This is going to be an uncomfortable read for you. Is there a topic that stirs more discomfort than mental illness?

This is going to be a challenging read for you. Is there a field where our lack of understanding translates into the real premature cost of human life, of loved ones, of children, in violently horrific ways, more so than mental illness?

And finally, if you are brave enough to keep reading, this is going to be an emotionally heart-wrenching read for you. We are plagued by mass shootings to the point of numbness, and yet, they keep happening. Is there a topic that makes us feel more powerless than mental illness?

If you can stomach this read, even if you are the only person in the world who can, then the pain I have sifted through to bring you these blood-stained words will not have been in vain. My body shakes in-between sobs as I try to get this message to you. Just you. I couldn’t write this for everyone. I couldn’t make this easy. Nothing about this is easy.


The most recent shooting took place in Florida, the state I call home, where I grew up. Palm trees and beaches line the memories of my mom needing to go to the hospital yet again in handcuffs, the experiences of which were not discussed afterwards. “What was mommy sick with?” I am 8 years old and confused. My dad teaches me a new word. “Bipolar.”

Though you may learn a new word, that doesn’t mean that you can say it whenever you want, not even when you need to. Some words are like curse words; any relief you get in yelling them loudly is not worth the risk.

F**k!

The Florida sun beats down on the car to accent the embarrassment that has flushed my cheeks in a K-Mart parking lot. My mom used to work here, but not since she quit weeks ago. Inside she made a scene in front of her old coworkers as I stood aside with my brother, Matthew. He’s frustratingly too young to understand, and our matching red hair makes us stand out at a time where I’d give anything for invisibility. A former coworker puts his arm around my mom and asks with genuine concern, “Are you okay?” I want to run away.

Minutes later we are in the car and my mom is calling the police yet again. The wait in between a 911 call and the cops arriving to file yet another report that is not true, but that they pretend to take seriously for my mom’s sake, stresses me out. I can’t take it anymore. The police report captures my loud arguing with my mom through the cellphone and ends poignantly: “Daughter hung up on me.” I was twelve.

My family is in lots of police reports. It’s one thing to have painful memories, quite another to have them documented and on file at the police station down the road. Anytime I want, I can go there and get a freshly printed copy of them all: my family’s personal traumatic memory album that we never asked for, but make payments on nonetheless.


I hold these police reports close to my chest as an anchor in this sea of chaos, proof to show the cops the next time they come knocking, that they need to trust me instead of my mom. Mom doesn’t know what she is talking about. Sometimes when they take her away, she comes back better. Not most of the time, but sometimes,and it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I love her so much.

Bipolar might be a bad word, but it pales in comparison to Schizophrenia.

Before I know it, I’m an adult and my brother is a teenager. We are still so cute together with our matching red hair. I look at his curls as he lays on the hospital bed, suffering from a neurological problem the doctors have yet to diagnose. They do more tests. They rule things out. Relief is followed by apprehension as they do more tests. They test and rule things out until there is one answer left.

Schizophrenia.

No. My eyes widen as adrenaline prepares me to fight this unseen assailant. Does this mean he will hear voices? What if they tell him to do bad things? Will he want to hurt people? Will he hurt us?

There is nothing like the fear that comes after being told to not let your loved one be around sharp objects, but that they are otherwise ready to come home, and then scavenging the house to hide sharpened pencils. The key to the knife-safe hangs on your keychain as a reminder that you are not safe; frustratingly it’s not as physically heavy as it makes you feel for owning a knife-safe in the first place.

There is nothing like the fear of standing in the doorway with your mom as you both look in terror as your brother destroys your home, knocking over a full dishrack of cermaics as they crash on the floor. Running over the rubble makes his feet bleed, but he runs unphased, and keeps destroying, a streak of red.

The cops finally arrive. I don’t need to convince them to help, which is a relief because I can’t speak. They use handcuffs to take my brother to the place where our mom has to go sometimes too. I pray that this is one of the rare times where it works. My body shakes as I go back in the house and start picking up thousands of little broken pieces.

Days later he is back home. Call 911 again. He returns to the mental hospital.

A week later, welcome home. Days later, call 911. He goes back again.

Again and again, through the revolving door of our modern mental healthcare system.

Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. Is not our treatment of the insane... insane?

My mom was not feeling well. The stress was getting to her, but she was proactive. She called her doctor and made sure she had ample supply of her mood-stabilizers–not as colorful as Matt’s new anti-psychotics, but they match nonetheless.

I can get mad at my mom sometimes, but I can never say that she is a bad mother. She is the most loving person I have ever met. With Matt’s new diagnosis, she is prepared to do anything to help, even make her world revolve around him, easy enough transition for a long-term stay-at-home mom already. I see homeschooling books on the kitchen table, and school is in session every morning.

No amount of book-learning could cover the guilt and devastation my mom felt for passing on the gene of insanity to her son. She had given him life, would give her own life for his if need be, but on a fundamental level, had doomed him. She calls from a church at three in the morning feeling suicidal. An ambulance answers her cry for help by taking her to the place that sometimes helps, and she is back home within an hour. Quick treatment, we are told, because she just needed a nap.


I lived in the unpredictable chaos of my mom and brother going in and out of the insane revolving door of mental hospitals for six months. The knife-safe key still felt heavy in my pocket as my mom’s erradic spending habit and collection of cats grew to frightening proportions. My anxiety surmounts to levels I never knew were possible and sometimes it all escapes out of me in the form of a scream.

When not collapsing from countless sleepless nights, I call people for help. I call my mom’s psychiatrist and leave a message every day. I can tell the receptionist is getting annoyed.

He never calls me back.

My mom’s delusions increase and she starts hearing things. Strange, you would think, for a person with bipolar to hear voices? But then again, my brother as a schizophrenic would have mood swings too. What a murky mess this method of diagnosis is. Maybe even a little insane?

As fear for my mom’s safety increased, I take matters into my own hands by convincing her to get in the car so we can get help. I drive her to the other end of the county to another mental hospital. I hope that this one is not insane and instead helps most of the time.

She refused to get out of the car, and I am told that she cannot be admitted against her will. Eventually I coax her out of the car and by some act of God, she is admitted.

Her admittance is longer than normal this time, more than a few days, which gives me hope. After two weeks, she is home, and soon we enjoy Thanksgiving dinner together as a family. I send out Thank You cards to the people who finally helped my mom. I am relieved. We had so much to be thankful for. I fill myself to the brim with my mom’s mashed potatoes and smiles.

***

I wish I could end my message to you right here, on this message of hope and trust in the mental health system. I wish I could tell you that we lived happily ever after so that you could sleep soundly… But this is not a fairytale, and I am wide awake at 4:30 in the morning, taking a deep breath, because the hardest parts are yet to come.

***

"We are still mad about the mad. We still don't understand them and that lack of understanding makes us mean and arrogant, and makes us mislead ourselves, and so we hurt them."
- David Cohen

My feet drag across the pavement as I go to the police station to get yet another report. I don’t want to read it, but I need to know what happened. I wasn’t there.

Reading it makes me breakdown.


The thing about medications is that they suck.

Anti-psychotics and mood-stabilizers mess with more than your head. They make a lot of people gain weight, have muscle spasms and tremors, and experience regular dizziness, drowsiness, vomiting, and the list goes on. I don’t blame my mom for not wanting to take them anymore.

But at the time I was mad.

Within weeks of her newfound stability, she was spiraling out of control again. I ask her to take her meds. She takes so many, it requires an Excel spreadsheet to organize, which I make, and lay each pill out for her. I plead.

She refuses.

That night, I gave up. I decided I wouldn’t try to get her help anymore. Nothing was working and it was consuming my life in trying.

If I knew what would happen 24 hours later, I would not have stopped trying.


Death, with time, comes with a sense of finality, of peace, and of closure for loved ones. This is not a story of death.

On this fateful day, I left my mom in order to work. My plan was to work to escape this madhouse that my home had become.

She stops me at the door, barely able to speak. I can tell she is upset and scared. She says she loves me with all her heart and soul. I say I love her too.

I walk out the door.

The next time I see her, I will not recognize her. The person in front of me is not my mom, but a balloon. I didn’t know that the human body could swell to the point where you couldn’t see it’s teeth.

Staring at what used to be my mom hooked up to an array of medical equipment–her life fully supported by machines and hanging by a thread, the result of a car accident where she walked out in front of traffic after some eight hours of walking without food or water as a diabetic. Was she suicidal? What were her thoughts? Was she thinking at all?

I wish I knew.

At the trauma center, my brother disturbs our concentration from the beeps of life support machines to tell us what the demons are telling him, his pupils dialated to it’s max with adrenaline-enriched fear. The knife-safe key hangs heavy in my pocket as I cry.

Three weeks in a coma, and months of rehab, while my mom was healing, I stepped in to help my dad by taking care of my brother. I started up the same cycle again. Taking him to appointments. Calling 911. Seeing him go in and out of the insane place that sometimes helps people if they are psychotic enough, but usually not.

During an especially bad episode, he was talking about what God, the Devil, the angels, and a whole cast of other characters were telling him. He was frightened.

I opened my mouth to give him my usual reassurances. To tell him none of this was real.

It wasn’t going to work. I was going insane. I was doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. So I tried something else.

He needed so desperately for somebody to believe him without judging him or trying to lock him up. Every adult in his life was telling him how broken he was, how it is only going to get worse from here, and how he can’t trust his own mind.

As he told me his experiences, I shut off my judgements, opened my heart as wide as I could, and I told him: “I believe you. I believe you can get better. I believe you can learn to control this.”

That conversation lasted a full day.

No new information was said, I just kept having to repeat my newfound beliefs to him. He would go to his room, and come back, shaking in fear, feeling like something was about to hurt him, or that I might even hurt him. He had no memory of what I had said just half an hour ago. So again, I would tell him “I believe you. I believe you can get better. I believe you can learn to control this. You are safe. I love you.”

Then I would invite him to sit and relax, a technique called meditation to quiet the mind. Minutes later, he would come back to me, shaking again, terrified. “Are you going to kill me?” “No honey, absolutely not.” I would tell him again. I believe you. You will be fine. You can learn to control this.

We did this with all day long, and you know what?

He hasn’t had an episode since.

I’m not saying the medicine doesn’t help, but he would have episodes even on the medicine. He hasn’t had a single episode since, and he didn’t need his medicine adjusted. The curse of chronic chaos was lifted, not by chemicals, but by empathy. Now he talks to me about his past experiences or current painful thoughts because he knows I believe him. He trusts me. The medicine and practitioners didn’t give us that. I had to do that.

He’s enrolled back in school again and doesn’t need a full-time caregiver anymore. We threw away that wretched knife-safe and key. I am proud of him as if he was my own son.


Schizophrenia, Bipolar, Mental Illness. These are no longer bad words to me. I say them freely without fear.

We project our worst fears into the unknown–what we don’t understand, and what we don’t understand will continue to perpetuate.

To understand the crazy, we need to stop being afraid of being crazy. It is not an contagious affliction, but a perspective that we have not been listening to.

Any physical fear is nothing compared to the fear that comes after being told that you are insane. To be told that your mind, your thoughts, your emotions, are the enemy that there is no escape from.

On top of that being told that it is never going to get better. With enough repetition, you start to believe that…

  • You are powerless.
  • You will get worse.
  • You are not in control.
  • You are bad.
  • You are broken.
  • You are a monster.
  • There is no hope.

If I told you any of the above, would you want to believe it? Would you if your life depended on it? How would that make you feel?

During episodes, sometimes my brother would yell.

Have you noticed that people only raise their voices when they feel like they aren’t being listened to?


When a person learns that if they express their negative experiences, their darkest thoughts, then they will be, not only outcasted, but also forcibly hospitalized and made to take pills that make them sick, and turned into a monster with no future, do you think that makes people inclined to talk?

It can be hard to let go of a current perspective, but it’s the only way to be able to consider alternatives. It took me having a mental breakdown and calling the Suicide Hotline in order to even begin to accept that my view of mental health was not working. To paraphrase the soft-spoken caller on duty who spoke straight to my trapped desperation: He said I was insane–that I was going in circles doing the same things over and over again and that nothing would change until I broke the cycle. It was hard to let go. I had done everything I was told. I asked for help from people who had degrees. But none of it was working.

Science research into the mind, we tell ourselves, will one day give us the answers we need. Sure, I believe this.

But I didn’t have one day.

I had lost my mom and at risk of losing my brother, in addition to skirting precarious suicidal thoughts myself. I had to do something differently in order to survive.

With all of the advancements modern medicine has brought us in terms of healing the body, our understanding of the brain, the mind, of memory, of thought, remains a blank page yet to be written. I don’t know how many shootings need to happen before we accept that we don’t know anything about this.

It is not natural to want to harm others. Think about the beliefs and previous experiences you would have needed to have in the past to be remotely close to the kind of experience of a mass killing shooter. Does attempting to empathize with such a “monster” cause you extreme inner turmoil?

I told you this was not going to be easy.

Emotions are contagious. Consciously or not, we tend to make people feel how we feel. When we are angry, that causes anger in others. When we are terrified, that causes terror in others.

The extent of suffering and powerlessness in the victims of shootings show how much suffering and powerlessness the shooter has. That suffering was there before the attack, and the attack was the release of it, the spread. Is it uncomfortable to consider a person with a gun, a killer, feeling powerless?

Quite frankly, we need to feel uncomfortable. We need to consider perspectives that challenge us on fundamental levels. If you think mental health in America is working, I would like to introduce you to my mom.

In recovering from the car accident, after three weeks of a coma, three months of rehab for a Traumatic Brain Injury, and a lifetime ride’s worth on the rollercoaster of hope and despair, my mom is not dead or alive. Sometimes she remembers us, sometimes she speaks nonsense, and sometimes she doesn’t say anything at all. We visit and talk to her sometimes. She can’t take care of herself, and taking care of her is more than a full time job, so her home is one full of nurses.

I wish I could go back and stop myself from taking her to the insane place against her will. I wish I could stop myself from screaming at her to take her medicine. It didn’t work when I was 12, so of course it didn’t work when I was 20. I wish we could stop being insane and just listen instead.

But I can’t go back, and neither can you. We have to keep moving forward. We have to believe that the pain we endure teaches us something valuable if we only listen.

I’m tired of the insanity. It’s exhausting doing the same thing over and over again expecting things to be different. It’s time to try other things. I’m not saying I have all of the answers, but I have forty books about the mind in my online shopping cart and am determined to understand, to listen, and to keep sharing my thoughts.

Envision a world where mass shootings can be spoken of in past tense, an era long gone. It won’t pass until we have learned from it, until we listen.

Are you listening?

I believe you.
I believe you can get better.
I believe you can learn to control this.