The Mental Health Conspiracy

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 8, Verse 1

"Can't you hear the voice of wisdom?"

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

When you work with people who have serious mental illness, you become paranoid.  No longer is "the walls have ears, my friend" just an avuncular piece of advice from a desk-jockey lifer: it's real.

Or at least, you think it's real.

But, isn't perception reality?

So.  It's.  REAL.

But in addition to a terrifying fear of my superiors, to wincing every time I drive down the long, twisting driveway festooned with Tim Burton-style gonna-get-you barren trees that lead up to the Draconian building I call home for far too many hours each week, I feel, I don't know... conspired against?

Is that the right word?  

Maybe.

So far, no grants that I've written have gotten funded.  Many are still "in the pipeline" as we professional grantwriter assholes call it (I'm sure there's many a vivacious Urban Dictionary definition for "in the pipeline" that do not relate to development and fundraising) but the ones I've heard back on have all been a resounding, "NEIN, FRAULEIN!"  Okay, so maybe I'm not a good grantwriter.  Or maybe nobody's jumping up and down to throw money at forensic mental health.

Then there's the op/ed, commentary pieces I've written to the newspaper.  I did one in August, one in September, and one this month.  None we run by the paper.  Now, granted, there's a lot of competition, but I don't want you to think I'm bragging when I say that I have a 9-out-of-10 success rate when it comes to getting commentaries published in the paper.  At least, that was my success rate before I started writing about mental illness.  Now the tumbleweeds start to dance by.

It's possible that my writing skills have tanked in recent years.  That's possible.  

Other people do seem to get published when writing about mental illness.  I just today read a very interesting piece about Assisted Outpatient Treatment today and, underneath the author's name all the way at the bottom was a picture of a young woman standing outside closing a flannel shirt over her bra and the caption below read "10 SMALLEST CELEB BREASTS" and I was thinking to myself, I'll bet at least a hundred times more people clicked on that link than read the article I just read.  

And I got sad, because as much as I love small breasts, particularly those attached to celebrities, I just shake my head in despair when I think about what mental health competes with on a daily basis.  On Philly.com, for instance, there is a whole page about "HEALTH".  What are some of the "articles"?

The big story is an expose about how Cliff bars and their counterparts aren't really as "healthy" as people think.

Catch me, I might swoon.

"New Method May Improve Face Transplant Methods" which, I'm sure, is relevant to so many people on Philly.com, certainly more pressing and urgent than a story about mental illness, which impacts 1 in 4 Americans, probably more people than who need concern themselves with face transplant methodologies.

And, the question to the answer that nobody asked: "Breast Implants a Boost to Women's Sex Lives?"  Not satisfied with merely one story about silicone slappies (featured twice on the page, mind you) there's also "Breastfeeding After Implants Won't Cause Sagging, Study Finds".  Gee, that's good to know!

Oh, and let's not forget the gem, "Smaller Testicles, Better Dads?"  Well, I guess it's a nice complement to "10 Smallest Celeb Breasts."  I wonder if smaller breasted celeb moms are better moms than big breasted celeb moms.  Stay tuned, I guess.

Now, if you bother to scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN, past the stories about Tom Hanks having Type II Diabetes and "Use By and Sell By -- What Does it all Mean?"  (IT MEANS USE BY THIS DATE, AND SELL BY THAT DATE-- WHAT THE FUCK?!!!) you finally will get to a little section of stories about "Mental Health".

What are they?

There's a piece about a link between gum disease and Alzheimer's.

Oh.  That's... uh... helpful?

An article about autism (always), and two actually interesting pieces about Parkinson's and depression and depression in pregnancy possibly leading to psychiatric issues in those children later on.  But, like I said, you have to really work to find those pieces, and they're the sort of pieces that offer straight information about rather benign subjects.  They're not talking about how the jails are the biggest mental health "treatment" centers in the country, or about how under-trained police officers are gunning down the mentally ill, or about how competently-trained police officers aren't, or about how the stigmatization of individuals with mental illness by the news media and the entertainment industry is actually killing people, or about the public health crisis of 38,000+ suicides every year in this country, or reasons why psych patients don't want to take their meds and, well, you get the fucking idea.

Hey, we're Americans.  We wanna read about small celeb breasts and Tom Hanks taking Glucophage.  

I get it.

It's the Mental Health Conspiracy, hard at work.  Beating you down, every day, reminding you that you are, in fact, its wholesome little bitch, bending to its will, responding to its caprice.  You are not acting of your own volition, you are powerless to stop it.  It comes in waves.  We have them all in jails, so we build mental hospitals.  People don't like the mental hospitals, so we de-institutionalize and put them back out on the streets with inadequate supports, and they get arrested and thrown back in jail because we've gotten rid of the hospitals.  And here we are again.  But, if you talk about it, God help you, because if you say the wrong thing in the wrong room near the wrong person, it's LIGHTS.  OUT.  

It's diplomatic seclusion.  It's political restraints.  

It's time for your non-profit needle.  

I'm terrified of saying the wrong thing, so most of the time, I just say nothing.  But I can say it here, right?

Well.  Probably not.  Maybe for now, only because nobody's listening.  Nobody but you.

Just us chickens.  

No no-- sheep.

Behold, I send you out as sheep amidst the wolves.

Baaa.

A Very Precocious Youngster

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 12

"If you have good eyesight and good hearing, thank God who gave them to you."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

I got my first pair of prescription eyeglasses in fifth grade, but I think I actually started needing them two years earlier.  I even took the socially frowned upon step of taking a pair of cheap plastic red Mickey Mouse sunglasses, poking the dark lenses out, and wearing them to school.  They had little Mickey Mouse emblems on the temples, but otherwise I thought they looked sharp.  You know, like something Elton John could have gotten away with.  Mrs. Henderson, on recess duty one day, told me to take them off before I got hit by a fifth grader.  

But I didn't just want glasses, I really couldn't see.  I complained to my mother that I couldn't see the blackboard (we had blackboards back in 1987, but they were green) and that the picture on the TV looked fuzzy and that it was hard for me to see my face in the barber's mirror while he was cutting my hair.

"There's nothing wrong with you," she said to me, "you're just a little theatrical."

The test done by the school nurse in fifth grade at the health fair proved otherwise.  Maybe "health fair" isn't the right word.  I don't know what the hell it was, really, but I remember they herded us all into the room where they did the book fair, (maybe that's why I call it the "health fair") and they gave us each a rectangular punch card divided up into sections.  One was for vision, one was for hearing and there were other sections, too, for-- I don't know what-- penmanship?  White blood cell counts.  I don't remember.  But there were four or five stations that we each had to visit.  They had the machine with the headphones that made beeps and you were supposed to raise your hand when you heard a beep in your left ear and all that other business.  I liked the hearing test a lot, and I thought about how sneaky the test was-- like, were they really trying to fake us out?  Would they make a beep start in your left ear and then do a Doppler kind of thing where, just as you're raising your left hand, they move the sound to your right ear?  

I aced the hearing test despite my burgeoning paranoia, but the vision test didn't go so well.  I triumphantly brought home the note from the nurse recommending an ophthalmic examination and placed it smugly in front of my mother on the kitchen counter.  She thinned her lips.

"Don't look so disappointed," she said.

A week later, we were in the car going to the eye doctor.  At last, I had gotten proper validation.  There was actually something wrong with me-- it was exhilarating.  I almost peed on the Oldsmobile's seat cushion on the way to the optometrist.  Once we arrived and I met this guy, the excitement waned markedly.  He was as big as a condominium and he smelled like the inside of a pawn shop trombone.  His breath, which he made sure to provide you with a ample dose of, was rancid and tobacco-hued and his teeth were the color of old newspaper.  His gut was shaped like the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle.  

Okay, okay, you get the idea.  

One last thing, though-- his paunch completely covered whatever genitalia that might have at one point existed down there, but he was constantly adjusting the longitudinal aspect of the crotch of his pants during my examination which, of course, was conducted with the lights off.  I made the mistake of complimenting him on his three piece suit, which he probably purchased at William McKinley's garage sale.  

"You're a very precocious youngster.  Do you know what 'precocious' means?" he asked as he leaned in towards me with some ophthalmic instrument or other.  

"Yes," I replied, pretty sure I was about to be molested.  For some reason, my mother had seen fit to stay in the waiting area, probably because all three of us couldn't fit in the exam room.  Regardless, it left me alone in there with this malodorous walrus.  

"If I can just get through this," I told myself, "I'll get to have glasses."

And I got through it.  I'm pretty sure the sweaty, heavy-breathing optometrist didn't rape me, or if he did I've successfully repressed it, and anyway, a couple hours later, I had my first pair of eyeglasses: gold-colored double-bar specs that would have looked half-way decent on your average octogenarian.  I was in heaven.  

I've gone through maybe forty pair of glasses since then.  I suppose it didn't help that, for three years, I worked at an optical shop and have remained solid friends with the manager, who still gives me frames and lenses at-or-near cost.  I've had designer, knock-off, vintage, antique, plastic, metal, and everything in between.  The latest frames are plastic Tart Arnels from the 1960s, brown up top, clear plastic on the bottoms.  I love them.  For how long?  Hopefully a very long time-- they were expensive, even for me.  I am extremely fickle with three things: watches, cars, and glasses.  Why?  I don't know.  My wife often jokes, "I'm glad you're more consistent with how you feel about me than about your watches, cars, and glasses," and I am too.  I talked to my therapist about the everchanging items on my wrist and my face and the car seat beneath my ass.  He was kind of flip about it.

"You get bored," he said.  

Wow!  Only $50 for that?  What a steal!

I can remember trying to convince my mother early on, around late elementary school and early middle school, that I needed to see a therapist.  That something was wrong with me.  I got the familiar refrain of "There's nothing wrong with you," and "you're just a little dramatic" and got sent on my way.  It seemed odd to me then as now that, in the face of some pretty obviously aberrant behavior, my mother was content to stick her head in the sand until some clinical or authoritarian voice told her otherwise.  I wonder how I'll be as a father, when my children come to me claiming to be sick in the head or the heart or the eyes.  I guess I'll have to struggle hard against the impulse to ignore or reject, because looking up and looking in is scary.  And they're only seventeen-and-a-half months old, and I'm scared already.