Mary Jo West

Local media personality reveals how fight against mental illness led to conversion

By Claudia I. Provencio
The Catholic Sun

As the spokeswoman for the Phoenix Diocese, Mary Jo West was the face of the local Church through its most challenging and painful period, a time of transition when the national sexual abuse crisis was at its peak.

She’s also celebrated the installation of a new bishop, the ordination of several priests and spearheaded the growth of the weekly televised Mass from a taped 30-minute show to a live full-hour broadcast.

Under the guidance of Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, whom West calls a great man of prayer, she has also witnessed the local Church’s efforts to restore trust and healing since being appointed spokeswoman for the diocese in 2003.

Confident that she has done what she came to the diocese to do — to restore the diocese’s relationship with the media — West is leaving. After three years as one of the diocese’s most recognizable faces, she will now lead public relations efforts for Bashas’, AJ’s and Food City supermarkets statewide.

“Mary Jo will be dearly missed. She won the respect of nearly all who work in the media long before she began to work for the Diocese of Phoenix,” Bishop Olmsted said.

“Because of that, she was able to help people in the media to understand the Church and thus to do more accurate reporting,” he added. “In addition, Mary Jo helped many of us to deal with the media in more proactive and productive ways.”

Aside from her work with the diocese, West is also as well known for her work with the poor and the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a passion borne out of a family tragedy. Her father died homeless, forced to the streets by his alcoholism.

But, West said, the work closest to her heart is her ministry on behalf of people who struggle with mental health issues.

West, who lives with clinical depression, is an outspoken advocate on mental health and frequently shares her personal story of redemption with the public, including Oprah Winfrey. Depression, she said, “is an illness, not a weakness” and those who suffer from it can lead normal lives with the right treatment.

“She has a special love herself for those with mental health problems, and speaks candidly and courageously about her own struggles with depression,” the bishop said. “Her faith is focused on putting the Gospel into practice.”

Pageants to newsrooms

West is visibly comfortable in the spotlight. It’s where she feels at home and where her gifts of public speaking and broadcast journalism intersect.

Although her childhood dreams involved a Broadway stage, she set her sights on a life in front of the camera after winning a Miss Atlanta pageant.

“I would enter these beauty pageants and I would never ever win them. But what I would win would be talent,” said West, who counted on her years of voice lessons and experience as a church pianist to earn money for college.

Remarkably, West said, she took the whole competition in 1971. As the newly crowned Miss Atlanta, West traveled the country for a year, taking a break from her education.

“I spoke in churches, I sang, I went to Washington, I got an internship,” West said. “My mind expanded and instead of going back and graduating from Florida State, much to the horror of my parents, I transferred to the University of Georgia and changed my major to journalism.”

West’s timing couldn’t have been better. During that time the Federal Communications Commission began to advocate for women and minorities and it proved to be West’s big break in the then male-dominated world of broadcast journalism.

After graduating from college in 1973, West found work as a reporter for a small station in Thomasville, Ga., and often reported from neighboring Tallahassee, Fla.

“I’d drive back and forth twice a day. It was 50 miles each way. I worked 7 days a week. I did news Monday through Friday, sports Friday night and Saturday I did weather,” said West, adding that on Sundays she was the minister of music at a local Baptist church.

Two years later, West landed in Phoenix and shortly thereafter became the Valley’s first anchorwoman. In the position, West came under fire, facing some of the male chauvinism made famous by actor Will Ferrell’s shtick as egocentric Ron Burgundy in the comedic film “Anchorman.”

“We were allowed to dress up in short skirts and do the weather. We were allowed to do shorter skirts and do sports but we were not allowed to sit on the news set with the anchorman and how exciting it was when I finally had that opportunity,” she said.

“I lucked out and had a lot of help and won some Emmys, some very nice journalistic awards, to show the women in this state that we don’t hurt the news, in fact, we add to the news and to broadcasting,” she said.

“Look, I started in ’76 and this is 2006 and finally we have a woman anchoring a network by herself. It’s taken 30 years. Isn’t that amazing?” West marveled.

A period of personal pain

Like CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric, West seemed poised for unheard of success for a female broadcaster.

But behind the scenes, West was grappling with clinical depression. She began to have manic episodes — she left her husband, sometimes lived out of her car and began acting completely out of character for the Southern gal who had charmed viewers, family and friends.

West saw a psychiatrist and tried various medications, but to no avail. In 1981, West checked herself into Camelback Hospital for a week that included electric-shock treatment. She was back on the air two weeks later.

A year later, after six years of anchoring the news in Phoenix, West was tapped to pioneer “Nightwatch,” an all-night newscast based in New York City, which CBS hoped would compete with Ted Turner’s upstart CNN.

The move to a national market is a broadcaster’s dream. But West, who grappled with her illness, found the move unsettling. While she could function at work, at home she was alone with her depression.

She came back to Phoenix a year later and worked for a rival station. Three years later, the company came under new management and she was among the anchors whose contract was not renewed. Viewers weren’t keen on her sleek East Coast hairstyle and although West continued to win awards, a home audience simply wasn’t there.

“That’s when I really had to use my faith to say ‘Lord, this tragedy has happened for a reason, let me find that reason.’ And it’s hard when you’re having a pity party,” she said. “What had happened was I had become my job and I think God was trying to get my attention.”

So one day while going to yet another job interview that went poorly, she stopped to take in a dollar matinee. The documentary film’s star — Mother Teresa — changed West’s life.

“At that time I was the same age she was when she went out and totally changed her life. She taught high school geography and her principal even said she was a mediocre teacher,” West said. “And yet here was this woman who went on a retreat to Calcutta and came back and said, ‘I want to start my own order.’”

Renewed by the film, West drove home, washed off her makeup, traded her interview clothes for jeans and a T-shirt and headed to St. Vincent de Paul.

“I just knew that Christ had a plan for me, I didn’t even know what it was. [To be] unemployed or fired, it’s just devastating. And St. Vincent de Paul, they were helping me. The homeless were helping me more than I was helping them,” West said.

West worked out of a closet giving out bus tokens and finding work shoes for men and diapers for toddlers. With new vigor, she threw herself into the work as she continued to look for employment.

A new beginning

While West struggled to find a job, two priest friends (Fr. Jack Spaulding and Msgr. Dale Fushek) called and asked her to travel with them to Medjugorie, Bosnia-Herzegovina, to film a documentary on the Virgin Mary’s appearances to young people there.

“I tried to be respectful,” West recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t speak Croatian, I’m not Catholic and I don’ have any money, but I will put it on my prayer list.’”

A few days later, a local television station, eager to offer Catholic programming in anticipation of the late Pope John Paul II’s visit to Phoenix in 1987, paid for West’s travel expenses.

Shortly after her return from Europe the two priests called again with another trip offer, this time stateside to film a documentary for Life Teen, a Catholic youth organization. Mother Teresa was visiting Gallup, N.M., and Life Teen got an exclusive interview.

Following the interview, West, who had just learned she could never bear children, asked Mother Teresa if she would consider allowing Americans to adopt children from her orphanages.

“At first she said, ‘Oh, no. You Americans, you kill your babies,’” West recalls. “But then she looked at me and she said, ‘Mary Jo, because you love the poor and the Virgin Mary so much, I am going to give you a baby.’”

A few weeks after their conversation, West traveled to Honduras and adopted her daughter, Maria Teresa, named after both Our Lady and the petite sister who ushered West into the joys of motherhood.

“The only thing Mother asked me was to please raise my daughter Catholic,” she said. “I made a promise.”

West, whose Baptist faith saw her through her darkest moments, kept her word. But she initially resisted becoming a Catholic herself.

“I was taking my daughter to Mass and then going down the street to the Protestant church and that was crazy. I just said God is calling me to come home to this faith and the rest is history,” said West, who enrolled in RCIA in 1993, the same year she went public with her story.

Maria Teresa, now 18, said she often thinks about Mother Teresa “because I am so grateful for what she has done for me in my mom and dad.”

The teenager said she admires her mom because of her selflessness and is proud that she speaks to others about mental illness.

“I think it’s good she educates people and tells them that they, too, can overcome it.”