Silence is Deadly

I find the following entry of my father's agonizingly captivating.  His journal entries serve as a vivid lens by which one can get an idea of what it must be like to live with a major mental illness.  Often, the passages wrench the gut.  You can feel the pain, desperation and fear with each entry.  As his daughter, I often read them with a particularly strong variety of sorrow, yet I feel obligated to do so.  I feel that if he had to endure the pain firsthand, the least I can do is suffer through it in the name of awareness.  Giving readers not just the sense of what it must be like to be schizophrenic, but also to provide humanity to the illness.  He was someone's son, father, brother, uncle, cousin and friend.  He loved and was loved by many in return.  His disease has a face and it was indeed tragic.  While it did not physically take his life, it certainly captured the quality of his life.  He lived each and every day painfully aware of what schizophrenia had stolen from him.

These days everybody and their brother is a victim.  Every family is dysfunctional.  Everybody’s inner child has been violated and wounded.  Criminals are victims of urban stress syndrome and hence not culpable.  Alcoholics are the victims of a disease.  Child abusers were abused as children themselves.  Murderers plead insanity.  White collar criminals are victims of greed.  And on and on it goes. Schizophrenics on the other hand really are victims.  True, classic victims.  They have been struck down in their prime by a disease so unspeakably insidious that it rarely comes up in comes up in casual conversation.  Most people don’t know much about schizophrenia, and for the most part are content to remain in ignorance.  The stigma about mental illness is so pervasive because everybody has wondered about their sanity at one time or another and nobody wants to talk about it.  Thinking it a weakness of character.  But unlike neurosis, which afflicts virtually everyone, and is merely a conflict of ideas, schizophrenia is a biological disease of the brain.  Consequently, schizophrenics are victims, real victims.   Just as much as a person who is a victim of diabetes or cancer.  Yet schizophrenics do not spend a lot of time trying to gain sympathy from others.  Generally, they try to hide their disease.  They are embarrassed and ashamed and only want to pass for normal by concealing their affliction from the prying of the mentally healthy.  There is a great deal of denial among schizophrenics about their disease because it is so misunderstood by the preponderance of the healthy population.  No one wants to be a lunatic.  The mentally ill, except possibly to their families, are the objects of derision and fear.  Or else they are regarded, to put it blandly, peculiar and subject to curiosity.  This is only as long as a sufficient distance is maintained to prevent actually sharing in the frustration and pain of the scourged.  The tears of bitterness are best shed in private.   We have become a culture of comedy and it is surpassingly difficult to find much funny about insanity.  In the movies the mentally ill are often depicted as harmless comic idiots.  This is a far cry from the real picture of schizophrenics’ who are routinely incapacitated by their disease and who have great trouble in finding the humor in their delusions and hallucinations.  As much as we would like it to be otherwise, insanity is deadly serious business.  A patient can’t just laugh off the malaise that afflicts him or her.  There is nothing very funny, for instance, of hearing voices telling you to kill your infant daughter because she is of the devil.  I was in the hospital with a man who did just this, and he wasn’t laughing about it.  Out of the respect of mutual hardship often displayed by mental patients for each other, no one teased this unfortunate man about his undoing either.  We all knew how easily it could have been one of us.  I met this man in a public psychiatric facility that accepted patients regardless of their ability to pay.  It was a kind of warehouse of patients who had nowhere else to go.  This man was pointed out to me by another patient, who I sensed was relieved that there was someone on earth who had it harder than he did.  I was not so comforted.  My second daughter had been born only three months prior to this hospitalization.  I tried to imagine how I would feel, how I would always feel, if desperately ill, I had done just what this man had done. My self-control was gone when I was committed.  I was capable of anything.  I grew morose just thinking about it.  I felt a compassion for this man of such profound depth that even in my wretched state, when I would have traded places with virtually anyone, I knew I would not want to trade places with this man.  The things I was having trouble living with paled in comparison and I was thanking my lucky stars I had been spared such a fate.  My youngest daughter, who had just been born, is twelve now.  Healthy, happy and full of life.  To think, to just stop for a moment and think the unthinkable I am filled with fear and dread.  There is no cure for schizophrenia, which means that at any time, I could again find myself thinking the unthinkable.  I am frighteningly vulnerable to the vagaries of my disease.  At any time I could start howling at the moon.  Security is an illusion enjoyed at the expense of prudence.  If I had lost my grip for even a second.  I know what would have happened.  I would not be able to live with myself.    

In many of Dad's entries, I can't help but think how he seemed so ahead of his time when it came to his societal observations around mental illness.  The way he describes stigma, comparing the victimization of the disease to cancer or diabetes or the perception that mental illness is simply a weakness of character.  Those of us who loudly advocate for mental illness awareness yell those exact things from the rooftops.  However, it has only been recently that one hears mental illness discussed with a likeness to physical ailments. The fact is, we still have a long way to go.  Perhaps what has been obvious all along to the afflicted, is just now being realized by some, yet not by the majority of Americans.  Mental Illness is biological, chemical, debilitating and deadly.  Just because we cannot see it does not mean it isn't real.  The above journal entry is an expose into why access to treatment for mental illness is so critical.  Had my Dad not received the necessary support and treatment for his illness, he may have found himself doing the unthinkable.  When stable, it was easy for him to sit and reflect on what could have happened in an act of desperation.  But the mind is not so lucid when one is psychotic.  Sure, there are sociopaths and psychopaths who have no remorse for their violence.  On the other hand, there are a lot of individuals out there who commit acts of violence when terribly ill, acts they never would have committed in their "right" mind.  

The fairly recent tragedy of Senator Deeds is one such example.  Mr. Deeds had tried desperately to get help for his mentally ill son, and by all accounts, they had a very close relationship.  In the days leading up to the attempted murder/suicide it had been clear Deeds' son was ill and needed treatment and stabilization.  Despite all attempts, treatment was not obtained.  Gus violently stabbed his father and then took his own life.  I know some people have a hard time wrapping their mind around this, but he was not a bad kid.  He was not beyond help and the situation did not have to end as it did.   Gus was Bipolar and his family had been struggling desperately to get the right treatment.  Treatment was not made possible and the outcome was indeed the unthinkable.  One wonders, if a State Senator cannot get the necessary hospital bed for his mentally ill son...what chance does the average family have? 

People all across the country were shocked when Senator Deeds declared that he didn't blame his son for his act of violence, but instead he blamed the system.  A system that failed both Gus and the family who loved him.  Deeds was quoted as stating, "in every sense of the word, my son was my hero.  He was handsome and witty, he had it all going for him."  He described Gus as a "sweet and gifted individual". Bipolar disorder ripped a family apart and took the life of a promising young man.

If this was your child or parent, wouldn't you care deeply about this issue?  I ask that people begin to care for their neighbors as they would their own.  For if not, one day it could arrive on your doorstep in the most unwelcoming of ways.  Mental illness isn't going away.  Advances won't come at the necessary pace if we don't start talking about it.  If we don't end the stigma.  According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) almost 60 million Americans experience a mental health condition each year.  Regardless of age, race or economic status, mental illness impacts the lives of 1 in 4 adults and 1 in 10 children in our country. 

Mental Illness is everywhere...the vast majority just don't feel safe discussing it.  It is often a family secret, a source of shame and a place of isolation.  The silence is deadly.