Madness and redemption

Margot Kidder is a miracle. The actress, who is well known for playing Lois Lane in the Superman movies, battled bipolar disorder for years before having a severe manic episode in 1996. She has not had any mental relapses since that time, nor has she been on any psychiatric medication. This is not to say that her recovery from mental illness was due to divine help, or that she's somehow better than other people. It is just truly remarkable that Kidder came from a place of complete insanity to being lucid, rational and engaging. This did not happen by accident. When Kidder spoke at SUNY Rockland Community College earlier this month, she repeatedly stressed how important it is to treat those who are mentally ill as human beings. "The thing that saved my life 10 years ago was respect and compassion," she said during her lecture. She didn't get it from doctors, either. It came from a homeless man named Charlie. "He gave me the respect of one human being to another," she said. "All he did was simply take care of me." While the synthetic knowledge of medication has made great strides in combating mental illness, Kidder still claimed that her recovery has been due to being treated like a human being. Unfortunately, this is the exception, not the rule. To this day, a stigma about mental illness causes people to look at the mentally ill as anything but human beings. Kidder understands that to combat the stigma she must talk openly about her experiences as someone who is mentally ill, and show people that not only that a full recovery is possible, but that the stigma doesn't exist if you don't let it. She also understands that courage is contagious. I am simply following her lead. I am mentally ill. I also live in the mental health system. In a way I feel as if I'm admitting that I'm a convicted felon, or that, fundamentally, I'm unlike the rest of you. It feels as if I'm admitting that I'm feeble minded, cowardly, lazy, morally bankrupt, prone to violence and/or just completely insane. I've hidden this during my time at RCC because I knew that it would negatively affect the way people look at me. The people I work with at this newspaper are finding out about this only because of this article. Until this time I just flat out refused to talk about where I lived or what brought me to RCC. The fact is, my mental illness makes me no worse than anyone else, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. The stigma against people with mental illness goes further than shame. It violates our dignity.

It's all around you

Before anything else, I'll clarify what I mean by the word 'stigma.' It's the type of psychiatric language that emerges from bureaucracies. Essentially, a stigma is a mark of infamy, shame and reproach. It separates a person from others by branding them as something less than a person. Archaically, it referred to when people would literally brand the skin of slaves or criminals. Today's meaning is figurative, but of no less substance. The impression that I get from talking to people is that with regards to the mentally ill, they feel something is wrong. Not just chemically, mind you, but wrong in a moral sense. They aren't like us. They're strange. They're a threat to our safety. This attitude of 'us' and 'them' is at the root of the stigma against the mentally ill because it reverses the most fundamental point about mental illness: they are us. The Mental Health Association defines mental illness as "a disease that causes mild to severe disturbances in thinking, perception and behavior." It's immediately obvious that if the term is applied loosely, it can relate to almost anyone. Moreover, mental illness does not discriminate along racial, age, class or gender lines. In fact, all the evidence clearly shows that, far from being a scattered phenomenon that affects only a few deranged individuals, it is nothing short of an epidemic. According to the MHA, mental illness is the most prevalent health problem in America, outnumbering cancer, lung disease and heart disease combined. They claim that during the course of a year, more than 54 million Americans are affected by one or more mental disorders, and that those disorders account for four of the ten leading causes of disability in the United States. A survey released by the American Psychiatric Association claimed that each year, one in five adults is diagnosed with a mental illness. One in five. Think about that in terms of your family. A few of my close relatives have bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Until very recently, their behavior had always mystified me. If you want proof of a stigma, consider that the APA also found that an equal percentage of people would not see a psychiatrist under any circumstances. A different survey released by the APA found that 31 percent of adults said they wouldn't seek treatment for mental illness for fear of what other people would think. If you want more proof of a stigma, consider that one-third of the respondents in that survey thought that emotional or personal weakness caused mental illnesses. They are, of course, mistaken. Mental illness is caused by genetic and environmental factors, traumatic events, and other physical illnesses and injuries that have psychiatric side effects, according to the APA. It has nothing to do with character. So, as Kidder said, mental illness has nothing to do with "a lack of moral courage." It has nothing to do with being weak. And while the character of an individual has nothing to do with the fact that they develop mental illness, it does take courage and strength to get help. Adults are not the only ones affected. In a news release from September 2005, the APA stated that nearly half of all college students reported feeling so depressed that they had trouble functioning, and 15 percent met the criteria for clinical depression. At the same time, the APA reported that over 10 million prescriptions for anti-depressants are written each year with no mental health follow up afterwards. While this might not seem like a big deal, consider this: the economic burden of depression alone in the U.S. in 2000 was an estimated $83 billion.

This is not an exit

Economic costs aside, understanding mental illness can only really come from hearing the perspective of someone who has been through it and, to some degree, come out the other side. In this case, that someone is me. Almost two years have passed since the time of these events, and I'm tired of carrying them around with me, like some kind of scarlet letter that only I can see. It's time to give up the ghost. Prior to June of 2004 I led a relatively normal existence, albeit one which was defined by years of depression. I had done well in high school, gone away to college, succeeded for a few years before failing out, and taken the year off. I came home after three and a half years in Rochester-where I went to college-and started working two jobs in a vain attempt to prove to myself and others that I was doing well. I might have been doing well-if you can say that for a 21-year-old living with their parents-but I knew that in every way that actually mattered, I was not well. I decided to go on medication. The psychiatrist I saw prescribed me Paxil for the dual purposes of alleviating my depression and my social anxiety. He failed to ask me if there was a history of mental illness in my family. About four weeks after I began taking the drug-simultaneously using heavy amounts of drugs and alcohol, which was nothing new-reality began to slip away from me, although I lacked the capacity to grasp that fact. What started out as a seeming relief from chronic depression ended up in a complete psychosis, one which I still cannot rationally explain. My episode culminated with me getting picked up by the police in Nyack for walking in the road, ranting. They calmly asked me a few questions, then asked me if I wanted to go to Pomona. I agreed. Before I continue, one thing needs to be made clear. Saying that I had a psychotic episode is not a euphemism of any sort. The word is ugly but appropriate, given that leading up to that point I believed the police were following me. Before that, I called someone at 3:45 in the morning, and I took the three seconds of silence before they hung up as signal to break into their house. I truly believed that they wanted me to do so. Hearing about this kind of psychosis from someone else who has experienced it helped me to understand myself, in a way. Kidder said that during her last manic episode 10 years ago, she sincerely believed that hot dog vendors were hiding machine guns that they were going to use to kill her, and that the helicopters flying above were going to bomb her. After they committed me, I sincerely believed that every other person in the crisis center was really a psychologist, and that the whole thing was a charade being put on just for me. It took me a week to figure out that my stay wasn't voluntary. I must say that I was significantly more grandiose. Being completely severed from reality, I was spared the harshness that greeted me when I returned to a semblance of sanity. Never had I been in a place that was more harmful to my mental health. In Kidder's words, "It's all in reverse of what it should be." As a whole, the crisis center had all the comfort and humanness of a warehouse. Between the staff treating the clients like either animals or children, the inedible meals, the open disdain shown for any complaints regarding the living conditions, the beds which were so hard that I would wake up from acute pains in my arms and torso, the static on the television, the plastic furniture that reminded me of an airport terminal and the unbearable amount of time spent doing absolutely nothing, they really failed to fully recognize us as human beings. I spent hours staring out into a courtyard where residents had been able to lounge about during the day until someone apparently climbed up on the roof and tried to run away. As a result, the door to the courtyard was permanently locked, with a big white sign that read "This is not an exit' hung at eye-level. It was as if that sign was taunting me with the sight of a perfect summer garden held behind a wall of glass, unused in the June sun. It was a symbol for the life that had suddenly been torn away from, and the futility of trying to get it back, even as it stared me in the face. It's also worth mentioning that county workers still trimmed the hedges and mowed the grass. They were the only people who set foot there. It wasn't much better for the staff. I noticed that they often pulled double shifts- sometimes voluntarily-working around 16 hours at a time. I remember hearing a couple of guys who worked there talk about applying to jobs at KFC because it paid better. The county of Rockland recently started a housing program for people who work in the mental health system, because so many of them live below the poverty line. All the clients in the crisis center were paying more than $1,000 a day to be there, by the way. One of the reasons that I only spent two weeks at the crisis center was that when my parents came to see me, I had a number of purple and yellow bruises on the upper half of both arms. Unfortunately, the only way they knew how to deal with a psychotic individual was with force. They hire guys who are physically intimidating for this purpose. The other reason I spent so little time there is that after three trips to the padded room, two of which were quite violent, they put me on so much medication I could barely speak. The zombie-like demeanor stayed with me for around six months. During that time I knew that my mind was a shell of itself, but I could do nothing to change it. Regardless, I'm still thankful that this all happened in the era of medication. In the years before modern psychiatric drugs, they put people who were psychotic and violent in straightjackets, or worse. My introduction to the mental health system removed any shred of dignity I had left. I've consistently interacted with psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, case managers, primary care givers, and everyone else who works in the system, and respect and compassion has been hard to come by. There's a reason people use the word 'system.'

Moving forward, slowly

Since that time I've gone from not being able to read a newspaper to being the news editor of this paper, and this too did not happen by accident. Very little of my recovery had to do with the help I received from where I lived. The problem is not that the workers have less education that I do, the problem is that they look at their job the same way someone who works at Target or Best Busy looks at their job. It's a job. I've had to look elsewhere for compassion and respect. Reconciling the disjointed realities of living in halfway houses and group homes and attending RCC has not been easy. Most of the time I feel as if I am caught between two separate and distinct realities that have little to no relation to each other, except for the fact that I see people who work where I live going to school here. Part of the reason it's been so difficult-the other part being myself-is rooted in the fact that respect and compassion is not exactly the student body's strong suit. In fact, I'm not exactly going out on a limb by saying that we put far more importance on our differences than our similarities, even though we're all much more similar than we realize. I'm lucky that I blend in perfectly in this environment: you would definitely not guess that I'm a returning adult, let alone that I have a mental illness. But again, Kidder puts it best. "One of the misconceptions about mental illness is that you can see it on someone's face, that it is constant, that mentally ill people don't know normalcy." Part of this mentally is a maturity issue, part of it-and I have no proof of this whatsoever-seems to be getting worse with the younger generation. It just shouldn't be the case that I'm only telling this story because I'm not coming back to RCC. Had I chosen to come here in the fall, I never would've written anything about my experience. Again, why is this? What is there to hide? In truth: nothing. Kidder has learned not to shy away from the truth. "A lot of people, including psychiatrists, think they're better than us, and they're not." A lot more people would also say that something like this is far too personal to share with strangers. I disagree. The only way to help others is to give them a reason to be hopeful, and to declare openly and honestly that mental illness is an illness like any other, and that the stigma is irrelevant. Judging me for it would make as much sense as judging someone with cancer. I'm not writing anonymously because to do so would only reinforce the idea that mental illness needs to be hidden. I simply hope that someone who suffers from a mental illness, but does not seek treatment because of the stigma, will come to see that the stigma is a product of ignorance, nothing more. Insisting to simply be recognized as a person is the type of request that shouldn't even have to be made, but think about it in terms of Kidder's saving grace: the homeless (the subject of mental illness and homelessness is so obscene that it's too much to begin to go into). By the end of Kidder's lecture, she implored the audience to act according to the principle of humanity above all else. She used the example of a homeless woman, swearing at no one in particular. "I don't want you to cross to the other side of the sidewalk, I want you to get a dollar out of your pocket, get five dollars, because that could be you, it could be me, it could be your brother, it could be your daughter, it could be your children," she said. Ultimately, her request became radical in its simplicity. "Let her know she's still connected to the human race. Give her respect." The individual is infinitely more important than the category other people put them in. There is no reason to hide mental illness, because we do so only out of fear of ignorant judgments. Listening and speaking to Kidder gave me the courage to admit that there's nothing to admit. This is who I am.