BRACCO

Lorraine Bracco famously played Dr. Jennifer Melfi for six seasons on the popular HBO show The Sopranos, portraying a flawed psychiatrist trying to redeem a mobster, and, in the process, herself. Critics called the relationship between Dr. Melfi and Tony Soprano the heart — and conscience — of the critically acclaimed series.

Bracco, an Academy Award-nominated actress who garnered four Emmy nominations for her work on the HBO drama, credits the show with accurately depicting “talk therapy” to a national audience.

“I feel like Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi did a huge amount of good, because it was a very truthful look at the way a professional doctor deals with a patient,” Bracco said in a recent phone interview from her home in New York. “I think it was a fair insight into what therapy was about. And in that, I think it was very helpful to people.”

What was less well known when The Sopranos started was that Bracco was suffering from clinical depression and was in treatment.

On TV, Dr. Melfi sat in the clinician’s chair and controlled therapy sessions.

In real life, Bracco was the patient On the Couch, the title of her 2006 autobiography.

Bracco is scheduled to come to Rhode Island on April 24 to speak about her battle against depression, at Butler Hospital’s “Real Stories, Real Recoveries,” a luncheon that focuses attention on mental health and raises money for the hospital. Past speakers include former Today and Dateline NBC host Jane Pauley and NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw.

“I just believe it is helpful to talk about it,” says Bracco, 53. “I believe that depression is very much like a toothache, considering that 35 million people experience it, and yet there is still a huge stigma. Education is important. The more we talk about it, the better.”

Bracco’s descent into depression began in the mid-1990s, after a bruising custody battle with actor Harvey Keitel, the father of her younger daughter, Stella Keitel.

After a rocky decade together, their relationship and the family they had formed — which included Bracco’s elder daughter from a previous marriage, Margaux Guerard — had fallen apart. Fighting over Stella left Bracco both emotionally depleted and financially bankrupt. Ashamed and drained, Bracco withdrew from friends and family, instead of reaching out for their help.

“You are an empty well,” Bracco says of that time. “There is nothing to give. You are cut off emotionally and there is just nothing there. It’s a very lonely space.”

Bracco said she did not realize at first that she was falling into a depression.

“I never believed I was depressed. I thought I was just in a little funk and I was going to exercise my way out of it and eat better and think better,” Bracco says. “Then it really hit me in the head that it had been going on too long, longer than a little funk. I couldn’t shake it anymore. It just wasn’t going away.”

It was not until her life began to improve that Bracco realized just how low she had sunk. She won the custody battle and more film and TV work offers started coming in. She received a script for The Sopranos and immediately knew she wanted to play Melfi. “Things were good, work was good, the kids were good, I’d been making a lot of money,” she says. “There was a lot to be joyous about. Yet I still had the big black cloud over me.”

She could not escape a growing sense of emptiness. “All during 1998, as we shot the first season of The Sopranos — the best job I’d ever had — I struggled through that pea-soup gloom,” she wrote in On the Couch. “Even as I was immersed in the role of Dr. Melfi — a therapist, for God’s sake — my depression was there in the background like a constant throbbing ache.”

Encouraged by a friend to seek help, Bracco started seeing a psychiatrist and taking the antidepressant Zoloft in 1998.

“I attacked this problem like you would if you had cancer,” Bracco says. “I said, how do I help myself here? Talk therapy, sign me up. Medication, fine, sign me up. I read books. I realized it was a life-and-death threatening thing and I decided I was not going to let go of my life.”

Even so, improvement came slowly.

“It takes awhile, once you are aware you are depressed,” Bracco says. “The medication helped me feel better, and once that started to kick in, it took away the cloud, at least. Then I went at [getting better] with a voracious appetite.”

After a year and a half, her doctor began weaning Bracco off medication.

“I felt I didn’t want to rely on it, but things were on a major upswing for me, which helped,” Bracco says. She continued therapy, but after a period felt she no longer needed that, either, and eventually stopped seeing her psychiatrist.

“I feel pretty good,” she says. “God knows, I will go back if I need to.”

Post-Sopranos, Bracco has made a few TV movies and appeared on a new NBC drama, Lipstick Jungle. She also focuses on her wine-import business, Bracco Wines.

“I miss it,” she says of The Sopranos. “But I can’t really complain. Life has been good, and I feel I have been given a second chance. It has been very rewarding.”

Bracco continues to speak about her depression, encouraging others to seek treatment.

“I always say that it is a very lonely kind of illness,” Bracco said. “But there is no reason to suffer alone. Don’t be afraid. Get help.”

For more information or to purchase tickets to the luncheon (individual, $85; $150 for two people), call (401) 455-6581 or e-mail bhdevelopment@butler.org. Tickets can also be purchased online at www.supportbutlerhospital.org

jjordan@projo.com