When there are no good words for mental illness, how are we supposed to ask for help?
This morning, after being notified that it was my 4-year Facebook friend-aversary with a close pal and previous roommate of mine, I fearlessly ventured into Facebook’s “On this Day” feature to see what else had happened throughout my Facebook life on November 3. As most know, this feature can often probe unpleasant memories of exes, friends-turned-enemies, or embarrassing statuses from Facebook’s past. The latter definitely applied to me here, and came in the form of something I had posted in 2009 as a sophomore in high school. It stood out as a mark of the first time I tried to reach out for help for my mom’s mental illness.
My mom died by suicide a little over a year ago, and she was not well for a pretty long time before that. It happened gradually over the course of high school and college. Obviously that was rough for me to deal with, and even harder for me to form the right words to talk about what was happening in my household. So one day, I desperately reached out with this:
At first glance, this status could appear to be the regular writings of an angsty high school student. On the November 3rd in question, I had the day off school and a lot of my friends were hanging out watching movies in the afternoon. I had wanted to go, and my mom, who had become paranoid someone was following us when she was driving and was increasingly not leaving the house due to what I way-later understood as symptoms of agoraphobia, would not let me leave. She locked the doors and physically held me down from exiting the house when I said I would bus to my friend’s. She said she was protecting me. My dad, who was at work, said I should call the police. Not understanding the seriousness of what was happening, I angrily sat in my room and played a Facebook aquarium game. And I posted that status.
In some ways it was a cry of anger at my immediate situation and in other ways it was me trying to understand that symptoms of this mental illness my mom was exhibiting really had taken over. One friend makes a joke about fruit that I must have understood at the time, but now I don’t get. I refuted it with a comment that has some desperate undertones of, “I’m not kidding around here!” Another friend who may have better understood my situation expresses helpless condolences. To a standard Facebook friend, this status would not mean anything. But realistically, it was a cry for help.
But, I didn’t have the language to actually say I need help. My mom needs help. I’m scared. I harbored feelings of confusion and fear for a long time. It was nearly impossible for me to explain to people why she rarely visited me in college. Only a few of my closest friends knew the details. But even when I wanted to share what was happening with someone, I didn’t have the right words.
“What do you mean your mom doesn’t leave the house?” close friends’ expressions seemed to ask me when I explained why my mom wasn’t at a swim meet or a school play. “So your mom is a shut-in?” another friend asked. And, “don’t say your mom is crazy,” when I let it out in frustration. “But she really is,” I had replied. I was wrong to stigmatize someone with a mental illness, and I know better than that now. But when I was younger, I was met with disbelief for what I was going through, and I had no other way to express what was a reality.
Our culture, our stigmatizing, American culture, does not give us the tools to speak about mental health and mental illness properly. My perceptions of mental illness were largely learned from TV and a media that doesn’t offer language or explanations for mental illness. Stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper” and movies like K-PAX, which stars a maybe-alien Kevin Spacey living in a psychiatric ward; a film I watched through tears in ninth grade English class because I saw my mom in many of the characters. But that was a movie, and my life was real life. I wasn’t told how to respond to mental illness, nor were my friends, nor were my friends’ parents. Even my mom’s psychiatrist once said, “your mom is just psychotic.” But what does that mean? Where was the diagnosis? What were we supposed to do so she could get help? The only words I knew in regard to this issue that my mom was going through were stigmatizing and made me feel even more helpless than I had before.
How are we supposed to ask for help if we can’t even express symptoms without feeling like we’ll be laughed at? For many people, there is no in between when it comes to crazy and sane, no difference between depressed and sad, and the consequences are devastating. We shouldn’t have to talk about our friends, family members and ourselves with an ounce of the thought that “I’m/they’re crazy.” We should be able to speak openly about experiences, ask for help and find compassion, not disbelief from those around us. A Facebook status may not be the best platform to ask for help, but it should be a start.
Some resources:
