The Witness A note on mental health, derived from a circumstance I happened to observe this weekend. • Look, if you are the parent of a depressive, and your adult child tries to explain a symptom of his malady, then it simply is not a good idea to laugh. I saw this. I heard this. I'm still reeling from the sight of a mother laughing at and denigrating her own child's mental health. The irony is futile; she wonders why he doesn't recover faster. No, really. I really did witness this. And, yeah, it was a disaster mitigated only by the fact that there was a witness. Because sometimes that's all anyone needs, a witness to confirm that yes, that stranger-than-fiction moment really did happen. But please, people, if you have friends and family suffering mental illness, please please please don't do this to your loved ones. They won't recover, ever, if recovery looks like sickness. I saw that. I heard it. And it sickens me.
So in plain laymen terms, what exactly sickens you? Biology of people which you can't erase within a collapsing social hierarchy? Genetics that have governed and will govern those who are stronger and will pass their genes on? Or you want a fake layer of compassion above the truth?
Would You Lie to a Blind Man? In plain layman's terms? Don't fuck with your own children's mental health. Easy enough? Or do you need the play by play? Watching a trembling depressive trying to reel himself in. Listening to him describe a very, very familiar symptom. Watching his own mother laugh at him, hearing her mischaracterize his behavior as something else in order to denigrate him and compare him to a notorious juvenile in the family. His own mother. Who apparently is frustrated at his lack of recovery progress. If he ever speaks to his mother again, it will in part be that he had a witness, so that when he tries to explain why that moment was so ineffably frustrating his family won't be able to pretend it never happened. Then again, if you really need it as complicated as you're pretending it is, we might wonder why a mother would perpetuate a child's sickness, but we would only wonder because we would so desperately hope the most glaringly obvious reason isn't true. And that would be an interesting exploration; how do you get someone to explain something she would refuse to acknowledge is true? I mean, it's one thing if people want to lay out some sort of supervillain plan. You know, if she admitted she wants him perpetually destabilized, that would be something. But people just aren't generally evil like that. Meanwhile, there are plenty in society who might seem paranoid but aren't. And part of the problem is that it's not the government they think is out to get them; it's their families. And they're not necessarily paranoid because there is a perfectly logical reason they might think that. But their families aren't really out to get them. Well, in most cases. But neither are those family members necessarily safe in presupposing their own psychiatric competence. Of course, there also arises the question of how we measure psychiatric competence insofar as some people are clearly permitted greater deviations from perceived or asserted baselines than others. There is a morbid joke among unemployed with mental illness, that if only they could get a job they wouldn't be sick anymore, because once you have a job nobody cares how much an asshole you are. Well, you know, as long as you aren't whipping it out at work, or actually punching people. Or, like I said, if you really need it to be that complicated, behavioral issues can certainly oblige. But in the end, really, unless one is prepared to admit they want the subject destabilized, it really, really isn't helpful to laugh off and denigrate an explanation of symptoms. Try the Pink Floyd song: "Just the basic facts; can you show us where it hurts?" Well, you know, these days the question is why would he tell anyone? It's not so much that one doesn't know who's listening, but rather that one can become somewhat conditioned to negative reinforcement whenever they try to tell us. If they're to get healthy, we need them talking. And the fact that this was his mother? Yes, that's an aggravating ... coefficient? ... exponent? I don't know, it's hard to measure the kind of damage that episode accomplished. But the fact that it was her and not some random dude at the pub or on the internet, or a coworker or even a friend, or even a sibling or father, has significance because of the unique relationships—real and mythical alike—between mothers and the children they raise. And if it was intentional? She would be kinder, then, to simply shoot him.
