Month: November 2023

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.  

I was a very good student. As long as nobody was pushing me to answer questions immediately I was always able to compose myself, reach into my store of knowledge and find the correct response. I was not good at contests in which I had to be the first to come up with an answer. My mind works wonderfully but its pace is slow and steady. If a clock is ticking I freeze. I won academic contests that allowed me to ponder over essays or prepare speeches in advance. I morph from being intelligent to stuttering as though I don’t have a brain when people put pressure on me to answer immediately. I was generally the last person to turn in a test, a fact that often annoyed my more quick witted classmates. I generally got high grades because I took the time to review and refine my responses. I suspect that many learners are like I am. There are those among us who can win Jeopardy. I am not among them. I will come up with the answer but not in the blazing timeframe needed to win a contest. 

I mention this because something is happening in the Houston Independent School District that troubles me greatly. After a state takeover of one of the largest districts in the United States a new superintendent is requiring some schools to use a pedagogic methodology that I believe will make learning more difficult for many students, especially those like me. From what I hear teachers are given scripted lessons with no time allowed for addressing individual learning needs. There is also a component that requires some segments of the lessons to be timed including moments when students are providing answers. From the standpoint of a long time educator I have a mountain of issues with what is happening.

First of all a script is far too impersonal for teaching much of anything. It ignores the reality that each group of students may require differing versions of the lesson depending upon their learning styles and how well they are comprehending the subject matter. It does not allow for reteaching with is critical to any good mathematics class. It also assumes that all students will respond positively to the exact same teaching method. Finally it forces students to race with a clock, an unfortunate situation for learners who need time to compile their thoughts before responding. 

I continue to teach mathematics even after officially retiring. Only the other day I had to backtrack with a group of students when I realized in grading their homework that most of them had struggled with a particular concept that I had presented in the previous class. It was important to clear up all of the misconceptions that I found before moving forward with the next topic. I new from experience that simply ignoring their trouble would only lead to bigger and bigger gaps in their understanding. Timed and scripted lessons would not have allowed me to have the luxury of reteaching and pointing out the common errors that I was seeing. The students were more attentive than ever because they had been stressed when they themselves realized that they had not quite mastered the concept. They were smiling by the time I had helped them to clear up their confusion.

A few years ago I was enjoying a wonderful opportunity to tutor underserved high school students after school. I had a working relationship with their mathematics teachers who sent samples of their work and alerted me to what kind of help they needed. It was gratifying to see the confidence grow among young people who were literally frightened by math. They beamed when their grades improved and their efforts made everyone happy. It was a truly gratifying time for me and then something terrible happened. 

The company that hired me to tutor in the school began issuing commands that I knew would not work with my high school students. They insisted that I never use the student textbooks or the teacher created work for the tutoring sessions. Instead they wanted me to give the kids a standardized test to determine what skills were weak. Then I was told to simply set them up with a computer program and monitor them as they worked independently. I did this one time and found that both students and teachers were upset because nothing matched what they were actually doing in class. When I told the company that I preferred to continue tutoring in the manner that had been so successful they threatened to make surprise visits and fire me if I was not using their pre-planned lessons on the computer. I beat them to the punch by resigning. 

It saddened me to abandon the students and teachers with whom I had built a strong and trusted relationship. I tried to explain how my hands were tied by people who seemed to have little idea how to work with high schoolers in mathematics. The ignorance of it all angered me. There were so many silly rules many of which were being made by individuals who had never taught mathematics or worked inside a high school. I was unable to reason with them because they were not really peddling a true tutoring service, but rather a computer package that had little or nothing to do with the realities of the situation. 

I find myself wondering of the prepackaged and strictly timed standardized lessons that are being echoed across classrooms are draining the joy and common sense out of the HISD schools required to use them. Students are first and foremost humans and by definition have different needs and ways of learning. I cannot help but believe that this system will fail and in the process put thousands of students behind in their knowledge and skills. Perhaps it will also have a very negative psychological impact on them. Somehow it does not seem as though true professional educators would design such a system. The system appears to be more of a product created by a business intent on selling its wares and using children to prove its worth. 

I hope that not too much damage is done to the young minds having to endure this experiment. I hope that the teachers do not become too discouraged. Mostly I hope that everyone will come to their senses sooner rather than later. What is happening is an educational travesty and needs to end as quickly as possible. There are many experts among teachers who know what to do. Someone needs to listen to them and to the students and their parents as well.