Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho

Author:Grace M. Cho [Cho, Grace M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

New York City, 2018

I AM TEACHING an undergraduate class on the sociology of mental illness, giving a lecture on the demise of community mental health, which was conceived of as the more humane and effective alternative to institutionalizing the mentally ill. John F. Kennedy, my mother’s first American hero, signed the Community Mental Health Act in 1963, but the investment in community-based mental health was never enough to serve all the people who needed it. When Reagan took office in 1981, he began to cut federal spending on mental health services until only 11 percent of the original budget remained.16

In the middle of the lecture a thought hits me. She always said that Reagan was trying to take her down, and maybe she was right after all.

Community mental health facilities became so woefully underfunded that they intentionally let people with the most severe mental illnesses fall through the cracks; the sickest people were the ones who used up the most resources.

There’s nothing we can do for your mother.

In the absence of real mental health care, people with mental illnesses were shuttled into prisons or left on the streets to fend for themselves. According to Allen Frances, it is for these reasons that the United States is the worst place in the world to have a serious mental illness.17

Two weeks later, I’ll be leading a discussion with my students about the case of Nakesha Williams, a young, gifted, and Black woman whose mental health spiraled downward until she ended up homeless on the streets of New York City and eventually died while sitting on a bench at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street.18 One of my students will say that the story gripped her because it began when Nakesha was a college student, that the same thing could happen to any one of them in the class. “In all the stories we’ve read the person is fine until something triggers their crazy. Maybe it was the sexual abuse that triggered her crazy.”

After that class, I will think again about my mother. Was there anything else that happened in 1986, some stone I left unturned? Have I become so attached to the narrative I’ve constructed that I can’t see what’s right in front of me? I will close my eyes and let all the pieces of the story fall away, and Green Hill will be left standing.

Memories will flash up.

I am ten or eleven, asking if I can see where she works. My curiosity sends her into a panic. “No, no, no!” she shouts. “You don’t know what kind of bad things going on in there! You can never go to that place! You hear me?” At the time I thought it was because she didn’t want me to go near the juveniles.

I am fifteen and she has just come home from work, visibly upset, talking with my father in their bedroom. The door closed. Her voice shrill. My father urging her to keep it down. My mother’s complaints about

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