A blue video screen reflects actress Lorraine Bracco, of The Sopranos fame, as she talks about her depression at a news conference yesterday.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

PROVIDENCE — Linda Iannotti of Cranston asked, “Would you sign my ‘script’ of Zoloft?”

“Sure,” said Lorraine Bracco, who played Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, on the HBO series The Sopranos.

Laughter wafted through the ballroom of The Westin Providence hotel yesterday as Iannotti, armed with her prescription and a black Sharpie, walked to the lectern. In front of the audience of about 525, Bracco signed the bottle.

“Who knew that mental health would be so much fun?” she added. “This is going to be a wild afternoon.”

Bracco, the keynote speaker at Butler Hospital’s annual Real Stories, Real Recoveries luncheon (this year’s raised $120,000 for the mental health facility located on the East Side of Providence), took questions from guests after she spoke for about 15 minutes about her battle with depression.

Another guest wanted to know if there were any similarities between Tony Soprano and the surrealist painter Salvador Dali. She said, “Having met both, I can say I’m not seeing it.”

Bracco, 53, told the crowd, in her signature raspy Brooklyn accent, that during the mob drama’s early years, about 2000 to 2001, she realized she was suffering from a “deep” depression. “The vortex had a hold on me,” said the actress, who has shoulder-length brown hair, and wore a tailored charcoal-colored pantsuit and spike-heeled open-toed sandals. “It was like I was dead inside.”

She sought therapy. When her psychiatrist gave her a prescription for Zoloft, she said, “I ran to the pharmacy.” After 18 months on the antidepressant, she felt well enough to go off of it.

Currently, she’s a spokeswoman for the drug, and she believes pairing it with “weekly talks” helped her “out of the hole I couldn’t climb my way out” of.

In addition to raising money for Butler Hospital, Bracco came to Providence to promote her autobiography, On the Couch. Critics have hailed her memoir as “from the heart.”

She also participated in the luncheon to dispel the stigma that sometimes surrounds mental illness, she said. “If you break your leg, you have it fixed. If you have a toothache, you go to the dentist. When it comes to mental health, people tend to think they can just get over it. I thought I could yoga my way out of it.”

But the scars of a bitter custody battle over her daughter with actor Harvey Keitel, a divorce from actor Edward James Olmos, and her daughter’s bout with systemic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis pushed her deeper into the “vortex” in the 1990s.

“It wasn’t until my life was on an upswing –– career and family was going well –– that I realized something was really wrong,” said Bracco, who has been nominated for an Oscar (Goodfellas) and an Emmy multiple times for her role on The Sopranos, which ran for six seasons, ending in 2007. “It was a time of my life when I should have been jumping for joy. I was devoid of feeling. I didn’t feel joy or pleasure. Weeks, months and a year later, I still was not feeling right. That’s when I realized it [the depression] was bigger than me.”

She said that her effort to openly talk about depression might inspire others with symptoms to seek treatment. It’s estimated that more than 35 million Americans suffer from some form of depression.

Before taking on the role of Soprano’s psychiatrist, she had appeared in several major motion pictures, making her American film debut in 1979 in The Pick-Up Artist, which costarred Molly Ringwald and Robert Downey Jr. Her role of a mobster’s wife in Goodfellas in 1990 landed her the Academy Award nomination.

It has been highly reported that David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, asked her to play Soprano’s long-suffering mob wife, Carmella, but she turned him down. She wanted a more challenging role, and feared being typecast because of Goodfellas. She asked to play Doctor Melfi.

Bracco, who hails from the Long Island, N.Y., town of Westbury, said that one of her most poignant childhood memories was being voted “the ugliest girl in the sixth grade” while riding on the school bus.

She began her career as a model at 19 in Paris. She landed a few roles in French movies, and, in the late 1970s, returned to the United States to embark on a film career.

“For most of my life I have been a single mom,” said Bracco, the mother of two daughters. The eldest, Margo, 29, is a year away from her MBA at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Stella, 22, works for a fashion designer and is studying acting.

Recently, Bracco appeared in a recurring role as the brassy magazine editor Janice Lasher on Lipstick Jungle. She’s hoping to return to the series in the fall, and she wants to continue to live her life as a woman who sees the glass as half full.

fzuckerm@projo.com