Tag: mental illness

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Making the Reach

It shouldn’t take a celebrity.

It shouldn’t require a death.

But here we are.

Some conversations never seem to be had until something painful and public happens. Like discussing security after a terrorist attack. Or guns after a shooting.

Or, in this case, talking about mental health after someone famous commits suicide.

Two someones, this time around. The most recent spotlight started with designer Kate Spade. And then, before the news could die down, chef Anthony Bourdain entered the headlines as well. Social media echoed and magnified the conversation, full of people trying to raise awareness, or share memories, or simply understand.

It’s what we try to do after all. Find patterns when something makes no sense. Make a painful moment manageable by reaching for an answer, any answer.

And then time passes. The moment passes. No one can live forever in crisis mode, and so the incomplete answers and uncertain explanations fade out for most of us and we return to a more normal sort of life.

Except for those who can’t. Those who continue to face a daily silent struggle. Unheralded. Unseen. Maybe even unsuspected.

And often, as a result, untalked about.

It’s a curious thing. Many of us these days are willing to talk about physical ailments, almost to the point of oversharing. Diabetes. Epilepsy. Multiple sclerosis. Even the once-unspeakable “big C” of cancer. We don’t necessarily pass around our latest medical charts, but there’s little hesitancy about speaking out, finding support from others, sharing stories, maybe even pinning some colorful ribbon to a shirt collar or Facebook profile once a year.

We don’t talk about mental conditions the same way. If we talk about them at all. It’s taboo, unsettling, dangerous. And those in the middle of it all often keep quiet, not wanting the judgment that comes with the label.

We all know someone who’s there. Whether we realize it or not.

I have friends and family who have lived with (and sometimes died with) depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and more. Many of these CAN be lived with, even if that life has to be won again day after day after day. But in isolation, without support, the battle can become overwhelming.

Once in a while – usually after something like a Spade or a Bourdain – the drumbeat will go up. Folks will be shocked into awareness, will post the suicide hotline numbers, will encourage folks to reach out for help. And that is good.

But.

Many conditions are isolating. Your brain outright lies to you, telling you you’re worthless, you’re alone, that no one really cares. There’s a hesitancy to reach out, not just because of the social stigma, but because of the internal soundtrack that’s constantly playing.

The burden of action cannot be entirely theirs.

Don’t wait for someone to reach out. Reach in.

Reach in to the people you do know. Not as a nosy neighbor or a person with all the answers, but as a friend who cares that a friend is in pain.

Reach in so they know they’re not alone. Step away from the center and listen. Don’t worry about having the right words or the magic formula – it’s not about you, anyway. The right words are the ones that remind someone you’re here, now, for them.

You don’t have to be a psychiatrist. You don’t have to be a therapist. You don’t have to solve the problem for them and you’re not going to.

But if enough people reach in, it can become that much easier for someone to reach out for the help they truly need.

It starts with us.

Not every battle will be won. Not every person can be helped. Some will need more than we ourselves can give.

But where we can, we should.

It shouldn’t take a celebrity.

It shouldn’t require a death.

Just open eyes. An open heart. And open, ready hands.

Be there. Reach in.

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No Laughing Matter

Picture a driver whose wrists are handcuffed to the steering wheel. A short chain, at that, so no hand-over-hand turns. The gear shift is barely reachable, with the fingertips.

Now send that driver on a trip from Limon to Grand Junction. How much of a miracle will it be to make it? If and when the inevitable happens, how many will blame the driver? How many will see that the driver was largely a prisoner of his own car?

In the end, I think that’s where Robin Williams was. Careening off a mountain road in a vehicle he could not control.

The crash has left echoes in all our ears.

There’s been a lot said and written about Robin these days. Not surprising. For many of us, the brilliant comic and actor was one of the constant presences, always there, always doing something new, always on the move, like a lightning storm that had been distilled into a human body. Too much energy to be contained.

My own personal memory is of a performance he gave in London in the 1980s, part of a royal gala for Prince Charles and Princess Di. My family and I taped the show on TV and darned near wore it out, as we watched his hurricane of stand-up over and over again. The effects of playing rugby without pads. The difference between New York and London cab drivers. The sharks watching airline crash survivors bobbing on seat cushions. (“Oh, look, Tom, isn’t that nice? Canapés!”)

At one point, white-hot, he broke off his routine. Running beneath the royal box, he pointed upward, looked to the rest of the audience and stage-whispered “Are they laughing?”

Everyone broke up. Charles included.

But now I wonder. How much of that question lay at the heart of Robin’s own life? Are they laughing? Do they really like me or just the face I show? Does any of this matter?

Those can be uncomfortable questions even without a poisonous brain chemistry. But that is exactly what Robin Williams had.

I don’t have depression myself. Too many of my friends do, including some of the oldest friends I have in the world. From them and from a number of acquaintances, I have at least a second-hand idea, like a reporter in a war zone watching people in the line of fire.

And that’s what it is. A silent war against your own mind.

“Your brain is literally lying to you,” one online acquaintance said. Even when you realize that, he added, it’s still your brain and you still want to believe it.

That’s a terrifying thing to consider.

Mind you, I’m used to the idea that your own brain can ambush you. I’m epileptic. If someday my medication fails or it gets missed for too long, I can have a literal brainstorm. But that’s a sometimes thing, a sneak attack out of the bushes.

This is more insidious. This is the command center taken over by the enemy. When you can’t trust your own mind, your own perceptions and impulses, what do you do?

There are more tools than there used to be. I have friends who use medicine to fight the chemistry, who use cognitive-behavioral therapy to find a path through the labyrinth, who reach for reasons to even get out of bed in the morning: family, faith, pets.

“Unless brain transplants become a thing, I will always require medication,” one dear friend said. “But I’ll always need glasses, too, and that’s the context I try to keep it in.”

But among these tools, we also have one other thing. A society that doesn’t fully understand. A place where the glasses and the pills aren’t seen the same way, where people see depression as a personal failing instead of a mental illness.

Where it’s the driver’s fault for not sawing through the handcuffs in time.

Like many, I wish Robin Williams were still with us. But also like many, I hope his death gives more of us a chance to understand, to see, to ask questions and really listen to the answers. And by listening, to lift some of the stigma so that more people can get more help.

It takes all of us. Together, in understanding.

And that’s no joke.