The
NAMI
Family to Family education program is a free twelve week course that helps
families cope and adapt when mental illness strikes someone they love. Dr.
Joyce Burland the program author included an entire 2:30 session about mental
health advocacy in the course. The advocacy class comes in week eleven, the
last week of instruction before class twelve, which is a party.
People often show up the first week of Family to Family choking
on impossible living situations or newly crushed by significant trauma, things
they’d never dreamed could happen to their own family but did—arrest,
hospitalization, involuntary commitment, suicide scares, attempts, and
completions. By week eleven, many have
found great relief. Friendships have formed. People have realized that they are
not absolutely powerless in the face of illness. They’ve bonded while telling
stories they once thought no one else could ever relate to. They’ve discovered
ways to let go of unfounded guilt they’d felt for not knowing what to do (“You couldn’t
have known what nobody told you!”) and, most importantly perhaps, they have
learned for certain that they are never never never alone against mental
illness.
The advocacy class can be a kind of piss-in-your-Cherios
buzz kill. We generalize with remarkable alacrity. We transform a detail that’s
true in a particular situation and apply it universally to describe everyone
and everything everywhere on the planet. Family to Family fills people with hope.
It gives us much too feel good about, but this hope unchecked can easily slide
from being a powerful motivator and become a deceptive, naïve outlook that fools
us into thinking things are fine, that social awareness and understanding of
mental health is on the rise everywhere, and that soon people will be getting
the care, support, and information they need to overcome the challenges of
mental and emotional struggle. Piss-in-your-Cherios wrong folks. Things are not
getting better.
Dr. Burland very wisely anticipated the deceptive powers of
new found hope when she wrote her life-altering education course. In a forceful
reminder not to snooze into unrealistic optimism, she includes this particularly
disheartening passage in her class on advocacy: “There are more people with
serious mental illnesses in jails and prisons in America than there are in
state mental institutions. There are two times as many people with brain
disorders in shelters and on the street as there are in state mental
hospitals.” These sobering truths ground class participants in the ugly reality
that the rest of the world has changed little during the ten weeks they’ve just
spent learning about psychological health.
I’d love it if everyone knew what people learn in Family to
Family. They should. I dream of a world where high school students learn these
things in health classes and know at 15 how to support someone with depression
or bipolar disorder or schizophrenia before life teaches them the hard way
through terrible, shitty experience. A low voice in me groans constant for
every single parent, spouse, sibling, lover, and friend who has watched feeble
and choking just not knowing what in the hell to do while madness gnawed into
their love. It doesn’t have to be this way, but if we give into the sirens of
empty optimism not much will change.
Dr. Burland maintains a delicate balance in her call to
action. Her task is not easy. Give people too much positive and you make them
naïve. Harp too often on the bad and you juice people of their motivation and
enthusiasm. Burland opens her juggling act with Eleanor Roosevelt’s writing on
fear:
“You
must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
I’ve been through the Family to Family course three times
now, as a student, training to teach it, and as the resource assistant who helps prepare class materials. Different points in the course have stood out more
prominently with each go-round. Eleanor Roosevelt's call to face doubt
has been echoing strong since I heard it again in early August.
For about six months now, I’ve vaguely bounced around the
idea of creating this page, to write for myself and others about my experience.
I’m not entirely comfortable sharing these things. I don’t want to be a
blowhard cause-head that bores everyone talking all the time about the same thing.
People will think I’m self-centered if I talk about my own life that much. The
emotionally charged subject will make people too uncomfortable. I might say
things that hurt people. And I can’t possibly tell the world I thought
seriously about killing myself for a time. That would just be unbearably
shameful.
Remaining silent though is no remedy for shame.
No
there’s no leaving shame after all—not down here—it has to be swallowed
sharp-edged and ugly, and lived with in pain, everyday. No path around it, a
delusional wish to think we might evade completely its crags inside us. But after
we absorb the initial jar of shame, we can control how we move on from it. For
every wave of enthusiasm pushing me to speak of unpleasant things, there are
plenty of doubts to hold me in check. Ultimately though, those whispering
doubts are vague and poorly formed lies I tell myself wanting to believe there
is an easy way out of pain and regret. There isn’t. I will feel these things
whether I speak of them or not, and recognizing that inevitable fact transforms
the impossible challenge into the thing I might as well try.
