Woman Who Could Not Forget (60 page)

Observers have argued that other factors might have played a role in her suicide, such as her fertility treatments that might have affected her mood. As far as I know, her fertility treatment length was very limited, only involving several weeks before the egg retrieval in December of 2001. Her emotional spiral began in 2004.

Others blamed the dark nature of her Nanking book as the cause of her suicide and asserted that perhaps no one should write books on a topic so dark. I know Iris had absolutely no regrets that she had been able to write the Nanking book and expose this tragic chapter of history to the world. Shau-Jin and I also believed that the Nanking book was not a real cause for her suicide; after all, the book was written seven years before her death. It was unfortunate that she was going to write about the American POWs’ horrible experience in the Philippines in the 1940s for her next book. Even though this last research was also on a hideous subject and it certainly was not good for her mental health, I don’t feel it was a major factor in her depression.

Could Iris’s suicide have been prevented? I strongly believe that if she had been given a chance to rest, physically and mentally, without psychiatric medications, she would have recovered and would be with us today. Intensive psychotherapy would have been helpful as well, as we all know there is no magic bullet to snap a patient instantly out of depression. With rest and support, she would have been able to manage her problems, personal or professional, in a systematic and logical way. She had dealt with other obstacles in her life successfully. She was always a strong and passionate person with enthusiasm for life. Tragically, Iris was not given a chance to recover from her physical and mental exhaustion. She was immediately given an antipsychotic drug and then an antidepressant with side effects which could exacerbate her anxiety and mild depression.

I hope this book will help people become aware of the possible danger of psychiatric drugs and to think twice before taking them. Even though the statistics show that the percentage of suicide among patients on antidepressants is low, still it is higher than placebo. Every single life is important and valuable. I don’t want what happened to us to happen again in anyone’s family.

It was frustrating that when the media learned of Iris’s nervous breakdown and reported the doctor’s diagnosis as bipolar disorder onset (a diagnosis that was never verified or confirmed), people started to speculate about Iris’s mental health without having the information they would have needed to understand her in her final six months. One published book even speculated that she was mentally ill as early as 1999. All these speculations are self-serving due to ignorance. Some people have even suggested that Iris’s enormous passion and drive might have been a manifestation of the mania phase of bipolar disorder. Friends who knew her and are trained in clinical psychology resoundingly disagree [3]. This kind of generalization implies that any person who is energetic and ambitious or a perfectionist would have or would develop bipolar disorder. I don’t think this oversimplified postulation is acceptable at all.

Iris was an extremely private person. She did not want her plight to be known by the public. Another reason that she wanted the whole thing kept private was the stigma against mental patients in our society. Indeed, mental illness in the Asian culture is especially a taboo subject, as it elicits cruel judgments. Out of our respect for her privacy, we complied with Iris’s request that her depression be kept secret; but after she died, we decided to accept the invitation of the Asian American Mental Health Network to speak out in public on behalf of the mentally ill. Open discussion of mental issues and support from relatives, friends, and communities are essential steps for recovery from mental illness—this is the lesson we learned.

Life cannot return when it vanishes. My earnest hope is to use this book to help families with mentally ill members. As many mental-health experts [6] now believe, psychotherapy, faith, and the love and support of family are essential for helping a mental patient fully recover. At the present time, antidepressants tend to offer only modest benefits compared to placebo. This shows that it is often hope that helps reduce depression, not the specific medication. We are far from fully understanding the function of the human brain.

Although Iris has been dead for over six years as this book is about to go to press, her image and spirit were always in front of me as I wrote this book. Those images—her innocent smile, her loud laughter, her curious eyes, her endless thought-provoking questions—are constantly with me. But the most significant thing about Iris was her spirit: to strive to be the best and never give up the pursuit of historical truth and social justice. It’s precisely this spirit which has inspired people worldwide.
The Rape of Nanking
galvanized the global Chinese communities and vitalized the international redress movement in forcing Japan to reflect on its actions during the Second World War. However, up to this day, Japan still has neither issued a formal apology to the victims nor paid any reparations to the people whose lives were destroyed in the rampage. And worst of all, Japan has failed to educate its own citizens and future generations about the truth of the wartime atrocities Japan perpetrated in Asia during the Second World War.

As a mother facing the tragic death of her daughter, I’m in a unique position: I could mourn the loss of my beloved daughter for the rest of my life, or I could convert my loss into something positive. In
The Rape of Nanking
, Iris quoted George Santayana’s immortal warning, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” to express the reason why she wanted to write the book. It is my mission to continue the unfinished work that Iris initiated—to educate the next generation about the cruel lesson of history in the hope that that history will
not
be repeated.

A year and a half after her death, on Iris’s birthday, March 28, 2006, my husband and I, together with many of her supporters, established the Iris Chang Memorial Fund (
www.irischangmemorialfund.net
) to continue the work she cherished and to pay tribute to her fighting spirit and enduring legacy. In the past several years, alongside the time I spent writing this book, I devoted my time to activities in education—for the next generation—about the Asian Holocaust. This work gave me a reason to live on and the courage to look forward—and the hope for a peaceful and harmonious world in the future.

Iris wanted the world to remember her writing, her words. She always said that life would vanish one day, but books and words would be left behind. In January 1997, in an e-mail to me, she wrote: “Words are the only way to preserve the essence of a soul. What excites me about speeches is that even after the speakers are dead and buried, their spirit lives on. This, to me, is true religion—the best form of life after death. (And, for now, probably the ONLY form of life after death.)” If, as she said, “Words are eternal,” and “Books are the ultimate for writers to reach immortality,” then she had already reached her life goal—except that she would have achieved even more if she lived longer.

At the end of the writing of this book, I came to this ultimate question, one whose answer I have always been—and continue—searching for: what is the meaning of life? The answer will surely vary with different people. When I thought about Iris’s life, her speech and all those letters she wrote to me and her dad, she clearly expressed that she was a person listening to her heart, her own inner passion, while striving to create something of enduring value. That she meant “standing alone and forging one’s own path.” And she wanted her son Christopher “better to belong to the critical minority than the unquestioning majority.”

To know her inner passion, in an interview in June 2003, she told Robert Birnbaum: “. . . it is important for me to write about issues that have universal significance. One of them that has resonated with me all my life has been the theme of injustice . . . for some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on other people’s civil liberties.”

In concluding this book, while I was trying to find a quote from someone who had the same philosophy about life as Iris, I accidentally heard a line over the radio that struck me at once as representing Iris’s essence: “There are some that live their lives for others.”

C
hristopher is a handsome eight-year-old boy at this writing, and he lives with his paternal grandparents Ken and Luann in central Illinois near his father Brett’s home. Brett remarried in January 2006, and he and his wife have two children.

Shau-Jin and I still live in the same townhouse in San Jose. Christopher visits us twice a year during his spring break and summer vacation, and he loves to come to California to visit us. Besides managing the Iris Chang Memorial Fund, Shau-Jin and I are active in Bay area organizations such as the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia. Because of Christopher’s autism, we have also joined the Bay area organization Friends for Children with Special Needs. When I have time, I hope I can help the national organizations in preventing suicide.

1) Teicher, M. H., Glod, C. A., Cole, J. O. (1990). “Emergence of intensive suicidal preoccupation during fluoxetine treatment.” Am J Psychiatry 147:207-210.

Techer, M. H., Clod, C. A., Cole, J. O. (1993). “Antidepressant drugs and the emergence of suicidal tendencies.” Drug Safety 8(3):186-212.

2) Healy, D., Harris, M., et al. (2006). “Lifetime suicide rates in treated schizophrenia: 1875-1924 and 1994-1998 cohorts compared.” British Journal of Psychiatry 188: 223-228.

3) “It is scientifically established that certain variations in genes, called polymorphisms”: Personal communication with Dr. Diana Zucherman, Clinical Psychologist and the President of the National Research Center for Women & Families,
http://www.center4research.org
. Other information in this book has been also kindly provided by Dr. Diana Zucherman via personal communication.

4) Okuma, T. (1981). “Differential sensitivity to the effects of psychotropic drugs: psychotics vs normals; Asian vs Western populations.” Folia Psychiatr Neurol Jpn 35(1): 79-87.

Bond, W. S. (1991). “Ethnicity and psychotropic drugs.” Clin Pharm 10(6): 467-70.

Lin, K. M., R. E. Poland, et al. (1991). “Pharmacokinetic and other related factors affecting psychotropic responses in Asians.” Psychopharmacol Bull 27(4): 427-39.

Matthews, H. W. (1995). “Racial, ethnic and gender differences in response to medicines.” Drug Metabol Drug Interact 12(2): 77-91.

Bakare, M. O. (2008). “Effective therapeutic dosage of antipsychotic medications in patients with psychotic symptoms: Is there a racial difference?” BMC Res Notes 1: 25.

5) Bass, Alison (2008).
Side Effects: a prosecutor, a whistleblower, and a bestselling antidepressant on trial.
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman Publishing, N. Y., N. Y.

6) Breggin, Peter R., M.D. (1991).
Toxic Psychiatry.
St. Martin’s Press, N. Y.

—— (2001).
The Anti-Depressant Fact Book: What Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Luvox.
Da Capo Press.

—— (2008).
Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide, and Crime.
St. Martin’s Press, N. Y.

7 “The FDA and the National Institutes of Mental Health now carry warnings on their Web sites that antidepressant medication can double the risk of suicide, compared to placebo”:
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/eating-disorders/fda-warnings-on-antidepressants.shtml
.

The Abilify Web site states that antidepressants may increase suicidal thoughts or behaviors:
http://www.abilify.com/Default.aspx?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CCkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.abilify.com%2F&rct=j&q=abilify%20side% 20effects&ei=vDxDTJSBIML98AakspUQ&usg=AFQjCNEmuZnhqoRv2cM0IGq_-bFnCG8QJw

The Celexa web site and label warn that “patients of all ages taking antidepressant therapy should be closely monitored”:
http://www.celexa.com/

8) A very recent study:
Schneeweiss S, et al. “Variation in the risk of suicide attempts and completed suicides by antidepressant agent in adults. A propensity-score adjusted analysis of 9 years’ data.” Arch Gen Psychiatry 2010; 67: 497-506.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/19904

9) Whitaker, Robert. (2002).
Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill.
Revised paperback, 2010, Basic Books, Perseus Books Group, N. Y.

—— (2010).
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.
Crown Publishing Group, N. Y.

Eulogy delivered by James Bradley

at Los Altos, California, on November 19, 2004

I stand here with a message for two-year-old Christopher.

My name is James Bradley.

My father was John Bradley.

My father was one of the guys who raised the flag on Iwo Jima.

Growing up, I didn’t learn much about the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photo from him, because he couldn’t talk about it.

My father died in 1994.

After his death, I went on a quest to learn about that of which he could not speak.

Christopher, your mother was Iris Chang.

She wrote haunting words about difficult historical truths.

Your mother died in 2004.

Later, I imagine you will also go on a quest to learn about that of which your mother could not speak.

In 1997—five years before you were born—I was struggling in my efforts to write a book about the six flag-raisers in the photo.

For two years I had tried to find a publisher.

Twenty-seven publishers wrote me rejection letters.

My spirits were low.

Then one Sunday I felt a beacon of hope.

A book about World War II was on the
New York Times
“Best Sellers” list.