Ohana Haas - The Tragic Death of a Promising Talent - Pt 2
How We Are Becoming Unreal to Ourselves
When she turned fifteen, Ohana became a resident of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts for nine months. McLean is associated with Harvard University and notable for the many famous people who have spent time there. During his own stint at McLean, James Taylor met his friend, “Suzanne,” whose death figures prominently in the first verse of “Fire and Rain.”
Ohana’s stay at McLean, while difficult at the start, saw her make great progress in coping with her emotions. The program included high school classes and allowed this “girl interrupted” to resume living and maturing. In addition to composing new songs, she started writing poetry and doing artwork. The cure seemed to have worked.
It didn’t last, though. Ohana had to return the following year to McLean as she relapsed into anorexia and bulimia once more.
The next two years were spent mostly at home. Her days and nights flipped as she stayed up all night singing and writing poetry to ward off her nightmares. At first her mother didn’t understand why she was lying around all day—why she just couldn’t function—until she came to understand Ohana’s nocturnal habits caused by her terror of sleep.
The only thing that had really improved in Ohana’s later teenage years was her ability to communicate directly her periodic need for hospitalization. This limited her self-destructive behavior, to a degree.
During this time when Ohana wished to return for further treatment, McLean Hospital informed the Haas family that the facility no longer believed it could be of any meaningful help to Ohana. Silver Hill did not have any available beds. Her long time psychiatrist decided that Ohana, in an effort to become more resilient and self-sufficient, should take time to see if she could work on some healing on her own. What seemed Ohana’s best hopes—her places of last resort in her mind—gave up on her.
The tough love approach from her longtime psychiatrist didn't last for long as he was, as always from age 14, there for her when she needed support. And she now needed both his support and some new treatments, since she had already tried every conventional one that her doctor and numerous specialists had recommended.
Looking for alternatives, the Haas family found Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist known for treating high profile cases and the most severely ill. He was also open to alternative therapies, including the use of the mild psychedelic, ketamine. (Ketamine has now come to be widely accepted as a treatment for severe depression.) He lived not far from McLean Hospital, in the the small city at the top of the North Shore outside of Boston, Newburyport.
Dr. Keith Ablow worked with Ohana through the years 2018 and 2019. He had never seen anyone who had disfigured herself to such a degree through cutting. It shocked him that McLean had essentially thrown up its hands.
At the same time, he found Hannah extraordinarily engaging. He saw both her fierce intelligence and her prodigious talent. She had, he says, “a sarcastic, combative streak, with a lively sense of humor that tended to be dark. Her empathic and creative abilities gave her insight into other people. She could ‘run the arithmetic,’ so to speak, and decide whether someone made sense or not. She was never rude but didn’t suffer fools gladly. She was definitely a person dancing on the edge.”
She was a “high-wire” act, but for that very reason someone who commanded and deserved his attention and care.
Dr. Ablow felt it unnecessary to trace or re-trace the genesis and trajectory of Ohana’s mental health issues back to their origin in trauma, brain chemistry, or genetic predispositions. It was clear enough that she was broken. Her personality had fractured to such a degree that the dark elements could commandeer her will and drive her to acute and chronic self-destructive actions. The question really was: how could he help this person reintegrate and manifest herself?
Dr. Ablow could foresee the narrative of Ohana’s recovery. For one thing, he did not see her Dissociative Identity Disorder as inexplicable. “It seems reasonable to me,” Dr. Ablow says, “that if you're a very sensitive person, and you go through very painful things, and you have certain predispositions genetically, then trying to manage all of your affect in one locale, if you will, emotionally and mentally, isn't possible. And to survive, you compartmentalize.”
He points out that to a degree we all have multiple personality disorder, in the sense that we have aspects of our personalities that tell us we are unworthy and others that argue we are God’s gift to humanity. Most people with any acquaintance with psychology will have encountered the idea of one’s mind consisting of a “committee” of such voices. For most of us, these committees are cohesive, in the sense that we understand all the different voices that we hear in our heads as having a common source in our self. (Even if that particularly rude one sounds like a dead-ringer for Aunt Sally.)
What happens in Dissociative Identity Disorder is that the person experiences the different aspects of his or her personality as not having a common origin, as lacking cohesion. The normal coping mechanism of compartmentalization becomes a casting department with its dramatis personae beyond the person’s control. Their destructive emotions assume a persona—a life—of their own, and sometimes several lives.
Dr. Ablow began helping Ohana reintegrate her sense of self through her creativity. That was the place where she both found comfort and the ability to see herself as others’ might. Her music is astonishing, in part, because it provides such an understandable portrait of what it was like for Ohana to feel the emotions that drove her self-destruction. Her imagination provided a pathway to self-understanding, and ultimately, perhaps, mental health.
Dr. Ablow’s understanding of this, as well as his regard for her talent, led to him setting up the recording sessions out of which came The Broken.
There’s a Romantic notion that creative people are given to madness. That it’s our imaginations that bedevil us, while sweet reason produces sanity. If this were true, relying on someone’s creativity—their imagination—to lead them to mental health might seem crazy in itself.
Go back and listen to these final lines from the video at the top of “Don’t Give Up On Me.”
I am falling and drowning in memory and it's not over I am reliving it as we speak And I am sorry I'm not who you want me to be But I am trying So please don't give up on me. So please don't give up on me.
When Ohana sings, “I’m not who you want me to be,” she’s voicing a prayer to those who love her from a position of empathy. She understands that her pain has caused them pain and identifies with their disappointment. This is the very opposite of the self-centeredness in which the truly insane become lost within their own mazes of reason. Her imagination, in other words, allowed Ohana to see and potentially value herself as others who loved her did, and so find a path away from the destructive Ohana she saw in the mirror—the one who wouldn’t be satisfied until she made of herself a blood sacrifice.
One day, Dr. Ablow believed, Ohana might step away from her mental anguish and place her faith in what gave her life meaning: the ability to create music and send it out to others in the world.
Dr. Ablow says: “In the middle of a torturous mental illness, Ohana Haas showed up like a champ in a studio, and recorded an album with career musicians who found her talent breathtaking. Maybe the energy that's inherent in that goes on and we can be instruments of it in some form.”
Her mother, Sandra, comments: “If you can take your incredible gifts and your abilities and find a way to harness them in a such a positive way [as Ohana did in helping her fellow patients and now her larger audience], yours is a life of infinite value.”
It’s widely known that Millennials and Gen Z are dealing with an epidemic of mental illness. Ohana Haas’s case might be thought of as so extreme that it has only so much to teach us about the widespread anxiety, depression, lack of purpose, and sense of self from which these generations suffer.
Ohana may have been predisposed to self-destructive behavior in whatever time period she happened to be born. Still, Ohana remains at the extreme end of a continuum upon which most of us find ourselves today.
Remember back to the onset of Ohana’s illness. It started and rapidly accelerated with her use of social media. Dr. Ablow suggests that the screens in our lives are turning us into two-dimensional characters, attenuating the true sense of self we gain from close friendships and community. How different are we than the characters we see on our screens? Those we blow away in video games or idolize for their TikTok videos? Citing Marshall McCluhan’s communication theory, Dr. Ablow argues our screens are sucking us into them and transforming us into digital imagery. What does personhood mean in this context?
This led me to think about how so many film, television, and music stars become such miserable, and often, self-destructive people. The roll call of drug overdoses and suicides just off the top of my head would include Marilyn Monroe, John Belushi, Whitney Houston, River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger, etc. etc.
Any Warhol famously quipped that soon everyone wold be famous for fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, now almost everyone is famous, to some degree, on a continuous basis.
Here’s what I mean: In the past, only those made famous by traditional mass media had to deal with idealized images created by PR agents versus the humdrum and often disappointing reality of being themselves. The disparity between the images created for the public and their own private realities could become torturous. Booze and drugs were a first line of defense. Lethal solutions often followed.
To a degree, everyone at all times has worn a mask—a public face—to shield their privacy and to foreground the more likable aspects of their personality. This had its positive aspects, as the selves we presented to others practiced common decency more often and were more courteous than the darker aspects of our natures may have preferred. We could “keep a stiff upper lip” and still know ourselves to be more emotional, afraid, and imperfect than we chose to show.
Genuinely healthy people know what they are feeling and have relationships in which they can let down their guard and be fully themselves. They also know, more or less, who they are, at least within the boundaries of how much a creature with a free will can ever know this.
When the distance increases exponentially between how we present ourselves to the world and our interior reality—when we find ourselves living a “double life” or one even more complicated—disintegration is inevitably at hand. That’s what happens to so many “stars.”
Social media have now produced a world in which we are all liable to the star syndrome that’s killed off many of its supposed beneficiaries. Everyone now has a PR agent—YOU. That fabulous trip you took to Cancun, your chance to have Vince Gill’s arm around you backstage at a recent concert, eating potentially deadly puffer fish sushi at a kaiseki restaurant in Japan—this is YOUR amazing life, at least as far as we can tell from your social media posts.
You’ve just been divorced? Hey, time for self re-invention! You get to “change the narrative” and extoll the five miles you run everyday with your girlfriend, who is twenty years younger. People actually celebrate now the notion that our identities are as fluid as our latest selfie. We get to decide, from moment to moment, who we are.
Now that is crazy.
When it’s so easy to “make up you life,” how are you supposed to know who you are anymore? And if you really don’t like who you are, there’s always fentanyl to help you exit stage left.
Ohana Haas remains a unique person; one tragically susceptible to personal disintegration and the destructive behavior that followed. She fought this, valiantly.
It’s a battle we all have to fight now, to some degree. Being authentic is demanding. It also demands resources that our culture largely shuns. This is a theme to which Music & Culture will return again and again, I’m sure.
By the time Covid hit in early 2020, Ohana Haas was no longer under Dr. Keith Ablow’s care, as he was making a transition away from being a practicing psychiatrist. Ohana’s recording sessions in 2019 were a high point. A real future for her was coming into view—one in which even she could believe.
Then, the Covid pandemic quickly stole away many of her coping resources.
Ohana was living with her family in New Jersey, but none of her friends in town could come to visit. Her isolation had a devastating effect on her, with her anorexia consuming what little body stores of energy she had left. Through Zoom calls she was under the care of a physician specializing in eating disorders. Part of those sessions was devoted to Ohana weighing herself. The patient dutifully focused the camera on the scale’s reading, to the doctor’s satisfaction. What she kept out of sight were the dumbbells she was holding.
One night she told her mother she wasn’t feeling well and went up to bed early. This wasn’t an unusual circumstance, as Ohana’s medications often upset her stomach. Still, to be safe, her mother went up to Ohana’s bedroom every 20 minutes to check on her. The first couple of times Ohana seemed to be fine. The third time Sandra Haas went upstairs, she found her daughter curled up on the bathroom floor. Ohana had died of heart failure.
The pain had finally broken her, but not before she created a musical legacy of great beauty—one that has helped people and will go on doing so.
This article was written with the assistance of Sandra Haas and Dr. Keith Ablow, whose contributions are gratefully acknowledged.
For more about Ohana Haas visit her website: ohanahaasofficial.com
You can also find her music at the following links:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6p4lDbQKzdlvpcMOmmZrfk?si=d8f3Ab4fRdu62_IFJF_Hqg
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/ohana-haas/1490299793
If you are someone you know is suffering from mental health issues, please make use of the following resources.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness): Teens and Young Adults nami.org Helpline 800-950-6264
NEDA (National Eating Disorders Association) nationaleatingdisorders.org 800-931-2237
NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) nimhinfo@nih.gov 866-615-6464
Pain-2-Power, The Ablow Center pain-2-power.com 978-462-1125
HHS Resources to Support Adolescent Mental Health hhs.gov 877-696-6775
Save the Music Foundation savethemusic.org 212-846-4391
This is well reasoned and fair. I will look into these aspects as you suggest.
Again, thank you. I will follow up with Dr Ablow as to his response, although I will say that ketamine, despite being regarded as out-of-bounds for many years, is now widely used and readily accepted as a beneficial treatment for depression, etc. Many physicians have been vilified for being on the forefront of care only to be vindicated laters. I will also ask about the allegation of abuse by a martial arts instructor. If true, as you point out, that’s a crucial element to the story. I have no knowledge of this but am willing to be corrected and re-write the story to reflect this, if it is true.
I do find it odd that you presume I am acting in bad faith. I suppose this is understandable if you believe my depiction of Ohana is willfully in error. I assure you that’s not the case. As I told the story, my heart went out to her. The story’s intent is to celebrate her life and I think that’s abundantly clear by its tone.