This gets harder when the truth comes out. Harder especially when what so many people think is the truth is so severely unfair, so full of vitriol, and so patently false. When so many people embrace this error, intolerance and prejudice take hold and an open, honest life becomes a liability. A stumble into the secret thoughts of others reveals the breadth of the counterfactual and the hate that undergirds it.
My honesty and integrity are the foundations of my work with mental illness, and I am moved with love by the people who reach out to me and tell me this work has changed their lives. I feel forever blessed.
I also feel that perhaps it has been a mistake to live so openly with mental illness.
We go to the pub on the corner often. The regulars there are like-minded upbeat people and the bartenders have become friends. It’s a highlight of the neighborhood and of so many days. Until…
A couple of months ago a mass shooting took place in Maine. What we got from the brief reporting given the depth of the tragedy, brief reporting because such tragic events are far too common, was that the shooter had spent time in a psychiatric hospital, was widely known in the community to be unstable, and should not, under existing laws, have been in possession of a gun.
A woman in our bar, an attorney who works criminal cases and really should know better, railed that people with mental illness should be denied their second amendment right to bear arms. She should know better because most gun violence, by far, is committed by people without mental illness, and when mental illness is a factor, so usually is substance abuse. In fact, people with mental illness are significantly less likely to commit gun violence than the general population. Perhaps counterintuitive but none the less true, people with mental illness are more often the victims rather than the perpetrators of violent acts. I’ve supported these facts and expressed my opinion about mental illness and gun rights elsewhere, but suffice it to say that I don’t think a person should be denied a constitutional right because of a health diagnosis.
This attorney disagreed. I told her I have bipolar disorder. I referenced the years we have known each other and shared drinks at this bar. She knew my family and my reputation in the community. And she maintained that despite all this because I have bipolar disorder I should never ever be allowed to own a gun. In fact, when pressed she conceded that it would be legitimate and just to deny me other rights as well because of my illness. Regardless of how I live my life or manage my illness I was less of a citizen merely because I have this illness; a mental illness; an illness that should deny me the rights shared by all. All except those with mental illness.
I let it drop. Sure I’m an advocate for those with mental illness, but I know better than to argue at a bar with ignorance.
A week later I took my daughter deep into a rural area about 45 minutes from the city where she rides horses. I love it there. Going there and standing at the crest of open fields surrounded by ancient trees and crisscrossed by white fences that corral galloping horses is a high point of my week. Nothing could ruin it. Nothing, until that afternoon a woman there leaned against the fence and somehow the shooting in Maine came up. I didn’t know this woman at all, and she sure didn’t know me, but she went off about how these people, these crazy people, are no good at all. He was in a mental hospital and they should have just kept him there. No not kept him there. They should just kill those people. All they’re going to do is come out and hurt someone anyway.
Argument was pointless. I let it drop.
Then there was last Wednesday. The weather was ideal, a bright, crisp fall day, so my wife and I walked through our neighborhood to pick up our daughter from school. When we got her she was unsettled. Something was bothering her. We were barely half a block from the school when out of the blue she protested about me being open about my bipolar disorder. Her friends tease her about having a father with bipolar disorder and presume that, because I have bipolar disorder, I abuse her, I deny her, and I make her life unusually difficult. Of course my daughter and her closest friends know this isn’t true, but she also doesn’t want to have to deal with this from her classmates.
Now what I have to say is that someone taught this to these kids. Most 12-year-olds have no idea what bipolar disorder is, let alone how it may negatively impact behavior. They’re parroting what they heard from somebody else, as every person who becomes intolerant of anything does. Intolerance is taught and boy have these kids learned the lesson.
How do I possibly counter this when it hits so close to home?
Yes I write about mental illness in my books and this newsletter. I tell a lot. I’m not ashamed. While this may seem brave I write to a closed community. I write primarily for an audience who has a mental illness or has a family member with a mental illness. Yes I’m open about it all, and I have revealed enough to torpedo my career, but in the face of the intolerance held by so many people against those of us with mental illness I am too much of a coward to make a stand. Instead I put my family first and live a small life so that I may be the husband and the father they need, and so I may fully participate in our shared life and help support our present and our dreams in every way I can. This is the way it should be for every person with or without a mental illness.
Small lives lived within a small community can make a world. In a small community people can come together and really get to know each other. In the face of this, intolerance is far less likely. But we live in a very big world where misinformation and prejudice spread fast. Yet I still have faith. Intolerance is learned, so it can be unlearned. I have a platform, albeit a small platform, from which to shout out the truth. If I only had the courage to confront erroneous speech and indefensible behavior. If only I didn’t shrink away from every fight.
Instead I focus on being well. Instead I do my best to remain independent and productive. I’d rather be a positive example than a powerful orator anyway. Perhaps all of us with mental illness, just by doing good and doing well, can dispute the ridiculous ideas some people have about us. We’re better than that, and every day that we get up and do something positive for ourselves and others we prove the intolerant wrong. For they are wrong. We know it, and in the face of intolerance we should justly persevere.
It makes people feel safe to believe the danger is in the "crazy" person, when in fact the danger is in an average (typically male) person who is exposed to too much propaganda, too much social media, and has too easy access to guns. (I get really angry when people say that a particular politician/business owner is mentally ill. He's not. He's corrupt, power hungry and cruel and dangerous. That is not the equivalent to mental illness.)
Now this idea of killing people on site for having mental illness, or for being an immigrant, etc -- is something new, and being promulgated by the current politicians. Very scary stuff. I'm so sorry it's affecting your daughter this way.... as you say, you write for a niche group. I'm so sorry that in 2023, it's still being taught that mental illness is more a threat to the public than it is to the actual sufferer.
I ,too, recently edged away from a man in a grocery store that told me it's "them" and "us," and the ones shooting people are "crazy" vs there being a gun problem. As I'm getting older, i feel more vulnerable physically, and certainly so, in the current world we live in. You, having a young daughter absolutely changes the risks you should take in engaging with hotheads. This does not make you a coward; it makes you a father. Just keep trying to find a balance, as you do, between keeping totally quiet, and speaking out. I know you're not capable of *totally* shutting up -- it's not in you.