Mental Illness and Your Town by Larry Hayes

Author:Larry Hayes [Hayes, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781932690767
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Loving Healing Press
Published: 2008-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

21. Heal Families

After one upsetting episode with my son, I asked one of John's psychiatrists what he'd do if John were his son.

“I'd cry,” he said.

There was nothing to say after that.

They've yet to figure out a way to let families down gently when they give a son or daughter, spouse, father or mother a diagnosis of mental illness.

Once, in an interview, Rabbi Harold Kushner, whose 13-year-old son died of a rare aging disease, told me that it must be harder to have a son develop a mental illness than to see your son die.

“No closure with mental illness,” Kushner explained.

Here's the way it works. You get the diagnosis for your loved one. It's often something worse than you feared. First, you figure you didn't hear the guy right. Slowly, it dawns on you that this probably won't get fixed like a broken leg or a burst appendix. Depending on the diagnosis, this can easily be chronic, even a life sentence. Your loved one gets this scary, mysterious diagnosis and it changes everything in the family.

If you really want to help somebody with a psychiatric disorder, you won't find a better way than to help the families figure out how to cope. I'm not the only father who, quite honestly, knows that in the best of times, he was a mediocre parent. That's when the child is healthy, smart and cooperative. But how do you handle things when your child, as a teen-ager or young adult, hears voices, attempts suicide, drops out of school, closets himself in his room day and night listening to the heavy metal music of Ozzy Osborne?

Lots of people get answers at NAMI. That's the National Alliance on Mental Illness. It's a family support group, some 240,000 people strong. NAMI has chapters in hundreds of cities and towns. Our group meets each Tuesday evening.

I hadn't heard of NAMI until Evelyn Taylor, the local director, showed up at my newspaper office back in the mid-1980s. An earnest, friendly lady, respectful but on a mission, she'd read my editorials on mental illness. I told her about John. She thought she understood what I was dealing with as a parent. Her son was at the state mental hospital in Richmond. Will I come to one of their meetings, at Park Center, our mental health center for northeastern Indiana? Maybe I'd like to write something about her group, too.

That invitation from this angel opened a hundred doors. I thought I knew something about mental health. Hadn't I studied abnormal psychology in the seminary? Didn't the shelves in my study at home hold a raft of books on psychology? Hadn't I fallen into a depression after Dad died? Hadn't I spent weeks on end in a psychiatric ward at St. Joseph Hospital? Hadn't I bounced back, stronger, healthier than ever? When John developed problems, hadn't I dragged him and the rest of the family to a therapist? It turned out what I didn't know would have filled volumes.

I got quite an education in mental illness as I started attending those Tuesday night NAMI meetings.

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