My parents met as two patients institutionalized in a psych ward.
My mother was interred following her first unsuccessful suicide attempt. Born into a middle-class Jewish family with a history of “mental troubles,”[1] my mother lived quite the remarkable life. She began adulthood attending art school, transitioned to become an architect at 25, had her first suicide attempt at 32, graduated medical school at 35, got her MBA at 52, entered the C-Suite of a multimillion dollar company at 55 and attempted suicide again at 56.
My father was there because he was in the midst of an unsuccessful endeavor to get sober. But he also has his own extraordinary backstory: a high-school and college all-American basketball player, whose professional playing career was cut short after an attempt on his life in which he was ran over with a car, shot, and stabbed left him without the use of his right arm and a severe limp – not to mention mentally broken. In a few short years he went from basketball star to homeless heroin addict all at an age younger than I am now.
I have spent a lot of time trying to make sense of my mother, my father, my family, mental illness in general, and the world. Often, it feels as if making sense of one would necessitate making sense of all the rest.
I often think that my father must have had some serious game to be able to pull a woman (suicidal or not) while being a one-armed near-homeless drug addict and patient in a psych ward.
Crime as Illness
Alcohol and drug addictions are considered mental illnesses under The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or the DSM for short) – which is the gold-standard and often final say of what is and is not deemed to be a true diagnosable mental illness.
Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in his seminal work, The Myth of Mental Illness – for which this piece is named – argues that mental illnesses aren’t real. To support his argument, Szasz underscores the fact that addictions and other disfavored behaviors which do not really seem to be diseases have been deemed so as mental illnesses.
What is a disease really? Is alcoholism or addiction in general, a disease, or are they the results of bad habits, poor circumstances, and a lack of sufficient discipline to overcome them? The inability to check appetites, whether the result of personal failings or due to bad surroundings and upbringings is now considered a disease, but previously it was considered sin, moral failing, or simply a crime.
Was my father diseased when he would shoot heroin or smoke crack? Or was he coping with the combination of an addictive personality, an inner psyche left in tatters from decades of child abuse, and perhaps a lack of a social support system able to guide him the right way? When my father was finally able to get sober, he didn’t do it with medication or surgery, he did it with willpower – how many times has a hospital looked to treat a diseased patient with just that?
In our household I was raised to believe that mental illness was a modern original sin of sorts, everybody was mentally ill in their own way, and everyone needed to confront and overcome this. In our family it was to be each of our own lives’ work rooting out our psychiatric demons.
Now I think of mental illness more like branding and packaging applied to a range of behaviors and thoughts that we do not approve of. It’s a way to police people’s ideas and attitudes –it’s more like a crime than a sickness. Homosexuality was once a mental illness, now gambling addiction is. Interracial marriage was once a crime, now buying too much allergy medicine is.
Being sick is who I am
R.D. Liang who was both a psychiatrist and early leader of the Anti-Psychiatry movement harps on the arbitrariness of how we classify bad behavior as mental illness. Why are some actions and habits considered mentally ill, while other even more strange and dangerous ones considered healthy? He relates a tale of a female patient he attended who was deemed schizophrenic for believing she had an atomic bomb in her womb. Why was she crazy when there were actual men who have detonated atomic bombs that were deemed completely sane? Who defines madness in a mad world?
For Liang, much of mental illness was about communication and identity. People, unable to communicate through perhaps more straightforward or legible routes act out to express who they are. Szasz agrees, to use his example, a battered wife[2] may not be able to get the attention and care she desires from her spouse and neighbors, but if she acts out, if she becomes hysterical, then loads of attention may come her way, she may even get someone to listen.
My mother always spoke of her depression as if it was who she is: “I am depressed.” “I am sick.” “I have a disorder of the brain.” – I wonder if she doesn’t have a mental-illness but an identity – I’ve come to see identities and labels as her little hiding places. She can burrow inside of them and never have to reveal who she is, neither to herself nor others. I think she finds these constraining places freeing.
As I have grown older, I have come to appreciate that here’s a heavy burden to being a full person. It entails a responsibility to be present in moments that would be easier to sleepwalk through, to make decisions where it would be easier to follow default paths, and to connect in relationships where it would be easier to put on façades or prepackaged identities. On some level having a mental illness must be, at least in the short term, easier because of this. “I cannot do x because of my depression.” “I act that way because of my anxiety.” Though much suffering comes along with being diagnosed as mentally ill, it can also certainly be a relief.
Do you think maybe these people suffer just to suffer?
In a journal I kept while my mother was in her depressive episode there’s an entry that reads: “I find it disgusting how suffering is romanticized… It is unnerving, but some people have really fallen in love with their tears.”
Szasz states that in some ways the scourge of mental illness is due to a laxity in the morals of our society. Donning his best Nietzsche impersonation, he states that any culture that exalts the weak, meek, poor, and ill (read: the foundation of the Judeo-Christian Ethic) is doomed to attract and produce many more inept and ill-fated souls.
This feels like too gross of an analysis for me – it is too monocausal, too simplistic of action and reaction as if humanity were simply chemicals being catalyzed. I don’t think life would ever be so kind as to provide such a blatant narrative; but, I am also not willing to throw away completely the idea that allowing and praising incapacity and ineptitude may foster it to some extent.
By my early teens my mother had re-entered a deeply depressive state. I know she finds being ill and invalid comfortable; it means she can find rest; it means she can be blameless; it means she will be taken care of.
For a period of six years, outside of her job, my mother was emotionally, socially, and in many ways psychologically catatonic. For over half a decade, I witnessed her come home from a 10-hour day in the office and spend the whole night watching children’s fantasy movies or playing point-and-click computer games. On evenings and weekends, she would barely leave her pajamas, let alone the house. I saw her carry on in this routine while her relationships, health, and life withered away.
Going through my own teenage years I felt I was unable to really talk to my parents about anything important – I often felt like I was raising myself – a lot of times it seemed like I was the adult and taking care of them.
After my mother’s second suicide attempt, during my sophomore year in college, she was institutionalized again. My family and I signed off on the administration of electroshock therapy treatments. The doctors told us that it would be akin to a rebooting of the brain and would do her well. For weeks after the treatment, my mother acted like a small, confused, but very docile child – she could not be left without supervision because she was prone to forgetting who and where she was. One time, when we went to the local mall, I lost her, and had to go around with a security guard calling her name to track her down.
A few years after her second suicide attempt, my mother is visiting me in New York City. On the last day of her stay she tells me over dinner, “I could never try to kill myself again, because of you and your sister. I love you both too much. I want to live for you.” She meant it to be loving and self-sacrificial, but I left her that evening feeling disgusted.
Why do we take suffering so seriously?
Nietzsche deemed the teachings of the Christian church to be the spirit of gravity – embodying an ascetic and life-hating worldview that took everything all too seriously. What are humans but the animal that tells jokes! The idealized man he envisioned would be able to laugh and dance through all serious moments.
I have always been a fan of comedy and spend much of what little free time I have on the very fringes and bottom rung of the comedy scene in New York City, doing improv shows and 5-minute stand-up routines at open mics. A leitmotif I find among so many comedians is using mental illness as a tragic punchline: “everything is terrible//we’re all fucked up in the head, HAHA!” strikes me more as pathetic than funny.
Ironically, comedy and joking were a cornerstone of our household growing up. Between the fights and the weird manipulative behavior (and even entangled within them) was relentless good-humored teasing and acting out of bits. My parents constantly used punchlines or quips to wave away tension around their problems; they were used as artful counter-maneuvers to dodge much tougher discussions. Our family didn’t take anything seriously, until we took it all-too seriously, but the same things that make you laugh make you cry.
By itself I don’t believe humor in tough situations is a bad thing at all. But it must be used in conjunction with sober analysis and diligent work to address and solve issues, not simply to sweep them under the rug. I inherited the ability to crack a joke even around the darkest subjects – and I look at this as a blessing not a flaw. When I first told my girlfriend (now wife) of my mother’s issues, I mentioned her two attempts to take her own life with the caveat that: “She’s really into suicide as a hobby, she’s just terrible at it.”
Perhaps I am simply just making the same mistakes as my mother.
Defining the indefinite
I was the one that found my mother after her second suicide attempt. I remember coming from a basketball workout, walking into my parent’s apartment, relieved to escape the June heat. Just beyond the dining area and kitchen I found my mother laying facedown on the living room floor with a few empty bottles and pill capsules scattered about. Growing up my mother always said that I was just like her. I have my dad’s tall stature and darker skin, but my mother always told me “You have my brain.”
