I just started reading Daughters of Madness: Growing Up and Older with a Mentally Ill Mother by Susan Nathiel, which I initially heard about through the Facebook group Adult Children of Parents with Schizoaffective and Other Mood Disorders. (Another new and helpful Facebook group is Children of Parents with Mental Illness. There are probably others, but these are the two in which I participate. But I digress.)
Basically the book follows the stories of numerous women who grew up with mentally ill mothers from infancy through adulthood, guided and explained in the context of the stages of human development by the author, a psychotherapist. Just 50 pages in and there is so much that resonates with my experiences as a child, that uncanny feeling that someone does in face know exactly what you're talking about. There are also a number of stories that reinforce how fortunate I was to have a stable dad and how much worse it could have been. But already, it brings a lot back, and I am very interested to see how the book progresses.
I have done quite a bit of thinking about how my mother has affected the kind of person I am today--from being hypercritical of myself and anxious about making mistakes to being very responsible and not wanting to have kids too young b/c I want more of a break from being responsible for anybody else (along with a whole host of other unrelated reasons as to why I am not yet ready to be a parent!). But I've never thought about it in the context of the stages of human development, even though I studied that a little in college. (I was a wannabe psych major, I'll admit it.) So I'll probably write another entry when I've actually finished the book, but if you have read this book or similar books or have any thoughts on this subject, please feel free to comment!
Showing posts with label mental illness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mental illness. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Reaching out vs. Respecting boundaries
Earlier today, I was talking with a friend about our 4ths and she mentioned her significant other's parents had visited and how the dad is wont to talk incessantly, not about anything necessarily related to the current conversation, and he'll follow you around and keep talking to (or rather, at) you even as you're shutting the door to the bathroom. He's always been like this, apparently. I really wanted to say, "My mom does that, too," but then somehow we changed topics and the moment passed.
I remember once overhearing a former boss say to somebody else on the phone about how her husband was depressed, and she was trying to explain it to whoever was on the other end of the line, but she didn't seem to be having any luck. I wanted to say something, to tell her that it's something I've also struggled with, but a.) I had overheard it, and b.) I didn't know if she wanted me to know.
Sometimes opportunities present themselves and usually I do not take them and then kick myself afterwards. What if I told them something they didn't want to hear? Like, hey, your father-in-law's odd behavior sounds like my mom's and she has a mental illness so maybe he does too! I mean, I guess it is better that he get treatment if that is the case, but then again it may just be some quirk of behaviour that has nothing to do with mental illness. And then there is always that question of how much is too much information to share at work.
Illness and abnormalities make people really uncomfortable. Just ask anybody who's an amputee or visibly a burn victim. Yeah, there's all this ra-ra-bust-the-stigma and it's cool to smash taboo and whatnot. But just like in cognitive behavioural therapy (or whatever that method is for helping people with phobias through gradually increasing exposure), I think dealing with stigmas is one of those things that is a nudge-over-the-edge type thing rather than a sink-or-swim type thing. (Such an articulate sentence, I know.) Sometimes getting to know someone of that "other" group or some other type of interaction/experience speeds this up a lot, but rarely are such planned occurrences effective. All those exercises about stereotypes in school were just awkward and sometimes self-defeating.
Sometimes too much too fast just pushes people in the opposite direction. Not trying to knock Augusten Burroughs, and admittedly I haven't finished the book b/c I can't remember where I put it, but Running with Scissors just seemed like another memoir in the veins of I-had-a-fucked-up-and/or-bizarre-childhood. Augusten Burroughs is "that guy" at the party, much like Dave Pelzer or [insert name of someone else who wrote a memoir about traumatic experiences here]. The further something is away from our own experiences, the harder it is for us to identify with them, to truly empathize, and to understand. We don't even try; we just pity them. For me, the first book that really spoke to my experience was Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's The Keeper. I read it and kept thinking, "Yes, I know that feeling exactly!"
Anyhow, getting back to my original quandary....
When do you reach out to someone, take that step in their direction? And when do you respect whatever boundaries they have set about what they're willing to share with you?
I remember once overhearing a former boss say to somebody else on the phone about how her husband was depressed, and she was trying to explain it to whoever was on the other end of the line, but she didn't seem to be having any luck. I wanted to say something, to tell her that it's something I've also struggled with, but a.) I had overheard it, and b.) I didn't know if she wanted me to know.
Sometimes opportunities present themselves and usually I do not take them and then kick myself afterwards. What if I told them something they didn't want to hear? Like, hey, your father-in-law's odd behavior sounds like my mom's and she has a mental illness so maybe he does too! I mean, I guess it is better that he get treatment if that is the case, but then again it may just be some quirk of behaviour that has nothing to do with mental illness. And then there is always that question of how much is too much information to share at work.
Illness and abnormalities make people really uncomfortable. Just ask anybody who's an amputee or visibly a burn victim. Yeah, there's all this ra-ra-bust-the-stigma and it's cool to smash taboo and whatnot. But just like in cognitive behavioural therapy (or whatever that method is for helping people with phobias through gradually increasing exposure), I think dealing with stigmas is one of those things that is a nudge-over-the-edge type thing rather than a sink-or-swim type thing. (Such an articulate sentence, I know.) Sometimes getting to know someone of that "other" group or some other type of interaction/experience speeds this up a lot, but rarely are such planned occurrences effective. All those exercises about stereotypes in school were just awkward and sometimes self-defeating.
Sometimes too much too fast just pushes people in the opposite direction. Not trying to knock Augusten Burroughs, and admittedly I haven't finished the book b/c I can't remember where I put it, but Running with Scissors just seemed like another memoir in the veins of I-had-a-fucked-up-and/or-bizarre-childhood. Augusten Burroughs is "that guy" at the party, much like Dave Pelzer or [insert name of someone else who wrote a memoir about traumatic experiences here]. The further something is away from our own experiences, the harder it is for us to identify with them, to truly empathize, and to understand. We don't even try; we just pity them. For me, the first book that really spoke to my experience was Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's The Keeper. I read it and kept thinking, "Yes, I know that feeling exactly!"
Anyhow, getting back to my original quandary....
When do you reach out to someone, take that step in their direction? And when do you respect whatever boundaries they have set about what they're willing to share with you?
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Equal but Different?
I am glad that both houses of Congress approved a bill ensuring parity in coverage of mental and physical illnesses. But I wonder (and sincerely hope) the bill will live up to its hype.
Here's the article in the Times:
Here's the article in the Times:
Congress moved close to approving a bill that would require health insurance plans to provide treatment of mental illnesses comparable to what they already provide for physical illnesses.
Monday, May 26, 2008
more than the sum of our parts
It's almost halfway between Mother's Day and Father's Day, and instead of reflecting on lives lost to war today (although Andy Rooney did an exceptional Memorial Day commentary on 60 Minutes last night, saying what too few are willing to say on days like today), I am thinking about parents and how they shape us.
To lay all of who we are on our parents (or whoever raised us) is too much, too easy, too simple. But there's no denying that I am who I am today because of my parents. I am who I am today because I have a mother with schizoaffective disorder (bipolar in her case), and because my father does not. I am who I am because they are who they are. And there is all this politics of saying that someone has a mental illness rather than that they are mentally ill. It is just a part of who they are, not all of it, stress advocacy groups.
Yes and no.
My mother was not diagnosed until I was 14. I'd always known there was something not right with her, and I always thought that once I knew what that something was, all my questions would be answered, somebody could fix it, and then I would get to have my real mom.
But my "real" mom is no more real or unreal than the "real world" postcollege. Socrates' postulation that "the more you know, the more there is to know" seems to be a recurring theme in my life. Sure, having a name (a label, a category) for some of her behavior was helpful. But for all the advances science and medicine have made, how little we know about the mind. Names and labels make things easier to talk about; they give you a handle, but the pot's still empty.
For all the categories, symptoms, and theories that I've learned about since my mother's diagnosis, all that I've really learned is that you cannot separate a mental illness from who someone is. Sure, the delusions and paranoia are symptoms. But what about my mother's propensity to talk anyone and everyone's ear off? Her messiness? The way she exaggerates everything? When is it a symptom and when is it just the way someone is? I don't remember where I read this, but somewhere I was reminded that mental health is a spectrum, not a definitive state such as being pregnant or having the chicken pox.
What about other lifelong or seriously life-threatening illnesses? Don't those affect people in similar ways? One of my college friends had cancer when she was in junior high. Fortunately, the cancer is no longer in her body, and she lives her life like any other 20-something-year-old, but I don't think being a cancer survivor will ever not be a part of who she is. And it's hard not to want to separate when it's a mental illness. I wanted so much to believe that my mother said mean things to me because she was ill, not because she was mean or hated or me or truly regretted having me. If my mother didn't have whatever this was, she would be constant, loving, stable. I truly believed medicine could flip the switch.
So maybe this is why I have trouble seeing anything as black and white. All my life, everything has been a gray area, everything has been a spectrum, everything is shaded with meaning I can't begin to understand. I love words and writing, but I am constantly frustrated by all of its limitations. I love to analyze, but if all the analysis in the world can't answer our questions, what good is it? What good is any of it?
One of my favorite quotations comes from Nancy Andreasen, who has studied the brain and mental illnesses for years. In one of her books, Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome, she wrote:
"The more we analyze, the more we feel we understand. The more we analyze, the more we feel we can control. We forget that megabytes and millimeters and millennia have no intrinsic meaning and are merely human inventions. By trying too hard to understand everything, we may understand nothing. We analyze so much and so well that we may also destroy the vital essence and meaning of things by breaking them into pieces."
Reading that, I realized that I had been going everything wrong. While I understand trying to destigmatize mental illness by saying that it is a disease that someone has, just like cancer or diabetes. It's not that that isn't true. Yet to simplify it in that matter fails to do justice to any true attempts to understand it. My mother's mental illness is no less a part of her (and no less a part of me) than an arm, a lung, a vertebra. The only real way to destigmatize mental illness is by talking about it, by being open. It is not by sugarcoating it, by using terms and labels and breaking it down. It requires being honest, being human, and realizing that we are all more than just the sum of our parts.
I make no claims to having achieved such grand enlightenment, but I am trying.
To lay all of who we are on our parents (or whoever raised us) is too much, too easy, too simple. But there's no denying that I am who I am today because of my parents. I am who I am today because I have a mother with schizoaffective disorder (bipolar in her case), and because my father does not. I am who I am because they are who they are. And there is all this politics of saying that someone has a mental illness rather than that they are mentally ill. It is just a part of who they are, not all of it, stress advocacy groups.
Yes and no.
My mother was not diagnosed until I was 14. I'd always known there was something not right with her, and I always thought that once I knew what that something was, all my questions would be answered, somebody could fix it, and then I would get to have my real mom.
But my "real" mom is no more real or unreal than the "real world" postcollege. Socrates' postulation that "the more you know, the more there is to know" seems to be a recurring theme in my life. Sure, having a name (a label, a category) for some of her behavior was helpful. But for all the advances science and medicine have made, how little we know about the mind. Names and labels make things easier to talk about; they give you a handle, but the pot's still empty.
For all the categories, symptoms, and theories that I've learned about since my mother's diagnosis, all that I've really learned is that you cannot separate a mental illness from who someone is. Sure, the delusions and paranoia are symptoms. But what about my mother's propensity to talk anyone and everyone's ear off? Her messiness? The way she exaggerates everything? When is it a symptom and when is it just the way someone is? I don't remember where I read this, but somewhere I was reminded that mental health is a spectrum, not a definitive state such as being pregnant or having the chicken pox.
What about other lifelong or seriously life-threatening illnesses? Don't those affect people in similar ways? One of my college friends had cancer when she was in junior high. Fortunately, the cancer is no longer in her body, and she lives her life like any other 20-something-year-old, but I don't think being a cancer survivor will ever not be a part of who she is. And it's hard not to want to separate when it's a mental illness. I wanted so much to believe that my mother said mean things to me because she was ill, not because she was mean or hated or me or truly regretted having me. If my mother didn't have whatever this was, she would be constant, loving, stable. I truly believed medicine could flip the switch.
So maybe this is why I have trouble seeing anything as black and white. All my life, everything has been a gray area, everything has been a spectrum, everything is shaded with meaning I can't begin to understand. I love words and writing, but I am constantly frustrated by all of its limitations. I love to analyze, but if all the analysis in the world can't answer our questions, what good is it? What good is any of it?
One of my favorite quotations comes from Nancy Andreasen, who has studied the brain and mental illnesses for years. In one of her books, Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome, she wrote:
"The more we analyze, the more we feel we understand. The more we analyze, the more we feel we can control. We forget that megabytes and millimeters and millennia have no intrinsic meaning and are merely human inventions. By trying too hard to understand everything, we may understand nothing. We analyze so much and so well that we may also destroy the vital essence and meaning of things by breaking them into pieces."
Reading that, I realized that I had been going everything wrong. While I understand trying to destigmatize mental illness by saying that it is a disease that someone has, just like cancer or diabetes. It's not that that isn't true. Yet to simplify it in that matter fails to do justice to any true attempts to understand it. My mother's mental illness is no less a part of her (and no less a part of me) than an arm, a lung, a vertebra. The only real way to destigmatize mental illness is by talking about it, by being open. It is not by sugarcoating it, by using terms and labels and breaking it down. It requires being honest, being human, and realizing that we are all more than just the sum of our parts.
I make no claims to having achieved such grand enlightenment, but I am trying.
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