Pills

December 11, 2014

My parents have been mean to each other all my life.  I stopped speaking to them in November of 2010, so I don't know what they're like now.  I don't think that I'll ever try to find out.

When I sought psychiatric help in 1992, I was very concerned about how mean my parents were to each other and their children.  I didn't want to be like them, and I hoped that I would get help, both with their meanness to me and with learning how not to be like them.  I didn't get help with either problem, ever.  After all, my parents paid for the insurance and the copayments for all of my mental health treatment until I finally had employment in my late twenties that had good health insurance. Then I paid my health insurance costs, plus $240/month in copayments to the last, long-term therapist I had, who specialized in doubting my judgment and making me stay in less than optimal situations.  My highest salary at the job that had that health insurance was $11.25/hour.  I also paid the copayments for the medications that she said I needed.

I think that the lure of the pharmaceutical industry, with its domination over psychiatry, is that it offers easy answers to parents who ask "What's wrong with my kid?"  The answer "Your child has a biologically based condition that can be treated with medication" is an easier answer for many parents to hear than "You should stop screaming at her and at each other, and stop punishing her for every failure.  She really tries, and does well most of the time.  Everybody makes mistakes."  The answer that the pharmaceutical industry offers to psychiatrists and psychologists who ask the question "How hard do I have to work at understanding and giving intelligent and appropriate support to my clients" is "Not very; stuff them with pills, tell them their problems are forever, and sit back and collect the cash."

The message that everyone responsible for helping the children of emotionally abusive parents gets is "It's not you; it's your children/clients."  The children/clients get that message, also, along with the message that they are a burden to everyone around them and will be lucky to ever have friends or the semblance of a normal life.

The message that everyone also gets is that, since there's "nothing really wrong" with the parents, the children should try to be like the parents.  Everybody goes through the motions of encouraging the mental patients' independence, but they consider that independence theirs, not the patients', to judge and then approve or condemn.  So do most people who find out that someone is or was a mental patient.  

Mental patients, past or present, are considered fair game for everything.

It is, not infrequently, an automatic reflex for me to be mean to people.  When I began to realize this about myself in my adulthood, I tried to fix it.  Opportunities to work and have friends were much less rare than opportunities to date; that tends to be true of most people, and it's particularly true of people whose lives have been derailed by psychiatric stigma and stereotypes.  Also, for the first 13 years of my life, I lived with my parents in beautiful, bucolic Vermont, in a place that was officially designated a village because it only had 1,000 people.  Of those people, approximately none were anything like my Jewish, jazz-playing father from Philadelphia or my mother, whose parents were social workers educated at the University of Chicago and who moved their family from Vermont to the Midwest a few times during my mother's childhood and adolescence.  The scenery was beautiful, if cold, year-round.  The social life was not beautiful; we had each other, and that was mostly it.  There was no Internet then, either.  

I think that loneliness can make people insane.  My closest and most consistent role models were my parents, who spent our years in rural Vermont trying not to lose their sanity, with varying degrees of success.

Five years after we moved to a more populated part of Vermont, I was in the hospital for the first time.  I was about 18.  I am 40, and living in a psychiatric facility; that is something that the system that derailed my life likes to blame on me.  "Nobody's blaming (me), of course! (I'm) just chronically mentally ill.  Nobody said the word 'blame'!"

Meanwhile, my original issues continue to plague me when it would be a lot better if they didn't.  A few months ago, it occurred to me that, if there is a G-d, or a method to life's madness, since I got little help dealing with my mean parents all my life and got no help dealing with the ways that they influenced me, it could be that my years of solitude were what were required to let the meanness start to die. 

It's a slow death.

Copyright L. Kochman, December 11, 2014 @ 4:16 p.m./edited @ 4:41 p.m./addition December 13, 2014 @ 9:43 a.m./addition @ 10:01 a.m.