One couple’s climb to hope

Supermodel and husband tell their sides of coming back from his depression

By VIRGINIA ROHAN

The Record (Hackensack N.J.)

After supermodel Emme and her husband, Phillip Aronson, made it through the 2 1/2 -year nightmare they call “the abyss,” the last thing she wanted to do was to revisit her husband’s severe clinical depression for a book.

“I was kicking and screaming going into it, because I just couldn’t handle it,” Emme says, chatting over a cup of organic coffee at her Dutch Colonial home in northern Bergen County, N.J. “It was too soon, and post-depression, there was a whole adjustment period ... about eight or nine months for Phil ... a lot of tough, difficult times for him. Imagine being out of it for 2 1/2 years, not being in control of what was going on around you, (feeling like you) couldn’t even get out of the house if the house was burning.”

Her husband, sitting beside her at the table, picks up the tale of how they came to write their new Morning Has Broken, A Couple’s Journey Through Depression (New American Library, $24.95).

“Emme was like, ‘Phil, I don’t know if I’m healed yet. We just lived this, I don’t know if I want to relive it again.’ I was fine,” he recalls. But as the months went by, he approached her again. “I said to Emme, ‘The only way that I can do this is if you do it with me. That is the only way that I could justify and make sense of all this stuff. I need to turn it around and make it something positive.’ And Emme said, ‘OK, I’ll give you an answer,’ and she thought a couple of days ...”

“A month,” she interjects.

“And she said yes,” Phil says, adding with a chuckle, “and then from that point on, it was ‘Why did I commit to doing this?’ ”

Morning Has Broken is a candid look at Emme’s transformation into round-the-clock caregiver and single parent, as her husband, the creative force in their business, progressively slid into clinical depression. With especially cruel timing, it first manifested itself shortly after their daughter Toby’s birth in August 2001. Eventually Phil couldn’t even get out of bed, and in August 2003 he attempted suicide by overdosing on prescription medication.

Emme — who became famous as a plus-size model in the early ’90s, went on to a television career. She put her career on hold.

“I’m so blessed, because my wife, she took 2 1/2 years out of her life to take care of me,” says Phil, 43.

“One of my goals is to get to Capitol Hill and talk to legislators to see how we as a nation can help those who have no means to get antidepressants and get proper therapy.” he says.

The main trigger of his depression, Phil says, was his excruciating case of prostatitis (inflammation of the prostate), made worse by his decision to not medicate the pain so as not to mask symptoms.

“Because the pain did not let up and I was unable to sleep, I suffered from sleep deprivation, so then all my (brain) chemistry changed, and I went downhill,” Phil says.

His road to recovery involved a variety of medications, hospitalizations and, eventually, electroconvulsive therapy. In the book he gives an account of ECT, which helped bring him out of the darkness.

Phil at first resisted ECT, remembering the images of Jack Nicholson’s treatments in movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but got to the point where he was willing to try anything.

Though much less “violent” than the procedure used to be, Phil says, “there are still some people on the side of the fence that it works and others that it doesn’t. It worked for me.”