on KWIT, a public radio station here in Iowa, on a music show he did in the year before covid hit, with our late beloved musician friend Johnnie Bolin. I’ll never match their magical union, their fellowship of blues harp player and drummer, and their extraordinary knowledge of all things rock and roll. But, his sardonic New Yorker straight man wit to my comic chatty bits work most of the time. He’ll interview. I’ll pop in now and then. We will do it.

We didn’t break, not yet, and I hope this story, as hard as it was for me to tell,  can help just one of the millions who has or has ever had a dark time, or loves someone who has a dark time.

It IS dark, it is scary, and it is cloudy, but sometimes, just sometimes, at the end of that, there is a silver lining. Or so we hope.