Julie Krone's Race Against Depression

Excerpted from the New York Times
Sunday, May 21, 2000
Backtalk, SP 13

Down the black hole of Julie Krone's depression four years ago slipped her career, marriage, friends, even the thoroughbred racers she once drove with flicks of her powerful little hands.

"Horses felt my anxiety, they got weird, they reared up," she said last week in a torrent of memory." I had been given a magical talent to positive-image a loser right into the winner's circle. I had been possessed; I could pick a horse up with my will and put it right down in front.

And then suddenly it was all gone, and I was exhausted.

The magic eventually returned, three weeks ago, Krone became the first woman rider elected to racing's Hall of Fame. She "takes the pioneer responsibility with pride", which is a reason, she said, for also becoming the first major athlete in any sport to speak so publicly and openly about mental illness, psychotherapy and antidepressants.

"A little boy once came up to me at the track and asked to hold my goggles", she said, "and then he looked up at me and said, 'I want to be like you when I grow up'. A boy said that. A boy! What a feeling of touching people. And then, after I first talked publicly about being suicidal and how the medicine made me feel like me again, I got calls and e-mails from people who said I'd given them hope to keep living.

"So that's why I'm doing this," Her blue eyes suddenly widened, the sharp features scrunched and she unleashed the munchkin cackle. "And the drug company's paying me."

Last week, at the American Psychiatric Association's Annual Meeting here, Krone was the star of a provocative symposium on psychiatric drugs and athletes sponsored by the International Society for Sport Psychiatry, which will be covered in a future column, along with your own responses to this subject posted to the lipsite@aol.com.

Krone, happy in the limelight again, vividly described the painful dilemma for elite athletes whose socialization makes them hesitant to seek help.

Typically, she resisted therapy even after anxiety attacks, migraines, sleep and eating disorders had turned her into a recluse and a loser. She resisted medicine even longer.

"I'm a jock," she said. "I can do anything on my own. I though it was humiliating to get help. Meanwhile, the only real relief I felt was planning my suicide. I save sleeping pills, but I was going to drink alcohol, slit my wrists and maybe hang myself, too. I wanted to do one thing right."

Krone, 36, had done a lot of things right from the age of 15, when she first began a 19-year professional riding career that took her to the winner's circle 3,545 times until she retired last year. She won $81 million, 16th on the career earnings list. She was the only female jockey to win a Triple Crown race, the Belmont Stakes in 1993 aboard Colonial Affair.

That summer, at Saratoga, she sustained the most horrendous and spectacular of a number of spills. A collision threw her under the hooves of the pack. Her heart was bruised when a horse kicked her chest and her right ankle needed to be rebuilt with 2 plates and 14 screws.

"People think that's when the depression started, but, no, I was like, 'Wow, look at those X-rays, when can I get back?' " she said, posting in the restaurant banquette as if she were parading the paddock. "And it was a nightmarish hospital stay; the screw was sticking out of the ankle, right here," she said, pulling off her shoe as she raised her leg above her salad, "and that's how strong I was, back at the Belmont in the fall, overcompensating for the tentativeness that usually comes after a bad spill."

But the lurking darkness was moving in. As she would learn three years later when Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was diagnosed, the real trauma was not about blood and broken bones but about "childhood issues, traumatic in themselves, that I'm just not comfortable talking about right now because it would hurt other people."

On Jan. 13, 1996, she was tied for leading rider at Gulfstream Park when her horse broke down in the middle of a race and pitched her off. Rolling on the turf, she covered her head with her hands, which were broken.

"It fried me," she said. "I couldn't talk. The straw didn't break the camel's back; it gutted the sucker, left the camel for dead. I was numb, couldn't think. I was afraid of horses, hated riding.

"My husband said: 'Get back in there, you're tough. That's what I love in you,' which is about the worst thing the closest person can say to someone who is depressed. And typical."

Six weeks later, she was back in there, but her mending hands were on fire and her brain was feverish with flashbacks and fears. Walking to the barns she imagined her execution. When se vomited before she rode, it was anxiety, not weight control (at 4 feet, 10 inches and 100 pounds, she has never had typical jockey's weight problems.) She heard voices telling her she was going to fall off, die, mess up, which she often did, her never and authority gone. She was afraid to ride the rail, to be in the middle of the pack, to take bold risks.

Trainers pulled her off longtime mounts. To keep working, she rode 30-1 shots in bush-league tracks against jockeys she once could beat in her sleep, and lost because she held back. Other jockeys called her "chicken" and told her to quit.

It was an almost casual encounter with an old friend that summer, a racing fan with a psychiatric practice in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., that began her healing process. She was shambling across the backstretch after another loss, her signature bopping bounce long gone, when Dr. Tom Qualtere invited her to come talk to him.

Krone describes that night's two-hour session as "an emotional purge." She said, "I felt full and empty at the same time, joyful and like I was peeling off my skin."

She began seeing Dr. Qualtere four times a week, eventually driving from Belmont to Saratoga. But she rejected his suggestion that she try a psychiatric drug. Talking to a shrink, she felt then, was enough of an admission of weakness.

Krone's description of her early therapy is a high-spirited chattering that includes comic riffs on the joys and frustrations of erotic transference along with a remarkably bold willingness to use the term "mental illness," which is extremely rare among athletes. When she moved to central New Jersey two years ago and could no longer make the frequent trip to Saratoga, she picked a Red Bank, N.J., psychiatrist, Dr. Furey A. Lerro, off the Internet, because his first name was the same as a horse she liked. It was Dr. Lerro who put her on antidepressants.

'I picked Zoloft," he said, "because some of the others take longer to clear from the body, not good if she had a reaction while racing, and the tendency to sedation, which is also not good for a jockey."

Representatives of Pfizer, the makers of Zoloft, were on hand last week, and confirmed that Krone, while not a consultant, did receive money from the company to discuss her experiences.

According to Krone, she felt manic the first three days on the drug, then suddenly felt "anchored, back to Julie Krone again."

"I'm not sorry I didn't start the medicine sooner - I needed to first get to a place in talk therapy," she said.

She added: "You don't fully realize how weird it was until you have yourself back. I'd been spending the minutes before a race using all my energy to defeat an anxiety attack, and now, well, list to this. At the end of last year, in a 60-day period, my mother died, I got divorced and I moved to California. And I'm here, I'm O.K."

These days, Krone, a racing analyst for TVG in Los Angeles, is taking psychology courses with a view of becoming a therapist. She expects to continue her paid campaign to demystify therapy and drug for athlete and nonathlete. But on Aug. 7, when she is formally inducted into the Hall of Fame, she will not discuss depression.

"Nobody really cares," she said. "It's horse racing."