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California Secretary of State Debra Bowen made a remarkable revelation for an elected official on Friday — she told the LAT's Patrick McGreevy that she has been missing time on the job due to severe depression and has moved from the two-story country home she shares with her husband into a mobile home in a run-down industrial area of Sacramento. Bowen, 58, said she has suffered from depression since college but that the current siege is her worst in a long time. "It has been 30 years since I have had a depression that has weighed this heavily on me, so I am in new territory," she said. The reporter described Bowen as weeping during the interview. "I am having a more difficult episode right now," she said.
McGreevy's story also noted that Bowen and her husband have had several state and federal tax liens filed against them. Mark Nechodom, Bowen's husband and the director of the state Department of Conservation, told The Times he paid off the last remaining lien on Friday, after being contacted by a reporter.
Bowen and her chief of staff said she continues to run the office from home and that the preparations are on track for the November election. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said he was surprised that Bowen was able to keep her illness secret all this time, as a member of the Assembly and state Senate before being elected secretary of state in 2006, and he praised her for making it known. Steinberg said Bowen should be able to continue in office, but Republican Pete Peterson, a candidate to succeed Bowen in November, said "that’s an office where you have to be physically present. This is an office that has not performed well for eight years.”
Bowen was term-limited out and is in the final months of her term. Peterson's Democratic opponent in November is Alex Padilla, the state Senator and former Los Angeles City Council president.
From McGreevy's Friday night story:
On Friday, Bowen said she wanted to share her troubles with the public, particularly after the suicide of actor Robin Williams, who also suffered from depression.The pressures of elected office are intense, she explained, but she noted that she was open about being a recovering alcoholic while in the Legislature many years ago: "I got sober in 1995, while I was in the Assembly, which is no small feat."
She said she beat back addiction again after becoming hooked on prescription pain medicine while a member of the state Senate.
Depression, however, has proved to be a much tougher battle, even with treatment and medication, she said.
"It is debilitating. It wears on your soul," Bowen said, weeping….The secretary said she is receiving professional help, is comforted by support from friends and has not been hospitalized. She described her new living accommodations as a refuge, characterizing the mobile home park as one containing "extended-stay cottages."
The Times reporter, however, describes Arden Acres as a place with cracked windowsills next to a storage yard on the outskirts of sacramento. "On Thursday, her state-issued Buick was parked outside, the back seats and front passenger seat full of cardboard boxes brimming with clothing and household goods," McGreevy writes.
