Parenting
Mental Health isn’t always about self-care
Sometimes it's about acknowledgement
I've been turning the idea of writing this around in my mind. It’s not a question of being unsure if it ought to be written. I firmly believe that it should be. It’s also not a question of whether people should read it, I certainly think you should.
Still, I am completely unsure about writing this.
Okay, you’re being completely cryptic. What are you talking about?
Mental Illness. There. I wrote it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about mental illness and people in my family who suffer from it. Mostly, I've been thinking that if I write about it, I might be outing people who don’t want to be outed.
If I tell you that my friend has terminal cancer, that’s fine. I have written about Michelle’s life with and death from leiomyosarcoma.
There is no shame in being ill as long as the illness resides in your body. If I write about my aunt’s bipolar disorder, there is judgment. If I write about my son’s bipolar diagnosis, the judgment gets personal.
Why did I choose to have children when I had an aunt with bipolar? Didn’t I know that it is genetic and runs in families? No, actually, I didn’t. I thought Aunt Agnes was a one-off.
What happened during his childhood to cause him to become bipolar? Nothing. It is genetic and generally manifests in early adulthood.
Don’t you feel like you could have done something differently? Maybe if you hadn’t homeschooled him, or if you didn’t have other children and had given him your full attention, or maybe it’s because you're Queer. Children need school, all your attention, a mother and a father.
All of these judgments come down to me. If I need help with his medical or legal bills, can I reasonably start a GoFundMe? No, because his illness is somehow suspect, and, by extension, my parenting is suspect.
Legal bills? What do they have to do with mental illness? Some people’s mental illness makes them act out in ways that are illegal, or that bring them into the purview of the courts. Yes, I hear your judgment. Why couldn’t he control himself? Why didn’t you do something?
The real question, for me, is why do I have to answer these questions? Why do you even ask them? If I said he had cancer, you would offer me sympathy. You would ask how you could help. You might even start a GoFundMe for him yourself.
I have not written about bipolar because of these prying questions and judgments. Is it fair for me to out my son? Clearly, I am ambivalent. I haven’t said which son.
Mental Illness has long been relegated to the bin of things we don’t talk openly about. Periodically, when someone famous comes out about it, it surfaces briefly but then recedes to the shadows.
It never recedes in my life. It is there when I wake up. It is there when I text him good morning and ask about his plans for the day. It is there when I try to budget and realize that he can’t work.
Bipolar Disorder resides in my mind as well as his. I am not Bipolar, but I live with it every day. Some days are good days. We play chess together online and laugh about the absurdity of politics or exchange songs we’ve been listening to.
Then there are the bad days. The days he has to go to court, or the days when his meds are out of stock or the insurance decides not to pay for the drug that has been working to keep the mania at bay.
He went from living his life and paying his bills in May to being committed in September. I went from worrying about his happiness to worrying about his personal safety. The simple question, “How are you?” became a minefield. I asked it gingerly of him, and I cringed every time someone asked it of me.
“How are the kids doing?” became a masterclass in not lying, but not saying very much either.
There has been so much written about mental illness and about how we should remove the stigma from it, but if families don’t talk about it, the stigma will never go away. That said, if we talk about it, we are bombarded with accusatory questions, looked down upon, and blamed. It’s a classic Catch-22.
So, I am left feeling as if I have outed my son and myself and exposed us to a world that will judge us and find us morally and constitutionally lacking. Of course, there will be people who will not judge us. There will be people who, in whispered tones, tell me about their children’s or their own struggle with mental illness, with finding affordable appropriate care, with a legal system that doesn’t know how to deal with mental illness, and with people who blame them for being ill.
Still, talking about mental illness, out loud, in public, is the only way we have to normalize it, and it needs to be normalized. Mental health is no different from physical health, and we need to discuss it in terms that go beyond “Prioritizing Self-Care” or “10 Simple Steps to Better Mental Health”.
Bipolar Disorder isn’t a mental shortcoming or a moral failing, and it shouldn’t be treated as one. Even as I vacillate between needing to write about it and wanting to keep it absolutely private, I know that writing about the lack of understanding around mental illness won’t solve the problem, but it is one step toward creating a world in which it is treated just like any other illness.
