Deciding to write a blog about my experiences with my daughter over this last year was not easy for me … I originally felt I would have preferred the anonymity of writing a book.
This last year left me feeling blindsided and while I was sure I wasn’t alone, I also wasn’t sure letting it all out via a blog was going to be a comfortable fit for me. Let’s just say I saw the light.
The problem was that no one ever sat me down and explained what mental illness was. It’s not a topic you normally pick up through school, or conversations, or lectures, or news programs, or books, or magazines … you get the point, mental illness is something that is just not talked about.
I grew up in a town with a “state hospital” and all I knew was that people with mental problems would go there to get fixed. There were no distinctions made between mentally ill and mentally retarded, so I thought they must be interchangeable. The hospital was outside of our town, so I assumed like everyone else separation was best.
I ignorantly dismissed people who claimed to have “panic attacks” or to suffer from “anxiety” or even be “bipolar” to be just weak or moody individuals. It was because I personally treated mental illness so casually that I realized that blogging was a way to share the experiences Gabriela and I had and hopefully to open up the whole topic of mental illness for conversation.
Sadly, after 6 adults and 20 small school age children were killed in their classroom this past week, it seems the new old buzz words “mental illness” and “gun control” are back in fashion.
While I think both topics are ones that we need to discuss as a community, it’s disturbing that they are used together, as if they are linked.
I believe we need to help people with mental illness. Having a mental illness is not a crime, but the lack of understanding and help we fail to offer to nearly 25% of our population is criminal.
I read a blog posting that has been widely discussed – “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother“ and I applaud Liza Long for writing openly about her son. Mental illness should be openly discussed. I read some of the comments on the blog, and while there are some really out-there thoughts, bring it on, the discussion should be open and comprehensive.
The advantage, if there is one to having a minor child with a mental illness is that the parent can actually act in the child’s best interest. So if there was actual help to get it could be gotten.
However, one of the added issues with mental illness is that in many cases it starts to rear its ugly head sometime between the late teens and twenties when parents are no longer able to legally speak for their now, presumed to be, adult children.
One of the mantras of the mental health communities I had to hear over and over and over again regarding my 22-year old daughter was, “She has the right to be crazy” (this claim refers to a 1975 US Supreme Court Case )
I fully agree that people should be allowed to select their lifestyle. If crazy is what you want, as long as you made a clear-minded decision great! But I had to stand by and powerlessly watch my beautiful daughter go completely crazy and no one would or could help because she was an adult. For her to be forced to do anything she needed to be harmful to herself or others or to not be able to take care of herself – and to get to that point could well have killed her because she is epileptic and was not taking any of her medications.
I believe the 1975 Supreme Court Case that defines the rights of the mentally ill to remain un-medicated needs to be revisited.
In an effort to protect my daughter, Gabriela allowed me to have a Durable Power of Attorney for Healthcare for her. In almost any health care situation this document allows someone else to step into the decision-making role on another person’s behalf for almost everything but mental health issues.
While we are trying to ensure that no one’s civil rights have been stepped on, our current system ignores the mentally ill who want nothing more than to get help.
There’s also the problem that good quality and affordable mental health facilities are rare. The cost of the average mental health hospital is out of the reach of the average family and while there are ample substance abuse or eating disorder specific facilities, there aren’t nearly enough mental illness specific, non-acute, longer term care recovery facilities.
Mental health professionals long for the days when they had the legal authority to enforce more than the current 72 hour hold period to stabilize mentally ill patients. They know that in many cases they are just providing a Band-Aid and because of that the same patients will just be back again and again … if they survive.