I can’t speak for every place in the nation or every incident when it comes to mental health, but I can tell my own story of a forty year challenge to find help for my mother’s bipolar disorder. We hear a great deal of talk about mental illness and now and again a legislative body tosses a few million dollars into the budget for care, but mostly very little real dedication to solving some of the problems ever takes place. I have known the enormous frustrations associated with keeping a loved one’s mind working properly. I can attest to the fact that it is more often than not a daunting task.
My mother’s first frightening breakdown came when she was in her forties and I was twenty years old. Nothing had prepared me for the depression and paranoid ideation that she experienced. I had never before even heard of someone transforming from a healthy and happy person into one unable to grasp reality. The change in my mom came so quickly and unexpectedly. It seemed as though one moment we were going to see movies together and shopping at the annual Moonlight Madness sale at the mall and the next she was locked inside her home believing that forces were out to accuse and convict her of crimes she had not committed.
I was thrown into the maelstrom associated with finding care for my mother without warning or any kind of knowledge of how broken the system actually was. I appealed to the adults that I knew to provide me with guidance but they were as confused about what to do as I was. I literally found myself diving headfirst into murky waters without a life jacket. With the suggestions of our family physician I procured a psychiatrist for my mother. Based solely on my description of her behavior he decided that Mama needed to be assessed in the hospital immediately.
If not for the kindness of my mother’s best friend I’m not even sure how I would have convinced my mother to go the hospital. Instead the two of us convinced Mama to trust that we were doing the right thing for her. Somehow we managed to get her to sign herself into the hospital even as her eyes darted with fear and a sense that we had somehow betrayed her filled her mind. It would not turn out to be a good experience at all. In fact, it became a source of conflict between me and my mother for the rest of her days. Never again would she fully trust me. Sadly little did either of us understand at the time that her illness was chronic, not cured. The symptoms would return with stunning regularity again and again.
The next time my mother became paranoid and psychotic I had mentally advanced in age and experience even thought I was still in my early twenties. I shopped around for doctors and found one who seemed to understand Mama’s unique needs far better than the first doctor. She would continually see him for many years but for the most part she tended to be noncompliant with his instructions for her care. Thus the worst of her symptoms would appear in an almost predictable cycle, with each new illness being more serious than the last.
Much of the problem lay in the fact that my mother would deem herself well and stop visiting her psychiatrist or taking her medication. He had to glue her back together on an emergency basis again and again. Eventually as he grew older the frustration of her on again off again behavior became too time consuming and he told her that his practice was too full to allow her to come only when she was in a psychotic state.
I had to once again search for a doctor and by this time my mother was a retired senior citizen with Medicare. I quickly learned that few doctors were willing to admit such a person into their practice. It literally took me two weeks of eight hour days talking to one psychiatrist after another and being rejected for one reason or another before I was successful. It was only when I finally broke down while talking with a kindly older doctor that I found the very best psychiatrist that she would ever have. He was a specialist in geriatric psychiatry and had built an impressive CV caring for elderly persons with mental illnesses.
His scholarly and no nonsense approach set my mother on track with proper medications and a strict routine that seemed to help her long term, but just when I thought that we had finally found the keys to her treatment things changed. The doctor’s funding from the state of Texas was pulled and he was sent to work full time in a psychiatric hospital for criminals. He was as disappointed and angry as I was that the state thought so little of his remarkable work with senior citizens.
The next years were tumultuous as Mama had to see one doctor after another, never really forming a trusting relationship with them. Ultimately she ended up back in a psychiatric hospital again that felt like a factory rather than a place of healing. It soon became apparent that she was not receiving the care she needed so when they released her after two weeks with no real change in her condition my brothers and I understood that we would have to monitor her daily going forward. She spent the next years alternating between year long stays with one and then another of us. We kept her from the worst aspects of her illness by monitoring her daily medication routine, a task that was often quite unpleasant.
I learned over time that the resources for those with mental illness are stunningly limited. There are no months of the year when we all wear a certain color to support mental health. Funding for psychiatric care is ridiculously low and care tends to be based more on decisions made by insurance companies than by the doctors who know their patients. There is a shortage of virtually everything associated with mental illness and family members are often stymied by the system. People with psychiatric needs so often fall between the cracks. We lose them to their psychoses because our entire society seems to care so little about them. They and their families live in the shadows struggling to deal with the frightening diseases of the mind.
Society speaks in platitudes when it comes to mental illness but rarely follows through with the care and understanding that mentally ill people need. We somehow lack the courage and determination to make them as well as we do with those who have diseases of the heart or cancer. We turn away from their frightening behaviors until they become incredibly sick. We seem to lack either the courage or the willingness to invest heavily in treatments and resources for those whose brains are sending them signals that are out of whack. We can talk all we want but until we make the investments in mental health we will continue to lose good people to toxic illnesses that turn their thinking inside out. Surely we see the problem, but somehow we are loathe to do what we need to do. Our understanding of mental illness is decades behind our ability to repair hearts, cure cancer, minister to infectious diseases.
We must understand as a nation that studying and healing mental illnesses should become a top priority. The brain should be our new frontier. It’s long past time for dedicating time and funding to this critical branch of medicine. So many souls are longing for good mental health. Surely it will benefit us all to find ways of helping them to be healthy again.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 