Dark battle, bright future

Crazy.

That’s how Sophie Barnes felt during her freshman and sophomore years at Mountain Brook High School, and that’s how she felt other people saw her. Crazy for feeling depressed despite having a good home, good grades, sports and a social life. Crazy for turning that depression on herself through hundreds of cuts on her body.

Sophie believed she was alone as she dealt with her depression, but she was just one of an estimated 2.8 million adolescents who have experienced a major depressive episode, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

“I was not crazy. I was just a sad little girl who needed some help and needed someone to talk to,” Sophie said.

Now a senior, Sophie barely resembles the person she was two years ago. She’s doing well in school again, rebuilding friendships and planning to go to Mississippi State University. She’s interested in studying meteorology or perhaps becoming an elementary math teacher.

“I had one teacher who just kind of changed me because I hated math and I was really bad at it. I want to be that teacher for kids,” Sophie said.

But she and her mother, Sylvia, agree that it was a hard road to get back to a good place.

Sophie was already having a difficult time coping with the pressure of school and life when a bad relationship started her on a downward spiral. She remembers focusing on the negative emotions, and she stopped eating, let her grades slip and began crying at school. Intensive therapy programs didn’t work, and eventually, Sophie turned to substance abuse and self-harm.

“This is just how she’s dealt with the world. She didn’t have coping skills,” Sylvia said.

The reactions of people around her, Sophie said, made it even more difficult. Some couldn’t understand why a girl with a good life could be depressed and accused her of faking it for attention. Others weren’t prepared to handle a classmate going through such anger, sadness and self-hatred.

It was a time when Sophie needed friends more than ever, but she said her depression burned a lot of bridges at school. To Sylvia, it felt as if some Mountain Brook parents were afraid her daughter’s depression would rub off on their own kids.

“We have parents that won’t allow Sophie to be friends with their children,” Sylvia said. “As a family, we have felt very ostracized.”

Learning to survive

Sophie said as things got worse, she wouldn’t ask for help or mention it to her parents until her depression became too severe to handle. Finally, the Barnes became convinced their daughter needed a more specialized — and unusual — treatment to prevent a more tragic outcome of her illness. They pulled Sophie out of school as a sophomore and sent her to a wilderness program in the mountains of Georgia.

For the next few months, Sophie said, her only concern was survival. She hated it at first. The teens in the program would hike miles every day, eating prepackaged rations and drinking water from the streams. They built their own fires each night and slept under a tarp, which Sophie recalled blew away one night and left them all in the rain.

Once, she had to spend three days entirely on her own. That was when Sophie began to journal, and she found that writing was a more productive outlet for her feelings than self-harm, alcohol or narcotics.

“It just makes it easier to learn how to deal with your emotions because you don’t have to deal with anything else,” Sophie said.

By the time her parents came to visit overnight, Sophie was the one taking care of them in the woods. When she left the program, Sophie was able to carry a 100-pound pack each day through the mountains. Inside was a journal filled with her thoughts and an accountability letter that all students in the program were required to complete. Sophie’s was 60 pages long.

“We showed up and she didn’t look the same, she didn’t act the same,” Sylvia said. “In wilderness is how she is now. She’s very self-sufficient, she has two jobs baby-sitting, that’s how she was when she was at wilderness.”

It took a lot of showers to wash off three months’ worth of living in the woods, and despite being one of the best cooks at the wilderness program, Sophie laughs when she recalls her family’s disgust at her attempt to cook them trail food. 

When she returned to MBHS for her junior year, however, Sophie found that those 12 weeks had paid off.

“School was really easy all of a sudden. I was like, ‘Well I’m not in five-degree weather trying to write with a pen that keeps freezing … this is nothing. This is a piece of cake,’” Sophie said.

It wasn’t an instant transformation. She still had difficulty readjusting to life in Mountain Brook and school stresses. Underneath those highs and lows, however, Sophie had a new ability to cope with what life threw her way. And she was a lot happier.

“My lowest of lows that I’ll have now would be like my highest of highs that I had before,” Sophie said.

Instead of focusing on her depression and letting it spiral out of control, Sophie could recognize it and choose a healthier response: seeing friends, journaling, taking a shower or even getting out of the house for a short walk or drive.

Her parents could see it, too: Sophie now had grounding in her life.

“Even when she slipped, I felt like she would eventually come back,” Sylvia said.

‘Courage to change’

In October 2015, Sophie’s father heard about Beauty Revived, a national campaign to recognize women for inner beauty and strength. He submitted Sophie, since Beauty Revived also offers the chance to compete for scholarships, and the campaign chose her as their Birmingham-area contestant.

Over the next few days, Sophie wrote an essay about her experiences with depression and was set up with local photographer Alanna Rose for a photo shoot in November.

“Sophie was chosen for her strength and courage to change,” said Michelle Gifford from Beauty Revived. “Her closing statement to her submission was ‘I am not perfect, but I am accountable. And I am beautiful.’ Beauty Revived is all about celebrating the beautiful inner strength of these seniors. Sophie is a great example of this, and it was an honor to recognize her for who she has become.”

It happened so fast, Sylvia was afraid there had to be a catch. But there wasn’t.

“I just feel like our struggle with Sophie has been so difficult that nobody was going to give us a break,” Sylvia said.

“Something good came out of it. Who knew?” her daughter responded.

Beauty Revived gave Sophie the chance to share her story, potentially with other young women struggling with depression.

“There aren’t many people you can look up to who’ve been through it,” Sophie said. “A lot of the time, being from Mountain Brook, people are like, ‘What do you have to be sad about?’ and it just kind of made me feel bad. So I want girls, no matter where they’re from, to know it gets better. It’s OK to feel bad, it’s just not OK to engage in those harmful behaviors.”

From her own experience, Sophie said, she wants to tell others with depression that the illness is not their identity, and they don’t need to hide or feel guilty about it. Isolating themselves will only make it harder to fix.

“No matter how crazy you feel, how bad it gets … you have to keep going. You can’t get caught up in your negative thoughts,” Sophie said.

In February, Sophie found out she was not one of the Beauty Revived scholarship winners. The money wasn’t nearly as important, however, as the chance to share with others how she overcame a life-altering challenge.

“A lot of times in the moment you think, ‘I’m not going to get through this, it’s not going to get any better, my life is awful, I want to die,’ and all that stuff. So for me it’s basically that I want to reach out to those girls and let them know it gets better,” Sophie said. “I’m here as proof it gets better.”