On Mental Health
When a person first sees me, he or she is struck by my extraordinary 6’ 11” height – probably the part of me that is closest to “normal.” I know it was suggested that I write about my own take on Robin Williams’ death, which I already have done in my blog -- perhaps somewhat superficially -- accusing American Society of being in more of a mental illness than Robin was – and he certainly was ill – but really, who can judge the intelligence of anyone making any such statements unless THEY are transparent about their own mental health. That will be my subject in this piece, and with luck, I will be able to state what is germane without writing too much.
I was always a shy person, growing up in the shadow of an uncommonly domineering mother, and in a strict and strictly Roman Catholic household, where the strongest language allowed was “Hell’s Bells!” or “Damnation!” – but only my mother was allowed to use them – and most sparingly. She beat us frequently whenever she got frustrated with a world that was rarely “Mom’s vision cooperative”, and I don’t mean in larger concepts so much as in smaller things like children knocking over a Kool-Aid glass or buttons popping off shirts too new for that to happen.
And often phase two was Mom screaming at us kids, “What will the neighbors think?” concerned that they might have heard her lunatic screaming over nothing serious – and blaming us for that as well. We were always the picture of the perfect and perfectly raised Catholic family, although it is also true that we had small pastel swastikas rimming our dinner plates. I am not blaming Mom for anything, now. She had extraordinarily “good” qualities too – and I have finally made my peace with ALL of it.
The first sign of difficulty for me was when Dad was suddenly transferred to Columbus, Ohio in mid-1968, just before my senior year in high school, pulling me out of a society I was very comfortable in, and dropping me in a school (the best public school in Columbus), that offered NONE of the classes I had been prepared for in West Chester, Pennsylvania – like third year German, calculus, or second year chemistry, so I was bored with a roster of “Mickey Mouse” classes – and worse, was that the students were caught up in “typical white values”, unlike my class-leading friends in Pennsylvania, who were beginning to listen to Bob Dylan and flirt with the idea of smoking marijuana. Hair was growing long.
I lost all interest in going to college (although I obligingly applied to generic state schools in Ohio, knowing I’d have no choice about that), but I was so morose that Mom had me see our regular physician about depression – and he loaded me up with Playboy magazines as his remedy. I did hang with what might be called the “Out Crowd”, so out they didn’t tune into the excitement of the late 1960s. This all changed largely when I was recruited by Denison University, the college I actually attended, which from my bleak place seemed at least as good as the Land of Oz.
Then in 1978, much of my spiritual or psychological innards went into revolt in ways that I did not then understand at all, and after an argument with a beach-tag inspector in Cape May, New Jersey, I was hauled off the beach and locked in a meeting room in City Hall (not one of the jail cells), for several hours until I was cuffed again and driven to Anchora State Mental Hospital, after the Police Chief had a five-minute talk with me. I was somehow committed without first seeing a judge or a doctor, which state law then required. And there, the intake tech told me not to worry – that 90% of those who’d been committed there were only gay and had pissed off someone powerful. Like everyone else, I’d be out after a week of observation. Once settled into a proper ward, I learned this was absolutely true!
But I had great insurance and a knowing friend got me transferred to the top-rated-in-USA “The Institute” in West Philadelphia – our nation’s first mental hospital, actually founded by Ben Franklin, and part of the University of Pennsylvania. I felt completely comfortable there, it being run like a country club with lots of serious fun activities to choose from – as well as fairly extensive menu choices for well prepared and presented food. I was stabilized on Lithium Carbonate and released after nearly four weeks.
Now, concurrently, I had been reading all of Jane Roberts’, a popular trance medium of the day, Seth books (and wouldn’t you know, Seth is the grandfather of Kenan in Chronicles I in the Bible – and family secrets are typically passed between alternating generations), on the nature of co-creation of reality with this God thing, and had been introduced to Christian Science by a woman I had done house painting for, Grace Buck, the widow of J. Mahlon Buck who had been CEO of Smith Kline. Mahlon’s great-great-grandfather had been one of the Smith Brothers whose cough drops swelled into the pharmaceuticals giant. And since at that time, the Lithium capsules were trademarked “Eskalith” (S/K, Smith-Kline lithium), I figured I’d just trust Grace Buck’s choice of a husband, although she had shoveled quite a bit his drug wealth to the Mother Church of Christian Science in Boston, and it was much later, in the 1980s, that I learned that Mahlon (in the Metaphysical Bible Dictionary), means “The Sickness.”
You see, I have always been quick to find a lot of connections of things – one of the TOP symptoms of traditionally-defined Bipolar Illness. You have no idea how much this pissed off my mother or my doctors (always chosen directly or indirectly by my mother).
I eventually learned enough about law and the US Constitution to realize that if I paid my bills and did not break the law in any important way, no one could legally commit me, regardless my views or my process of thinking. And later than that, that I would have to keep guard against those who would trick the Law into thinking I had. Those who caused me the greatest trouble were linked by a claim of Christianity and robust heterosexuality – real or imagined. And while I have had some of the literally scariest adventures of anyone I have ever known, I have also known of many who had it far worse.
Although I have many disagreements with President Barack Obama, I can’t believe he keeps on ticking rather graciously, given both the ignorant content and manner of delivery of criticism that that man has had to deal with, but even greater than that is the ordeal of so many women like the three girls held for years by Arial Castro. I still tear-up in empathy, usually, when I think of them.
And while I acknowledge displaying symptoms in the 1970s and even into the early 1990s, of actual Bipolar Illness – and responding well to Lithium (but NONE of the other Bipolar meds), it is not clear to me if I had it and recovered (or it is in long remission), or if my brushes with psychiatrists were actually politically motivated, especially given what I have witnessed my parents doing over these many years.
I think no one lives in a vacuum, and the society we live in defines what it will and will not tolerate. In the United States, in the late 1960s, more than 2/3 of people believed in Scientific Evolution, but now, nearly 50 years later, barely a third of Americans do – biblical creationism having replaced it as the top held belief. Catholics, one of the few growing denominations – even discounting the Latino immigrants – teaches that not only is Jesus (a great prophet to me), the literal Son of God, which breaks the First Commandment of the Old Testament (said by Christians NOT to have been overturned), but actually believe that a priest changes bread and wine into the literal flesh and blood of the man – and eating it makes them a better person.
If you can square that with the at least rudimentary materials science and basic mathematics that even the most fundamental of Christians must accept, then you, too, look at the world through crossed or wall-eyed eyes – and I feel sorry for you and your need to try to drown me out. You cannot make a logical case for superstition – and THAT is the main mental illness permeating the world today.
Scott
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