Could It Have Been Different?

cont.

Suppose, 20 years ago, instead of going to the psychiatrist to be told that mental illness is hereditary and I have the same disease as my mother, I had searched out my friends to hold me and listen while I cried and laughed. Suppose my husband had said, "Don't worry, Mary Ellen, I can handle things. Just take a break. You deserve it." Suppose the family had pooled their resources and sent me on a hiking trip to the White Mountains or encouraged me to take some much coveted courses, or taken me out to lunch and for a bike ride, or to pick flowers, or brought me a kitten. Suppose the house had been decorated with beautiful flowers. Suppose I had had my own little space to go to whenever I wanted and do what I needed to do for myself. Suppose I had known that I had some value and could do for myself whatever it was I needed to make myself feel better. Go to every movie playing for a month. Whatever. Just suppose.

Maybe I wouldn't have spent too much of my life in mental institutions looking for ever elusive answers to my pain, too many years with my brain in a drugged fog, too many years of deep sadness and suicidal ideation interspersed with periods of outlandish behavior. It has taken me years to undo the damage. Maybe there would be no tremor in my hands, maybe some of the relationships that ended for me during those hard years would still be part of my life. Maybe my career and reputation would have remained intact instead of having to start all over again at 50.

Through all those foggy years something was stirring in me. Something that knew somehow that all of this was not right. Something that caused me to ask my psychiatrist how people deal with these illnesses on a day-to-day basis. He said he would get me that information. (Finally a promise of some useful help) When I returned the next week in great anticipation, he told me no such information had ever been gathered. The only information he could give me was on psychiatric treatment, medication and restraint. From someplace deep inside me a voice kept saying "this is not right". The voice got louder and louder.

For the last four years, I have dedicated my life to finding out how other people cope, and the more I learned, and put this learning into practice in my own life, the better I felt. I learned that there is a silent but very courageous group of people all over the country who, like me, have been told that they are incurably mentally ill. These people have not given up. They have found the way out of the maze and I have become the vehicle for getting their important messages out to the rest of the world. I gather the information and spread it as far and wide as it needs to go. Through seminars, lectures, books, videos and grass roots networking.

This is the most important thing that I have learned: people being there for people creates more wellness and more recovery than anything else. The next time you start feeling low (or high or strange), reach out. If someone you love is having "psychiatric symptoms", sit with them, listen to them, let them cry, scream, shout, swear. Don't judge them. Don't criticize them. Hold the advice. Just be there. Bring them good food or flowers. Take them away to a place of beauty where they can rebuild their strength. Do for them what you would like to have done for you.

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