Daniel leaves elementary school, begins junior high (Jr grades 7-9). Junior high begins Daniel’s depression. Mabel takes Daniel to counselors.
Daniel entered 7th grade and junior high School at Chester.[1]
In the Chester area, students that had been together since kindergarten were divided and reallocated to 3 different junior high schools. (If the Johnston family home had been only a short distance from where it was, Daniel would have attended school with many more of his elementary school friends.[2]) The transition from elementary school to junior high school is often a difficult one, but the problems associated with questions of “coolness” and the onset of adolescence, were exacerbated in Daniel’s case, as he lost touch with familiar friends and attended his new school with strangers.
Now Living alone at home with his parents, Daniel had his first experience with major depression, and it hit him “like a ton of bricks.”[3][4]
In 2009, Dale Dudgeon noted, “[If] his depression began in 7th or 8th grade, like he related to me, when he parted ways with Randy [Yost]… We didn’t have the tools. You didn’t take your kid to the doctor—no, he’s crazy!”[5] In interviews with Dale he explained further: [I need to track down this quote and citation for the above and below. The quote above is accurate but the quote below is paraphrased. Citations for each are somewhere in my first phone interview with Dale. The following is a placeholder.] ‘The way people thought back then, you were either crazy enough to be locked away in an asylum for life or you were sane. There wasn’t any in between. So, nobody would have taken Daniel’s condition seriously. We just didn’t think that way. We thought he was hyperactive and a little quirky but otherwise fine.’ Dale speculated in the same interview that it was Daniel’s time in Austin that truly broke him. Dale held a grudge toward Daniel’s friends in Austin, believing that Austin was the site of Daniel’s first experience with drugs [It was the carnival, two years prior.] and that his friends there were taking bets on when he’d die. The second untrue rumor understandably made him very upset, but it wasn’t true. In a follow-up interview with Dale, I dispelled both rumors and he was relieved to learn that Daniel’s Austin friends really did care for him and were doing their best to look after him.[6]
It’s unclear exactly when Daniel’s first major depression began, but we have evidence that points to a span of 7th/8th grade to 10th grade.[7] Here’s what we know:
- It began while he was still in junior high school[8]
- It lasted approximately 3 years[9]
- When he entered high school in 10th grade, he was still in the throes of it[10]
- His recovery was contemporaneous with his discovery of The Beatles[11] [12]
- By 11th grade, when he met Ron Harris, a fellow Beatles fanatic who had discovered The Beatles in 10th grade, they had a similar knowledge of the band.[13]
The above facts strongly suggest that Daniel’s depression began in or around early 8th grade, his second year of junior high school, and that he recovered from that depressive episode sometime during his first year of high school, 10th grade.[14]
Daniel described his first depression as very scary because he didn’t know what was happening to him. In 2009, he said the depression he experienced then was probably the worst of his life.[15] Friends remarked that he wasn’t himself and expressed disappointment that he was no longer lively and entertaining. His best friend at the time, Randy Yost, told him he was too weird to hang out with anymore.[16] He extensively detailed the onset of his first depression, and corresponding suicidal ideation, in journals he wrote as an assignment for his high school English teacher.[17]
By way of an extraordinary series of events, Daniel wound up diagnosing himself as a manic depressive without ever seeing a doctor. In junior high school, he sequestered himself in the school library, “to avoid having to see anyone.”[18] While there he pored over art books and took a special liking to the work of Vincent Van Gogh. That led him to read about Van Gogh’s life and learn that he was a manic depressive, with symptoms that matched his own. From that point forward, he thought of himself as a manic depressive.[19]
In The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Mabel referred to him having “lost his confidence” in junior high school, and that it was only years later that she realized he’d been exhibiting the first signs of his illness.[20] Similarly, in a 2005 interview, Bill said, “We were dumb enough to think he was just spoiled.”[21] But nobody that knew Daniel before he moved to Texas in 1983 suspected any form of mental illness.
As early as fall 1979 (at ACU), Daniel expressed that his greatest fear, from junior high school until the end of his life, was to be locked away in an insane asylum. He heard the song “We’re Coming to Take You Away Ha-Ha.”
It is likely that Daniel ran away with the carnival because he was convinced that his family was conspiring to have him committed. He also twice attacked people (Randy Kemper, Steve Shelley) when he believed they were on the verge of doing something that would directly lead to him being committed to a mental hospital. And recorded phone calls and NYC recordings (at least one was in the doc) reveal that his main problem with Jeff Tartakov, and the primary thing that led to Daniel firing Jeff for good, was that he was cooperating too much with Bill and Mabel and that that led to him being committed again.
From the David Thornberry “Songwriter of the Year” tape letter, side 2, around the 13-minute mark, in which Daniel cops to being on the verge of madness in early 1986:
“I’m definitely in my manic, but I gotta beat my depression cause I don’t want to end up like Roky Erikson, cause you know I understand him, God bless him. But I gotta be more stable and I could go that road, I know I could, but I gotta try to get a hold of myself and my life. And so, so the way, and my ambition to try to do that—other people may interpret it as sort of arrogant miltaryism, that I’m trying, that I do a bunch, a lot of things… Sort of, in a military type style but I’m just trying to carry out and do some things for myself, you know what I mean? To try to help myself. Because I’m trying to look out for myself, I’m trying to make things good for myself. Cause I’m worried, I’ve always been worried about myself and I want to try to beat it, you know what I mean? Because it’s hard for me, you know. It’s hard for everybody, right. But I, I been off the deep end before and I just don’t want to go again, you know what I mean? I mean, I think that I lose touch with, uh, reality. In that I forget what reality is, which is pretty obviously losing touch.”[22]
[1]42:36, WS330045 Dan W Va Thursday, with high school art teacher, 2009
[2] A statement that exists somewhere among hours of recorded interviews with Dale, Ron, or Goat interviews. It would be difficult to find but I can track it down if asked.
[3] 4:07-4:47: Interview with Daniel and parents, 2006 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQacXoQqQmw,
[4] 15:25, WS330048 Dan W Va Friday, 2009—Daniel describes the symptoms of his depression at length
[5] 2:29:33, WS330051 Dan H.S. reunion, Gabe Sunday interviews, 2009
[6] Citation [and major edit] needed for the entire paragraph. Should all be in first phone interview with Dale Dudgeon
[7] 15:25, WS330048 Dan W Va Friday
[8] 2:29:33, WS330051 Dan H.S. reunion, Gabe Sunday interviews, 2009; “Peek A Boo,” “Going Down,” 1982
[9] pp. 45-50, NB79E; pp. 46-47 NB89A, and many others
[10] pp. 45-50, NB79E; pp. 46-47 NB89A, and many others
[11] pp. 45-50, NB79E; pp. 46-47 NB89A, and many others, “Rock and Roll EGA,” too many others to list.
[12] 15:25, WS330048 Dan W Va Friday
[13] Unrecorded interview with Ron Harris
[14] pp. 45-50, NB79E; pp. 46-47 NB89A, and many others
[15] 14:13, WS330048 Dan W Va Friday, Daniel with his high school art teacher, 2009
[16] Unrecorded Ron Harris interviews
[17] pp. 45-50, NB79E; pp. 46-47 NB89A, and many others
[18] “Poor You,” Hi How Are You, 1983
[19] There are many citations for this but I’d have to look to find them. I also got this from David Thornberry first-hand.
[20] Interview with Mabel Johnston, The Devil and Daniel Johnston
[21]“He’s Daniel Johnston and He Was Gonna Be Famous,” by Michael Hall, Texas Monthly, February 2005
[22] DT Songwriter of the Year, Side 2, around the 13-minute mark