i've been
unhinged
i've wandered the dim hallways of my own
skull
pondering existence
and worrying about centipedes
i am that woman
laughing alone loudly
in the movie theater
when all of you are silent, incomprehensive
of the comedy onscreen
i've been out past dusk
stumbling through the woods
little red riding hood
without directions to grandma's
i've quaked in my boots
i've shuddered to think
i've run from
myself
for a while
does it make a difference
now
that someone else
with a degree in gray matter
points it out?
*********************
i've been thinking a great deal about the shooting in miami this week. it's hard to keep your mind off it when you live with someone who's bipolar, and moreso, you're considered mentally infirm yourself.
if no one had known, there would be no attachments made, no lines drawn. it would have been "man shouts bomb on plane."
i've got a big, big problem with drawing lines. it defines something that, to me, remains indefinable: the human capacity for change.
even if that nice gentleman who is now mourned by his family was on meds, would that have made a difference? if he hadn't been diagnosed, there of course would be speculation by the media of his being mentally unstable. i'm sure that his family has survived episodes and occurances on a daily basis for years; they're aware of an instability.
my largest issue with this has absolutely NOTHING to do with the fact that the victim was bipolar. it has to do with the fact that when it comes down to brass tacks, the man was a human being.
was it based on his mental illness? how the hell do i know. i can't do much but speculate. but i live with a bipolar fellow. i can tell you that sometimes, yeah, it gets bad. sometimes you're the line between sanity and insanity.
but i can only be that line so much of the time. some of the time, he has to be his own line. i'm not his keeper. goddess or god, The Someone Upstairs--that is his keeper. and if the flint strikes stone and he makes a decision, i cannot always be there to prevent it leading him down some dark road that skewed judgment tells him is bright.
one of the things i'm trying to do is let go of the idea that i can be responsible for his actions. he knows he is not responsible for mine. i've just got a dependency problem that spills over and makes *me* feel responsible when there's no way i could be.
this dead man's wife probably is thinking about what she could have done differently--could she have yelled more loudly, could she have tackled an air marshal--what could she have done, just by herself, to save the life of the man she called husband?
the answer, folks, is nothing.
and it sucks to think that is the answer.
i read on another blog that someone heard, amidst a group of bp people, that perhaps they should start wearing jackets that said "BIPOLAR" across the back, much as marshals wear coats that state their occupation.
people wear identification to show what they're doing--you recognize a police officer, a doctor, and so on, by their clothing.
you can't see someone who's mentally ill. you can't see someone who has a new heart. you can't pick out of a lineup someone who has syphilis.
i have a problem with this because if you define your self and your group so boldly, people will start to make value judgements--they can't help it. if you see a doctor strolling through the mall on his lunch break, and someone falls over in a seizure, you'll probably wonder why the doctor just keeps walking. he's a doctor, right? he's supposed to save lives? you get the idea.
let's say i wear my jacket to the mall. my jacket's going to say: DEPRESSED AND ADHD WITH ANXIETY DISORDERS. first of all, that's kind of long. so let's shorten it, shall we? we'll just say ADHD. i go into a store. do i suddenly get preferential treatment? i'm wearing a jacket that states that i'll probably either buy a lot of shiny, glittery objects, and get directed to said area, or will i be ignored because there'll be too much to choose from and i probably won't buy anything?
yeah, it's simple, but i'm a shopper, so keep it simple.
push it a step further. leave DEPRESSED on the back of my jacket. does this mean i can't go to the top of the empire state building now, because i've been labeled as a possible jumper?
wearing a jacket that said bipolar wouldn't have changed anything any more than the man's wife yelling it at the top of her lungs changed anything. anyone could have a jacket that says "bipolar" across the back in big yellow eye-catching letters--does that make that person exempt from having the knowledge and wherewithal to create a bomb and detonate it on an airplane?
as dan pointed out in his blog--he got scared, because he does know how to put together a weapon of quite destructive capabilities. other bipolar people got scared. i can understand their fear--they don't want to be the one shot at an airport, at least not at the moment.
but then again, who the hell does? i sure don't.
in these days of heightened security everywhere--i'm waiting to be frisked at the grocery store, it'll come--anyway, i think the idea is that you can't be too careful. i ADORE the idea of law enforcement carrying tasers and such, something non-lethal, in order to preserve the life of a perceived wrong doer. or nets that just stop the fleeing suspect. that'd be super. that'd be humane.
something else that i took umbrage to, while reading the same jacket-idea blog, was that this was the first victim of the War on Terror.
again, erase some lines. there've probably BEEN other people who are bipolar gunned down, beaten, etc. since the war on terror began. they just didn't have a doctor's note saying they were bipolar.
i could start taking offense to every depressed person eliminated since the war on terror started; but that would take a long, long time, and be totally counterproductive to mourning the loss of just plain all humans whose lives have been cut short.
again, lines are being drawn that i just don't think you can draw. having high blood pressure, being diabetic--it certainly can affect your thinking, but that doesn't define the fact that you're going to be the one shot in an airport.
what defines that is YOU. it's like adding things to cookie dough. you've got your basic dough--mental instability--and you can add to it a variety of things. all of them will not give you chocolate chip cookies unless you add chocolate chips.
ie, just because you're depressed doesn't mean you're going to jump off the empire state building.
i'm certainly not trying to hide what i am. i know the cliffs of insanity that my brain hits. i know their shape and their size. it doesn't mean that someday while shopping i'm not going to be seized by cells, and overtaken with the desire to just pick up the giant, shiny, glittery christmas tree in the mall and run out the door with it.
i fully expect to be halted.
4 comments:
The thing about hate is, most people are quite happy to latch onto just about anything about you that they can lay claim is the source of their hate. Mental illness is just a convenient target for them.
It's interesting, since I work in a field (and my former boss did quite a bit of work in this area) where we do focus on, and even commit, people who are suffering from some rather profound mental illness. It's the Court's role to decide whether or not these people are enough of a danger to warrant locking them up. It's our role to help prove that they're not. And believe me, some clients have made it incredibly difficult to help us do our job. But they can't help it. They've reached that point where that is their reality, and they cannot comprehend that their reality is not even close to overlapping with what constitutes "normal". As far as they are concerned, they are the normal ones; we're the ones who are wacko, so to speak.
Like the client who was convinced that the police had a special force of rattlesnakes used to subdue troublesome people, and he had gotten bitten on the butt. My boss was terrified he'd drop trou in front of the judge to show him the scars. He didn't, thankfully (though I think he did hike up his shirt to show his "dogbite" scars, from the same police unit--apparently, this was the little-known Noah's Ark unit). That was a 'kid gloves' situation because the client was terrified of women, which was the source of the conflict in the first place--he was being disorderly, a female cop was dispensed to deal with him, he freaked out and she tased him. It's not too much of a stretch for the mind to replace "taser" with "rattlesnake".
It gets me to thinking, though--what constitutes a danger? At what point do we have to stop and say, "These people are too dangerous to be allowed to roam free." A lot of our clients never left the home--they weren't dangerous to other people; their minds were just wired differently. Most of them never bothered anyone. It then reaches the uncomfortable conclusion that perhaps the State is locking people like this up because they don't understand mental illness and don't care to understand. Anyone who doesn't follow the norm? Lock 'em up. It doesn't matter if they hear voices or claim they can levitate or have violent conversations with themselves--if they're different, they deserve to be locked away.
That's what worries me about the 'jacket' concept of identification. True, people would be able to see, but when you present just the term and not the definition, you allow any random spectator to attach their own prejudice and fears to that term. I'd think, like you said, you'd get persecuted, not understood, and the sad thing about that is that even when committing someone, the Courts are a great deal more humane than the general public.
I was watching a movie once, a long time ago, the name of which I can't remember. I remember it dealt with mentally-handicapped adults. One was continually trying to prove to the Courts that he was capable of caring for himself, and shouldn't be treated like a helpless child. His advocate was appearing with him in Court, and he had a daydream about what he wished his client would say, in a very articulate and soft-spoken manner. One of the things he said was that one can judge the quality of a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. That has always stuck with me as being very profound, and also very sad, because there are so many people who would rather cling to prejudice and misunderstanding than to try and understand the differences, even if just for a little bit.
But then I begin to think that maybe this has less to do with being understanding and accepting of those with mental illness, as it is just being more accepting and open-minded about everyone else, in general. Perhaps the world would be a happier place if we weren't so quick to judge anything that didn't match up with our view of the world as it should be.
I'm rambling, here, and preaching to the choir, to boot. *sheepish grin* I guess I wanted to add my perspective to your post.
--Sara
Yeah.
i keep saying that things are true and i sure do mean it. that is interesting--how does our society treat its most vulnerable members? how does it assist them? how does it stifle them?
you, my dear girl, need a blog. that's all quite profound. thank you!
and dan, i knew you'd agree. (; but thanks for popping over anyhow!
I wouldn't be caught dead in a BIPOLAR jacket...no pun intended. (well, kinda)
I do believe the wife could have helped by calling ahead & notifying someone that he was having problems, had a mental condition & was off meds.
My son is also bipolar, so I do worry about things that seem to be prone to happen to bipolar men as opposed to women.
One time when he had a bad reaction to Luvox, we had to call the paramedics. Well, the cops came too. And I had to immediately let them know he was not on drugs or alcohol, but prescription meds & was having a psychotic episode. When they first walked in, they were very defensive towards him & I realized then how things can go so wrong, so quickly.
I don't know how our loved ones live with us, but I'm glad they do. :)
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