TRENTON, N.J. - The shock jock may have called Mary Jo Codey a bad mother and questioned her sanity, but he helped her cause.

In the more than 21/2 weeks since Craig Carton of WKXW-FM mocked Codey and other women who have had postpartum depression - saying they "must be crazy in the first place" - she has received hundreds of phone calls and letters of support from across the country.

And so Codey, who has used her husband's unexpected ascension to the governor's office to speak out about the dark days after her first child was born, has found herself almost grateful for Carton's rant.

"The public's reaction leads me to believe that all these years trying to talk about postpartum depression haven't been in vain. People seem to understand, and that makes me happy," she said. "I promised myself that if I ever got out of it, which I didn't think I would, I would do something about how naive the public is about postpartum depression."

Even after her 23 years as a political wife - acting Gov. Richard J. Codey was an assemblyman when they met - speaking publicly is difficult for the reserved 49-year-old kindergarten teacher, who prefers her comfortable West Orange Colonial, decorated in green and soft pink, to the Statehouse. But she tells the story of her lifelong battle with depression with a quiet determination that other struggling mothers should know they're not alone and don't need to be ashamed.

After giving birth to Kevin in 1984, Codey said, she didn't feel the joy she saw on her husband's face. Her indifference became irritability, and then she began having thoughts that scared her - urges to drown Kevin, or put him in the microwave.

Horrified by those images, Codey placed 6-week-old Kevin in her husband's arms and demanded to go to a mental institution.

"I didn't realize that once you were depressed, you could get over it. I just thought I was crazy. I gave the baby to my husband, and I said, 'Find yourself a new wife, Richie, someone who will be good to the baby,'" Codey recounted. "Suicide looked good to me. If you're having thoughts about harming your baby, wouldn't you rather kill yourself?"

At the Carrier Clinic in Belle Mead, N.J., Codey's condition stabilized with antidepressants. She returned home, but hid her experience from her family and friends. "I was afraid that maybe God would think I was ungrateful for the baby, and I wasn't. I went to a fertility doctor for three years to have him."

She stopped taking the medication when she became pregnant with her second son, Christopher, in 1988. By her eighth month, she was severely depressed, and her doctor told her that electric-shock therapy was her only option. She had one 11-week treatment that resulted in some memory loss, but no pain.

"I felt like such a waste of a human being, because there I was, eight months pregnant with a gift, and I was going for shock therapy," she said. "I didn't understand depression was biological and not my fault."

After Christopher's birth, Codey went back on her medication, and this time there were no baby blues.

"I could do and feel the things other mothers did," she said.

She told Kevin, now 20 and a sophomore at Drew University, and Christopher, 16 and a junior at Montclair Academy, about her illness "almost as soon as they could understand English."

"I never wanted them to hear, 'When you were born, your mother was so depressed she went to a psychiatric hospital,"' Codey said. "If I wasn't secure in my relationship with them, I'd be afraid to tell them."

q q q

But her battle with depression wasn't over.

Early in 2002, shortly after her husband became copresident of the state Senate, Codey's antidepressants stopped working. Her doctor changed her medicine, but the dosage was too high.

Codey said she recalled opening her refrigerator on St. Patrick's Day, asking Christopher what he wanted for lunch, and then collapsing.

At the hospital, the family was told that doctors had induced a coma to stop seizures caused by the new medication. But then they couldn't bring her out of the coma.

"What do you say to your two teenage sons who ask if Mom is going to live?" her husband said, recalling the days he spent at the hospital.

Codey emerged from the coma after seven days, but struggled without medication for her depression.

Two weeks later, a routine mammogram showed she had breast cancer, the disease that had killed her mother. "I was a mess anyway, so the news didn't frighten me," Codey said. "My family was upset, but I was already as low as I could go."

She had a double mastectomy, fighting the cancer with chemotherapy and the depression with more shock therapy. As her cancer entered remission, a doctor put her on new depression medication that she said had worked well.

Codey said she was struck by the contrast between the care and concern breast-cancer patients receive and the stigmas associated with people suffering from mental illness.

She formed a postpartum-depression group at her local hospital, St. Barnabas, and listened to new mothers recount the same sort of thoughts she'd had. Her husband said he had often come home to find a new mother crying to his wife on the couch.

After Jim McGreevey resigned as governor in November and her husband became the state's chief executive, Codey resolved to use the opportunity. She speaks to mental-illness and women's groups two or three times a week, she said.

"When we're out on the weekends, women will grab Mary Jo by the arm and say, 'Thank you,'" Richard Codey said. "It helps when you have a survivor who can make people reach out and feel what you're talking about.

"Or maybe it's just that she's so much prettier than me."

q q q

Inspired in part by his wife's ordeal, the governor has pledged to overhaul the state's mental-health system. He has recommended spending $200 million for affordable housing for the mentally ill and forgiving up to $20,000 in college loans for graduates who take social-outreach jobs.

Codey has worked hard to maintain a sense of normalcy for her family, even as her husband - whom she affectionately calls Richie but most people know as Dick - has assumed a busier schedule.

She has continued to teach reading and math at Gregory Elementary School near her home, without taking a security detail with her.

"I don't bring a trooper with me because I don't want to bore him to tears. I mean, I go to school, I go to the ShopRite, and I go to the bank," she said.

Her husband assumed the state's top post with a trace of reluctance, but she said she could tell that he was enjoying the job when he quickly began humming and telling his trademark jokes around the house.

She was disappointed when he announced he wouldn't run for a full gubernatorial term this year, even though he cited the family's disruption as one of his main reasons.

"I think he's a natural, and it's made him very happy," she said.

A legislative panel has voted to censure Carton, and his station agreed to run public-service ads about mental illness. But her favorite reaction was that of her husband, who told the radio host that if he weren't governor, he would "take him outside."

"I'm lucky I didn't have a husband who dumped me after my depression," she said. "But 23 years later, we're still married, and he's still defending me."