HARRIS COUNTY, Texas — In the weeks since Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo returned to the job after taking medical leave to receive treatment for clinical depression, she hasn’t hesitated to talk about it.
The top elected leader in the state’s most populous county providing an extraordinary public acknowledgment of a private suffering in the hope it might help others.
“I had felt suicidal for a long time. At this point, eight years, but especially this year, that first half of this year it got to a point where it was just so scary,” Judge Hidalgo told us on Y’all-itics. “I just felt like if I didn’t do something, I was afraid I was going to jump off the balcony.”
Hidalgo says in many ways she was lucky.
She went on a bike ride one day and became dehydrated. During a visit with her primary care physician, he asked her how she was doing, and Hidalgo says she immediately started crying.
Her doctor put her in touch with a different psychiatrist than the one she had been seeing and within two days, she was on a plane heading for in-patient treatment at the Lindner Center for HOPE in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Hidalgo says people have wondered about her stressful job, as politics can be a brutal business.
“Having a stressful job doesn’t help, but you don’t have to have a stressful job in order to be depressed,” she said.
That was one of the many lessons she says she learned during treatment.
And she says it’s a mistake thinking the job was the cause.
“For me, for someone that has my issue, if I hadn’t taken this job, I would have decided to take some other, you know, job. I say, if I decided to go plant trees, I would have put it on myself to plant a million. I mean, I’ve always been this way my whole life for as long as I, or my parents, can remember,” Hidalgo said.
Hidalgo was diagnosed in July and returned to the office Oct. 2.
While some called for her resignation during her leave of absence, she says she’s received a great deal of support since she’s been back, including from some folks who might not normally offer words of encouragement.
“I have received a lot of nice messages. A lot of people that you would never imagine who've shared with me their mental health struggles. And a lot of leaders from both parties that have very kindly reached out,” she told us.
Be sure to listen to the entire episode of Y’all-itics to learn more as Judge Hidalgo opens up about her regret in all of this, the therapy she brought back, and what surprised her about her own condition.
** If you or someone you know is in crisis, or struggling, call or text 988, the national suicide and crisis lifeline **
